TheRatmeister
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I think so? You'd need to do something about the building there, I'm not sure if it's signalling or ops or whatever, F-Line probably knows.
F-Line to Dudley
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I much doubt the placement of the Route 16 bridge abutments would allow you to snake an egress around to the westbound sidewalk on the parkway, which was what @jbray wanted to have done here. Again...even if you outright deleted the express track it's just not enough space freed up because the clearance envelope for each track is squeezed down to the minimums here.
The building is a combo substation and signal bungalow for the massive yard complex. However, since the tracks are well on their way to squeezing down for the bridge abutments by the time you reach the building it's unlikely you'd be able to structurally get anything station-related built far enough north to impact the building in the first place.
Yeah, I was thinking of something akin to Back Bay with the underpass and I certainly don't think the express track should be lost, especially at the station where trains come on and off the line. I guess my follow up is, should this ever be revisited when the bridge needs replacing? Is it worthwhile of an endeavor to move the bridge footings to accommodate such an egress to better integrate the station into the development of the area? It's arguably the worst integrated station into it's area.
F-Line to Dudley
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The bridge was just replaced in 2020, so they're not going to be touching anything there for another 50 years at least.
themissinglink
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It would be nice if Foxboro eventually gets a new station in the center of town, north of Bird Street. It should be built as a no-parking (or low-parking) station since there's such a big lot at Gillette. I know that there are a lot of rail NIMBYs in Foxboro, and they're probably the biggest obstacle to a town center stop.
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What should be a reasonable proposal: A seasonal Providence - Hyannis service in the spirit of today's Boston - Hyannis CapeFLYER service.
Connecting with Amtrak and MBTA commuter rail at Providence station, the train would follow the Northeast Corridor to Attleboro, where it would turn onto the Middleboro Secondary to Middleboro. Like Amtrak's Cape Codder service of the 1980s and '90s, the train would stop at Taunton, which now could use a CapeFLYER Bourne style mini high level platform. Absent any form of a Buzzards Bay - Middleboro commuter rail shuttle, the same type of platform could be set up at the new Middleboro commuter rail station on the Taunton - Cape main leg of the wye. This could offer New Bedford and Fall River connections. Might or might not be a popular connection, but with a Bourne style mini high, it would be a low cost experiment.
The equipment would be similar to the CapeFLYER, including café and bike cars.
Connecting with Amtrak and MBTA commuter rail at Providence station, the train would follow the Northeast Corridor to Attleboro, where it would turn onto the Middleboro Secondary to Middleboro. Like Amtrak's Cape Codder service of the 1980s and '90s, the train would stop at Taunton, which now could use a CapeFLYER Bourne style mini high level platform. Absent any form of a Buzzards Bay - Middleboro commuter rail shuttle, the same type of platform could be set up at the new Middleboro commuter rail station on the Taunton - Cape main leg of the wye. This could offer New Bedford and Fall River connections. Might or might not be a popular connection, but with a Bourne style mini high, it would be a low cost experiment.
The equipment would be similar to the CapeFLYER, including café and bike cars.
lainpimicaja
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I love this idea and in a perfect world, I think it would be a Worcester-Providence-Cape Cod-style service (+ all the stops you describe here). That would tie together a key market that desperately needs and deserves more service.
Charlie_mta
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I'd like a Providence-Hyannis route that goes directly from Providence to Fall River and New Bedford, then on to the Cape. This would take some substantial bridges over the water at Fall River and New Bedford, plus re-opening the abandoned rail tunnel in Providence, but it would provide a direct route along this highly populated corridor.
