Regional New England Rail (Amtrak & State DOT & NEC)

The NEC (1) is Electrified (2) has no freight train interference (3) is 100% government owned (4) is capable of 110 to 165mph speeds (5) wins vs air and bus by providing up to 2 trains per hour

SPG-BOS offers none of the first 4 and, given CTs limits on the number of Amtrak trains, splitting service would hurt (5) in PVD and RTE markets
 
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So what's stopping Amtrak from running half of NE Regionals via Hartford-Springfield-Worcester and the other half via New London-Providence? I know there has to be a good reason because to me it seems so obvious.. Electrification costs? ROW capacity? The price tag/obstacles must be really excessive to outweigh the massive benefits of tying Hartford, Springfield, and Worcester into the NE corridor.

It's costly, because all of the single track between SPG-WOR has to get re-doubled with extra crossovers for passing sidings. The freight schedule is too stiff for the current infrastructure, and CSX dispatches it so the freights are going to get priority in any conflict. SPG-WOR also needs a speed uprate (specifically: "welded rail destressing", like was done on the Framingham-Worcester portion of Worcester Line for T speed increases) from 60 to 80 MPH. And it'll cost more in resignaling if you want to push the straightaway from Springfield to Palmer via Wilbraham to 90 MPH instead of 80 MPH. CSX is probably also going to want to play Make-A-Deal and rope MassDOT into buying all of the B&A property and request some truck route upgrades (specifically: raising a low bridge or two) to big West Springfield intermodal yard in the process.

The NNEIRI study tallies up the costs, and it somewhat more realistic than the more recent East-West Study which was a tankapalooza on its cost metrics and included the much less useful Springfield-Pittsfield segment in its infrastructure. The plan, before Charlie Baker poked it in the eye, was to have up to 8 New Haven-Springfield-Boston round-trips daily, plus an expanded Vermonter/Montrealer, plus a new Boston-Montreal train, and have matching halves of the Inland trains meet up at Springfield for cross-ticketed transfers to the Montreal trains. The round-trip trains could be either repurposed Springfield Shuttles terminating at New Haven or Penn Station, or full-on extended Northeast Regionals. For it to be Regionals you probably need to get Gateway NYC built and a couple Fairfield County, CT drawbridges replaced because the NEC down there is near its traffic limit and they would much prefer to add slots rather than vulturing them from Providence.
 
Plus, Amtrak already runs several Northeast Regionals to Springfield. (Plus the Vermonter, which is basically a Northeast Regional that keeps going after Springfield.) They have to do a locomotive change at New Haven (which they do remarkably quickly, from what I can tell) when traveling via Hartford, which they don't need to when running via New London.

The other piece -- which isn't totally fatal, but does create more complexity -- is that the Boston-Worcester leg is notably less friendly than the Boston-Providence leg. In addition to the reasons Arlington lists out...
  • The NEC is remarkably straight. It's not just that the tracks were upgraded to support high-speed -- it's that the ROW itself is nice and straight, all the way from Kingston to Boston, as opposed to the Boston & Albany ROW, which is painful in its curves (image from OpenRailwayMap):

    Screen Shot 2021-06-16 at 8.44.13 AM.png
  • As a result of the above, travel times are going to be slower via Springfield. Again, this can be corrected to some extent with infrastructure improvements, but in terms of what it's like today, it's slower
  • The NEC has multitrack overtakes at Providence, Attleboro, and then Readville heading into Boston. This makes it easier to schedule "leapfrogs" where Amtrak passes a commuter rail train. The B&A does not have those right now. One can do overtakes with just two tracks -- in fact, that is what the Worcester Line does (or at least did) now, and is why platform assignment at stations like Wellesley is so screwy. But it's already a complicated mess, just with Framingham and Worcester trains -- hardly an ideal situation to add more intercity trains to
Finally: as mentioned above, some NER trains already run to Springfield. Extending those to Boston would serve only a handful of new markets:
  • Riders to/from Worcester
  • Riders to/from Framingham
  • Riders to/from Palmer
  • Boston-Springfield riders
  • Boston-Greater Hartford riders
These are important, to be sure, and I'm all in favor of running Boston-Springfield-New Haven trains. But there are a number of drawbacks, and it's not necessarily the slam-dunk it looks like on paper.

