On an anecdotal level, many years back I had friends with young kids living in Merrimack, NH, with their backyard abutting right up against the river. On a pleasant spring morning, knowing the river was there, I took their kids on an excursion through their backyard, finessed our way through the bramble... and stumbled up against the tracks [which I didn't know were there], which sit on top of a pretty steeply-inclined berm at that juncture. We scrambled over the berm, peered over the opposite flank to check out the river, and returned home. Which makes me wonder, on the increasingly-unlikely chance that the Capitol Corridor does get developed:
1.) who is responsible for erecting fencing in all of those residential backyards that abut right up against the right-of-way/trackage, from Concord all the way south to the state line, to help deter kids (or anyone else) from scrambling onto the tracks? There are surely dozens and dozens of residential properties where this is an issue.
2.) the riverbank side of the berm was substantially eroded, with tree roots exposed/hollowed-out, etc. Assuming the Merrimack continuously undermines those banks in all years--and does so catastrophically during massive rain events--who is responsible for shoring-up the riverbank?
Most of the riverfront the whole way up is conservation land, so that's probably going to be the state's bag for erosion control. For the most part the rail ROW is set back enough that it isn't affected by flood stages and whatnot. There aren't a lot of hastily-fixed washouts up to Concord (the only kind of fix PAR would ever do), so that isn't an issue. PAR only sinks a dime into Chelmsford-Nashua where there's multiple scheduled yard feeder trains per day...they haven't given a shit about Nashua-north in decades with the biz decline up there. So if the railbed up by Merrimack is in good shape it's because there's been no riverfront erosion for 41 years since the last big State of Repair blitz.
As for the "every foot of rail is a makeshift grade crossing" effect...legally-speaking it's all private property and thus 100% illegal to cross at a non-designated crossing. Of course, no one is actually going to arrest you for that because PAR's railroad police dept. is...exactly one officer for the entire system. It's basically just some old dude sitting at a desk in Billerica with his phone disconnected because Tim Mellon gets some tax advantage retaining a paper "Police Dept.", so they're not even going to call the local cops on you. If this were CSX and you were one of the kids fishing or swimming off the Fitchburg Secondary crossing of Foss Reservoir in Framingham (you can see them there all the time driving the Pike) you might actually see a real gun-toting' CSX officer make a patrol every once in awhile. Or at the very least get a tipped-off statie from the Pike EB breakdown lane screaming at you from a megaphone.
Trespassing frequency basically runs inverse to train frequency, and is somewhat self-correcting. The pre-Downeaster Western Route with its barely 20 MPH speed limit has this problem through NH as well. It didn't take fencing to lick the problem. Once the freight schedule started traveling 40 MPH instead of 20 that cleared most of the riff-raff by its lonesome...and then of course people really stopped fucking around en masse when they saw the Amtrak logo above the headlights...as that meant local PD would be
routinely called for any spotted trespassers. Revived T lines like the Old Colony that went from trace slow freight to full-schedule fast passenger also self-regulated in this manner...as did the Cape Cod Main (esp. along the Canal where the ROW is continuously wide-wide open) when Cape Flyer showed up and everything (dinner train & freights) started going 20 MPH faster post-upgrade. They did have to haggle some new pedestrian-only grade crossings with the upgrades for beach access...in fact, a new one was just installed last summer on the
Falmouth Branch at Monument Beach at one particularly choice beach access spot the state conceded was better off
being controlled with crossing gates rather than futilly enforced no-trespassing.
So the Merrimack shoreline will be a set of per-town bargaining trade-offs like that for the Cap Corridor where you'll probably have a net gain of 1-2 ped-only crossings per town (though esp. up in Manchester you'll probably see some tradebacks of double wrap-around street/driveway crossings pruned to single crossings). Much moreso past-Nashua, as for the MBTA most-concern Nashua poke there'll actually be net-2 crossing deletions in MA (Wotton St., Chelmsford and a private farm tractor crossing in Tyngsboro...both redundant to adjacent public streets with full crossing gates) and the only riverfront ped access needing better accommodation in NH being the pre-existing private driveway crossing to the scrap dealer at end of E. Glenwood St., Nashua. There won't be miles and miles of security fencing...that's simply not practical, nor is it RR liability to seal the corridor from illegal trespassing unless it's a Class 7/125 MPH or greater corridor like the NEC. Unfortunately the high number of trespasser hits and suicides at track level is a hole that just can't be filled to perfection, and human behavior either adjusts or it continues to be a job hazard. "Live Free or Die" mentality does--for better or for worse--have a choice in the matter.
However, I do think human behavior
will change sooner than the Cap Corridor forces it to, simply because of the freight big boys who are looking to buy out Pan Am right this second. If CN gets installed as owner/operator of the NH Main they're instantaneously going to be running a tighter ship, and you probably will see some nearer-term rebound in freight traffic simply from collected free-throws on the glut of disused freight sidings Manchester-Concord that PAR's "marketing" dept. pissed away. You'll see more than one appearance per day out of the Nashua local, and it'll be stretching north of Manchester to Concord more than the once-twice per week it manages to today. So we also are talking much more dynamically changeable conditions than just stuck State Gov't policy. NH freight may not be anyone's idea of a high-return investment...but when it's
just so goddamn easy to reclaim frivolously lost biz, you're going to see some degree of traffic rebound almost right away. And if CN crews are quicker on the draw to call local PD over trespassers, you'll see more enforcement regardless. It is, after all, private property of one of the biggest business owners in each town on the corridor...can't exactly make a town policy of hanging up on them. That'll straighten things out quick, too.
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EDIT: Security-cams-everywhere era also helps tons. Amtrak, the T, and big Class I's like CSX/Norfolk Southern/CN are rapidly deploying dash cams on their locomotives and cab cars as set-it/forget-it as those are now becoming with all manner of transit and school buses. PAR doesn't have any of that Jetsons Shit on their rolling ruins, but Amtrak sure does...T does on all new/rebuilt locos and cab cars with a newly-awarded contract to backfill it on all old equipment that doesn't...and CSX sure does on every train that trawls the B&A from Albany to Framingham (pot luck whether the secondary power on the locals out of Framingham is cam-equipped, but that all runs 80% of the time in commuter/Transit Police territory so they're well covered by T/Amtrak surveillance). Dispatch gets the live feed, and it can get forwarded to a local police officer's smartphone within minutes for ID'ing a trespass suspect. And with CSX their national dispatcher is almost 2000 miles away in a literal bomb-proof/tornado-proof military bunker near the Gulf Coast with a
backup bunker somewhere in the Midwest...but they're staffed with enough desk jockeys to muscle the local resources with no-difference as if they were 2 miles up the road. They can even tell the difference between the railfan regulars who set up near-daily at safe distance by the choicest photo vantage point in Chester for the big climb through the Berkshires vs. the ones wandering somewhere or behaving in a way that betray recent or imminent-future trespassing behavior. If CN takes up residence on the PAR system the Nashua locals will probably start exhibiting similar technology-aided acumen. And eventually the dashcam era simply hits a point of ubiquity that the holding companies like Gennessee & Wyoming start equipping those cookie-cutter yellow paint Providence & Worcester, NECR, and Connecticut Southern trains with the same across the second-tier New England carriers...since they too lump-dispatch all 100 of their different RR's out of one big control center at Darien, CT HQ.