F-Line to Dudley
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Awfully God-mode. The ex-Warren Branch is completely obliterated by new residential development in the Ocean Grove neighborhood of Swansea since the ROW was abandoned in 1938, and there's some crazy insertion angles in the middle of wetlands required to glom it onto the I-195 ROW instead. The landbanked Watuppa Branch never connected to the Fall River Branch through downtown, with a 1 km gap and some grading challenges. I-195 completely takes up that would-be ROW and it would require the entire City Hall air rights block to be razed to fit in so much as a single track within the highway cut. And the rump end of the New Bedford Branch and the end of the landbanked Fairhaven Branch on opposite ends of the river are askew from each other. Connecting them would almost require grafting on an elevated rail line along Route 6 across the Fish Island bridge complex then doing a slew of residential property takings in the most densely populated portion of Fairhaven to get on-alignment with the extant rail ROW. The Old Colony had the ingredients 130 years ago to do this route contiguously, but shortsightedly never filled the gaps before those areas got too built up. Plus you have some more minor challenges in Downtown Providence doing a tunnel extension along Memorial Blvd. to reconnect the extant East Side Tunnel to the NEC, and doing a de-landbanking of the popular bikeway along the Bristol Branch.
It's easily a $1.5B job chock full of oppositional blockers for not nearly enough ridership to make it worth it. Meanwhile, the around-the-horn Attleboro-Taunton-Middleboro route is existing, very straight and fast if you upgraded the track to Class 4/79 MPH, and was traditionally the route that intercity trains used to reach Newport because the Warren Branch back in the day had a too-severely weight-restricted bridge into Fall River preventing heavyweight coaches from using it at all. Travel times on the straighter route were roughly par to the meandering Providence-Warren-Fall River route, and I-195 is not that congested between Fall River, New Bedford, and Wareham so Cape-goers from those cities can easily skip the Bourne Bridge traffic by park-and-riding at a Wareham Crossing infill (195/28 interchange) on the Cape Main. The east-west train's potential audience is going to be far more from Rhode Island than the South Coast, so you don't leave too much on the table by making do with the around-the-horn route the Cape Codder used to use.
Charlie_mta
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Definitely a God-mode idea, but I just like to dream of a rail system that would directly connect our significants cities. Yeah, I've looked at the historical rail maps and have wondered why a direct Providence-Fall River-New Bedford- Cape Cod rail line wasn't built 130 years ago, but I suppose bridging the large bodies of water at Fall River and New Bedford was just too difficult, with not enough bang for the buck to make it financially feasible at the time.
"Not enough bang for the buck to make it financially feasible at the time" aptly describes why a direct rail route was not completed directly connecting Providence, Fall River, New Bedford and the Cape.
Regarding Fall River, the 1875 Slade's Ferry bridge over the Taunton River did provide a direct rail route to Providence, but the impediment here was the effort needed to connect the Fall River waterfront rail line with the Watuppa branch from New Bedford. The Watuppa branch ended in the area of Fall River's Plymouth Avenue, more than 100 feet higher in altitude than the waterfront Fall River line, horizontally separated about the same distance as the span of the I-195 Braga bridge over the Taunton River. Lots of expensive tunneling would have been needed to fix this.
At New Bedford, the challenge was crossing the harbor to connect with the Fairhaven branch.
Despite these challenges, I understand there was some consideration in connecting the routes, but it never rose to the importance of other major railroad projects of the period, so it never was funded.
Regarding Fall River, the 1875 Slade's Ferry bridge over the Taunton River did provide a direct rail route to Providence, but the impediment here was the effort needed to connect the Fall River waterfront rail line with the Watuppa branch from New Bedford. The Watuppa branch ended in the area of Fall River's Plymouth Avenue, more than 100 feet higher in altitude than the waterfront Fall River line, horizontally separated about the same distance as the span of the I-195 Braga bridge over the Taunton River. Lots of expensive tunneling would have been needed to fix this.
At New Bedford, the challenge was crossing the harbor to connect with the Fairhaven branch.
Despite these challenges, I understand there was some consideration in connecting the routes, but it never rose to the importance of other major railroad projects of the period, so it never was funded.