[EDIT: I see that F-Line and I replied at the same time, I was intending to respond to Arlington, but agree with F-Line's points as well.]
 
One other "problem" is the auto unloading facility in Spencer/East Brookfield. CSX and the in house switching railroad (EB&S) use the No.1/westbound main for staging trains between CP64 and CP60 (Spencer curves). That CP-60 was a recent addition in order to reduce having single track from Charlton (CP-57) and CP-64. Would be interesting to see how that situation would be dealt with.
 
I am attending a wedding in the fall near Pittsfield, and the 1 train a day situation is an insult. The town looks very transit friendly.
 
I am attending a wedding in the fall near Pittsfield, and the 1 train a day situation is an insult. The town looks very transit friendly.
BRTA local buses actually aren't that bad once you get there. Very extensive system, and decent (relatively speaking) frequencies for such a spread-out region. The problem, as you say, is getting there in the first place.
 
I am attending a wedding in the fall near Pittsfield, and the 1 train a day situation is an insult. The town looks very transit friendly.
Insult to whom/what? I'm not seeing it. Lots of places have historical rail (or even 1x Amtrak Long Distance), but that's not sufficient evidence that rail service or any transit is somehow the only dignified solution.

My solution for Western Mass would be a mix of nonstop bus from Boston (which would be both right-sized, and faster) and a bus hub at Springfield. If you want me to spend a coupla hundred million, It'd still be better spent on HOV lanes on the Pike through key choke points (eg 84/90 merge).

Throwing Billions at rail because the locals think it the only mode worthy of their dignity gets us wasteful projects like Greenbush and South Coast Rail, particularly because there's usually some other local who demands a tunnel or electrification or bike path as "compensation" for the imposition of new rail.
 
My solution for Western Mass would be a mix of nonstop bus from Boston (which would be both right-sized, and faster) and a bus hub at Springfield.

Springfield has a bus hub. Pretty great one as-is. The Union Station rebuild rebuilt the bus terminal bigly. The problem is Pittsfield is quite the jog off-Pike, so only a fraction of the prolific SPG-ALB buses actually bother to stop there. That might be a thing some targeted subsidy can help with, for encouraging more stopovers with Pittsfield. But the way East-West was designed by the Admin. to poison the well, "bus" is already a dirty word to the Western MA pols. Thanks, Charlie.

Figure out a way to undo the @#$%ed framing around the b-word, and you probably have a viable path forward. It probably ain't going to happen until a new Administration, however. Baker/Pollack utterly poisoned the well, and it's still stewing.

If you want me to spend a coupla hundred million, It'd still be better spent on HOV lanes on the Pike through key choke points (eg 84/90 merge).

That would do no good whatsoever. The source of the major traffic jams at that exit is from TRUCK traffic, not cars. The big rigs downshift going up and down the steep hills in Charlton, Oxford, and Auburn slow everything behind them in the center and right lanes, and end up creating their own weather with the ensuing traffic jams. Between 290 and 84 is the purest singular concentration of big rig traffic in all of New England. It flows OK the hours of the day when the car traffic is un-dense and there are easy enough passing opportunities, but feeding that all-day chorus line of tractor trailers into regular rush hour car loading around those downshift-special hills is a singularly bad recipe with eminently predictable results. An HOV ain't gonna do shit for that problem. There's no room for it, anyway, as on some of the steep hills in question the Pike is already bored as wide as the rock cuts will allow.

No...you need to keep on investing in diverting more of those big rigs to *rail*. Get CSX-West Springfield up to facilities par with CSX-Worcester so those big rigs can shoot down I-91 instead of going 290/Pike/84, and encourage Norfolk Southern's competitive long game in Ayer and East Deerfield so this 12-mile chunk of Pike isn't so hyper-concentrated with an entire Southern New England's worth of IM transloading. Then you'll have true load-balancing between I-84 and I-91 for serving Central and Southern CT instead of this problematic singular overreliance on 84. CSX-Worcester was only one of the intended investment cogs in the machine; we still haven't got West Springfield handling its fair share.

Yes, there's an East-West/NNEIRI vector for all of this. CSX quite badly wants West Springfield truck improvements. The truck pads are all on the north side of the yard, but the low clearance overpasses maroon all the big rigs on the south end. It takes complicated, time-consuming detouring through dense residential thoroughfares to get around the blockage, with time-of-day restrictions on the traffic so the trucks don't keep people up at night. Consequently, West Springfield's truck utilization is half-assed at best and a pittance of the yard's true capacity (it is the single largest-capacity freight rail yard in all of New England, with almost half a million square feet of tractor trailer parking available). CSX instead hyper-concentrates the volumes at Worcester, resulting in the daily Pike/I-84 overheating. It was okay as an opening salvo; now Worcester is maxed out and needs a tag-team partner. MassDOT has a long-stalled/unfunded proposal on the books to redo Union St. underpass for big rig clearances, which would let all trucks slip directly off the US 5 expressway onto Union and enter the yard while only passing a few big-box stores and half-dozen houses instead of miles and miles of houses. Do that spread around freight fun bux to modernize West Springfield's trailer processing to Worcester-level state-of-the-art and the overload that's gumming up the works on the hills between 290 & 84 largely shifts to I-91 in the flat-as-a-board river valley.
 
I had the sense that most transloading at Worcester and West Springfield was taking long-haul containers and piggybacks off of trains and putting them on trucks for local delivery, not driving them in on the Pike in order to put them on trains in Worcester. Is that really that big a share of Springfield-Worcester truck traffic?
 
I had the sense that most transloading at Worcester and West Springfield was taking long-haul containers and piggybacks off of trains and putting them on trucks for local delivery, not driving them in on the Pike in order to put them on trains in Worcester. Is that really that big a share of Springfield-Worcester truck traffic?
I don't think that was what F-Line said. My understanding is that the transloading capabilities at West Springfield are so poor, that rail traffic come on into Worcester instead, and then trucks have to backtrack (on the Pike, on I-84) to destinations that should have been served by trucks out of West Springfield (on I-91, etc.).
 
One other "problem" is the auto unloading facility in Spencer/East Brookfield. CSX and the in house switching railroad (EB&S) use the No.1/westbound main for staging trains between CP64 and CP60 (Spencer curves). That CP-60 was a recent addition in order to reduce having single track from Charlton (CP-57) and CP-64. Would be interesting to see how that situation would be dealt with.
There are proposals to triple track that stretch
 
Insult to whom/what? I'm not seeing it. Lots of places have historical rail (or even 1x Amtrak Long Distance), but that's not sufficient evidence that rail service or any transit is somehow the only dignified solution.

My solution for Western Mass would be a mix of nonstop bus from Boston (which would be both right-sized, and faster) and a bus hub at Springfield. If you want me to spend a coupla hundred million, It'd still be better spent on HOV lanes on the Pike through key choke points (eg 84/90 merge).

Throwing Billions at rail because the locals think it the only mode worthy of their dignity gets us wasteful projects like Greenbush and South Coast Rail, particularly because there's usually some other local who demands a tunnel or electrification or bike path as "compensation" for the imposition of new rail.

Why does adding a 2nd or 3rd daily train cost "billions".

The tracks are there. The stations are there.
 
I don't think that was what F-Line said. My understanding is that the transloading capabilities at West Springfield are so poor, that rail traffic come on into Worcester instead, and then trucks have to backtrack (on the Pike, on I-84) to destinations that should have been served by trucks out of West Springfield (on I-91, etc.).
Correct. Worcester serves the lion's share of the whole Southern New England market because West Springfield is only running at a fraction of its native transloading capacity. West Springfield runs at a fraction because the easy highway access (via US 5 expressway) is all on the south (general freight) side of the yard, but the truck access is all on the north side and the low Union St. (12'1") and River St. (12'4") overpasses prevent any direct access from one half to the other. Instead of taking the most direct route I-91==>US 5==>MA 147 and only passing a few city blocks of shopping mall to get there, the trucks have to come from way up north via 91 or Pike on the non-expressway portion of 5 from more miles out, get off on Park St. in West Springfield town center, go several blocks down Park, and take Western Ave. at considerable detriment to the surrounding residential. CSX has to curtail trucking on the overnight because of the residential, play keep-away from rush hour to avoid paralyzing downtown, and damp-down their rush hour activity on the turnpike portion of US 5 that has traffic lights.