F-Line to Dudley
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Slades Ferry was the bridge that was severely weight-restricted. It couldn't take anything but middle 19th century wood-framed cars, which were mostly phased out by all railroads by the 1890's in favor of newer steel heavyweight cars and the replacement bridges that could take them. The New Haven/Old Colony electrified the Warren and Bristol Branches in 1900 to use lightweight wood interurban-style EMU's so they could continue using the 1875 bridge on Providence-Fall River commuter runs while purging their out-of-date rolling stock, but that led to a somewhat terrifying potential (thankfully never realized) for the lightweight EMU's to get in a crash with heavyweight rolling stock in Providence where they intermingled. They also chose pretty poorly on their electrification scheme, opting for a trolley-like 600V DC feed that scaled poorly to longer distances and a then-novel battery substation to boost power during peak rush hour load which proved unreliable in practice (artificially capping service levels). Though they much wanted to electrify basically all of commuter territory, those self-limiting choices made it a very large and ultimately out-of-range leap. They wouldn't have been able to pursue that connection to the Watuppa Branch for thru New Bedford service and/or any connection between New Bedford and Fairhaven without first rationalizing the need for a new bridge to replace the 1875 span and a do-over of the electrification to something more robust and scalable. And they couldn't really rationalize that (or rationalize starting with these particular lines first) when ticket revenue for Providence-Fall River was merely *okay* at its best, and there was no freight revenue at all east of the RI/MA state line on the Warren Branch to pad out the revenues (or even give them a reason to want a new bridge to originate something heavy from the Fall River side). They threw in the towel on the route pretty early because those value-for-money hurdles were just not going to be overcome here.
To be clear, that corridor was originally built as a conventional (steam, in that era) railroad line, but they made the conscious choice to effectively “downgrade”/repurpose it into an interurban line because that was cheaper than replacing the Slades Ferry Bridge?
I can believe there wasn’t any freight business between Warren and Fall River, but I’m surprised that they didn’t feel Fall River had enough freight activity on its own to justify the replacement bridge (along with existing passenger demand).
F-Line to Dudley
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Conventional steam, but "conventional" steam from the 1840's to 1870's was rickety wood-framed cars pulled by relatively gimpy locomotives on iron rails and bridges mostly made of wood or wrought iron. The advent of mass-produced steel in car, locomotive, bridge, and rail construction re-revolutionized the railroads because their carrying capacity increased by an order of magnitude. So there was an unprecedented blitz in capital spending during the 1880's and 1890's to weight-uprate all of the railroads...renewed infrastructure, new freight and passenger cars, new motive power. Easily the biggest state-of-repair blitz in history. But that meant that a whole generation's worth of rolling stock became immediately obsolete, so the lines that hadn't been uprated quickly found themselves choked off for actively-maintained cars. The NYNH&H leased the Old Colony for 99 years in 1893 right before most of the OC system was modernized, but the OC had so many duplicate lines that many had to wait awhile to get the weight uprates...and the lines that had more freight and more profitable passenger ops went first. Taunton and Middleboro were the big diverging nodes for freight traffic on the OC system, and Providence was usually linked by yard feeder jobs that hit the Taunton diverging point first so those two routes into Fall River got the weight uprates first. The flow of goods just never made operational sense to re-route from due west, especially given the lack of on-line customers. The Slades Ferry Bridge meanwhile was fairly new, at full state-of-repair, and had complicated ownership because it was a combo road (lower deck) and rail (upper deck) movable span and at the time the only road crossing between Fall River and Somerset (it lasted 95 years in total, being decommissioned/demolished as a road span in 1970). The electrification trial bought them time for it, as the New Haven thought they'd be electrifying everything en masse and eventually rolling out standardized EMU's to everywhere. But it didn't work out that way as the 600V DC system didn't prove to be robust enough, and the ridership on the Bristol and Warren branches was only merely *okay* compared to the higher-priority routes from Boston and the premium-class Newport and Cape long-distance traffic from New York using the around-the-horn route. There just never ended up being a 'right time' to do the upgrade work to make it a stronger route, as the New Haven had so many competing priorities around the turn of the century (and squandered a lot of them, like the systemwide electrification, by constantly making bad investments).
Two ideas on how to tilt @Charlie_mta ’s pitch closer towards Reasonable Transit Pitch territory:
Maybe if the concept for this corridor evolved into a self-contained Providence-Fall River-New Bedford line (which is to say, you drop the downtown Providence tunnel and everything east of New Bedford, together probably $1-$1.5 billion), you save enough money that you can absorb the loss of the Cape-bound ridership cohort and still make the value proposition shake out on the backs on South Coast residents headed to Providence* and points south along the Northeast Corridor.
*(In this version, the line’s Providence terminus would be located outside the existing tunnel’s western portal. That would be only about 1,000 feet away from the existing Providence Station on the Northeast Corridor. The TF Green Airport has a quarter-mile-long enclosed skybridge with a moving walkway connecting the garage with the airport, and people don’t seem to mind using it. If something like that were built to connect the existing Providence Station with the secondary station outside the tunnel portal, I think that would go a long way towards mitigating the perceived inconvenience of the transfer.)
- For the Providence-Fall River and New Bedford-Wareham segments of the corridor, stick to the 195 median instead of trying to follow the historic alignments. It’s not realistic to try to resurrect the old Warren Branch and Fairhaven Branch rights of way. Still-intact portions of these ROWs have been converted into popular bike paths; other segments have been consumed by house lots and streets (like in Ocean Grove) and would entail multiple property takings. Highway medians aren’t always the best places to lay tracks, but in the case of the 195 corridor, I think it makes sense. None of the issues with reactivating grade crossings, taking property, etc that you’d run into on the old alignments. Development patterns in the corridor naturally favor wider, intercity rail style stop spacing, and the highway is straight enough to support intercity speeds.
- For the Taunton River crossing, incorporate a new rail span into the Braga Bridge’s successor when it comes time to replace the bridge. This implies extending the Watuppa Branch further west alongside the highway than it historically terminated, which (as mentioned before) further means demolishing the City Hall block and redoing the bridge overpasses. It would certainly be disruptive, but if you could convince the city of Fall River and MassDOT to envision a downtown whose whole highway + rail corridor was capped with a linear park, you might convince them the end benefits jusfify the near-term pain/expense. It would be great to have a downtown rail station right near the bus hub. Also, a new rail bridge alone might come under scrutiny for its costs, but if it’s bundled into a highway bridge whose relevance will go unquestioned, it might be easier to hide/justify the cost of the rail component.
Maybe if the concept for this corridor evolved into a self-contained Providence-Fall River-New Bedford line (which is to say, you drop the downtown Providence tunnel and everything east of New Bedford, together probably $1-$1.5 billion), you save enough money that you can absorb the loss of the Cape-bound ridership cohort and still make the value proposition shake out on the backs on South Coast residents headed to Providence* and points south along the Northeast Corridor.
*(In this version, the line’s Providence terminus would be located outside the existing tunnel’s western portal. That would be only about 1,000 feet away from the existing Providence Station on the Northeast Corridor. The TF Green Airport has a quarter-mile-long enclosed skybridge with a moving walkway connecting the garage with the airport, and people don’t seem to mind using it. If something like that were built to connect the existing Providence Station with the secondary station outside the tunnel portal, I think that would go a long way towards mitigating the perceived inconvenience of the transfer.)
F-Line to Dudley
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195 has no median in Providence or East Providence. It simply nuked whole city blocks in a cut or embankment portion all the way to the state line. You'd have so much difficulty trying to shift the whole highway alignment, excavate fill to fit in a track or two, replace every bridge to the state line, and reengineer every interchange that it would probably be less costly to reactivate the tunnel and Bristol Branch, do a connecting tunnel extension under Memorial Boulevard for the NEC hook-in, and try for an insertion angle onto 195 off the clear-to-state-line portion of the Warren Branch north of Ocean Grove along some power line ROW's. But then you've got loads of wetlands troubles in Swansea and Somerset, a highway bridge that's going to be no-go for 2% rail grades, and lots of destruction in Downtown Fall River to widen the 195 cut for a connector to the Watuppa Branch. And 195 likewise loses its median after the 140 interchange in New Bedford and starts nuking whole city blocks through Downtown, so getting over to Fairhaven is going to be another exercise in wanton destruction.
It's just not going to price out in any way, shape, or form for the ridership that such a route would bear.
My bad...I forgot to explain where I was envisioning the rail line would enter/exit the highway median in my earlier post.
On the Providence end, I was picturing it would curve out of the median just before the state line (i.e. where the median ends) and then shoot northwest, pretty much directly along the state line, up to Route 44. Then it would turn west and enter the intact-but-mostly-unused Henderson Expressway right-of-way. It would follow that to the Seekonk River, where it would cross via a new bridge (the one Crook Point Bridge would have to be replaced even if you wanted to use the historic alignment) and then enter the tunnel.
This alignment would likely have a small handful of property takings, but they would be industrial or commercial rather than residential, which should make the land acquisition process less contentious. There would be one or two crossings of the Runnins River right near the highway; if bridges aren't good enough for environmental regulators, maybe that short segment gets built as a trestle. The curves through East Providence would slow trains down enough that it probably makes sense to add a station here.
On the New Bedford end (which you only need to worry about for the version of this idea that includes a through connection to the Cape), I imagined the transition from the Watuppa Branch to the 195 corridor would occur on the northern half of the interchange between 195 and JFK Memorial Highway, which might require moving away from a cloverleaf design for those on-ramps (or at least reworking their clearances as needed).
I acknowledge that the buildings fronting on Cedar Grove Street are probably too close to escape unscathed even if you ran the rail line directly against the northern side of the highway. Besides that, I don't see any other obviously-necessary takings; 195 has a median on the Fairhaven side of the river, so you'd want to get the rail alignment back into it as soon as practically possible.
This alignment doesn't hit the existing station, so another New Bedford station would have to be established for this line. Maybe the vacant site off Hathaway Road in the top-left corner of the image below would be a viable option. The track is straight and there's plenty of space for parking and ideally some TOD.
Charlie_mta
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That's excellent!
The EGE
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Providence station to Wareham station via Fall River and New Bedford is 42 miles as the crow files, versus 47 miles by the existing rail alignment via Taunton. The existing alignment has a lot of tangent track; 2 of the 3 worst curves are at stations (Attleboro and Middleborough) anyway. I don't think you can cobble together a new alignment that substantially beats the existing one, nor do I think you'll garner enough FR/NB - Cape Cod ridership to justify the expense.
Here's an article from when the New Haven was considering it in 1910:
www.newspapers.com
www.newspapers.com
Note that a shorter freight route from FR and NB to points west was the primary motivation, with passenger traffic secondary.
I could maybe see Providence-FR-NB light rail or hybrid rail being workable someday, if 195 congestion got to the point that express buses were too slow. But that's much easier engineering, you can have on-street segments, and you don't have to deal with anything east of NB.
Here's an article from when the New Haven was considering it in 1910:
Article clipped from The Boston Globe
Clipping found in The Boston Globe published in Boston, Massachusetts on 4/10/1910.
www.newspapers.com
Article clipped from The Boston Globe
Clipping found in The Boston Globe published in Boston, Massachusetts on 4/10/1910.
www.newspapers.com
I could maybe see Providence-FR-NB light rail or hybrid rail being workable someday, if 195 congestion got to the point that express buses were too slow. But that's much easier engineering, you can have on-street segments, and you don't have to deal with anything east of NB.
TheRatmeister
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Hell, Fall River to Wareham is ~39 miles, via New Bedford it's only around 29 miles.