Then, because of the Worcester overload, Pike between 290 & 84 is singularly crushed with big rigs 24/7 and I-84 carries the lion's share of Connecticut-bound traffic. It's one of the hilliest portions of Pike anywhere out outside of the face of the Berkshires, so those big rigs downshift frequently in the center and right lanes to create major traffic jams at anything resembling peakish loading (including if you've had the indignity of driving there on a Sunday night when the weekenders are coming home). That would not be the case if West Springfield were more than a trace contributor to Central CT loads, because the Pike/84 loads would be much lower and nowhere near as liable for causing the traffic jams. I-91 is also mercifully free of hills and would be spared similar traffic swells from the downshifting hell if it ran under the equivalent truck volumes. Fixing the WS truck access is thus a thing that really needs to happen soon for the good of everyone.


Compared with Worcester, the truck area @ WS is as large or larger. But because they have to slow-walk it to manage city traffic, West Springfield processes trailer cubes at only a fraction of the breakneck density and speed of Worcester. Worcester has automated robot cranes for dealing with stacks, high-throughput automated truck scales at the egresses, idealized workflow for fetching trailers from parking areas and getting in/out, computerized queuing for the manifests (both rail and truck), and more switching tracks dedicated to quickly swapping out strings of cars from the crane tracks. West Springfield does plodding low-tech side-loading of trailers (like Beacon Park used to), processes many times slower, and is less dense and way more space inefficient in spite of its far bigger acreage. CSX's profit margins @ WS are sub-ideal because of its relative sluggishness, but until they have a truck route into it that can actually support crush-load volumes on 24/7 shifts there's no point in them making the profit-minded efficiency/density upgrades.

CSX and MassDOT talked lots about fixing this when all the Beacon Park/Worcester/double-stacks/line sales Make-A-Deal was being consumated 13-14 years ago, but the MassHighway project for improving Union St. clearances is pricey. A whole lot needs to be hollowed out to get that underpass from a shoulderless 12'1" to suitable state for big rig traffic. That's the Make-A-Deal vector for East-West/NNEIRI; CSX would willingly trade some passenger slotting flex for the state's help on West Springfield truck access. They would then in turn build a private access driveway right on the other side of that cleared underpass so the trucks came clean off the street after passing a mere 2 or 3 total houses, and do all their in-house modernizations of the IM yard so it could rake at a rate comparable to Worcester. Since Worcester is now more or less tapped-out on capacity, now is sort of the time to be revisiting the Make-A-Deal here. Especially while the state's going to be sitting down with CSX a lot in the next couple years dealing with Pan Am merger entrails (which upgrading WS also helps a ton).
 
Why does adding a 2nd or 3rd daily train cost "billions".

The tracks are there. The stations are there.
The slots are not. CSX packs most of their B&A trains to 80-120 car lengths, and adjust their acceleration super-slowly on the curves and grades of the Worcester hills. It's been mostly single-track ever since Conrail rebuilt the line in the early/mid-80's, and the passenger slots (LSL, pre-2014 Vermonters, pre-2004 Regionals) are scheduled in the gaps between big freight slots because if they were running behind the taillights of a freight making tons of acceleration adjustments en route it would take a whole useless hour longer to get between Worcester and Springfield. That was the Achilles heel that killed the old Inlands and made the Vermonter's old Springfield-Palmer jog such daily torture. Amtrak would routinely be in excess of 30 minutes late because they got stuck behind a gigantic freight lashup, and Amtrak couldn't do anything about it because Conrail/CSX was the freight dispatcher. There's nothing comparable elsewhere in New England for degree of difficulty in bumming slots on the current infrastructure.

To add more than a "couple" slots, which the studies aimed to do, you also have to install regular-spaced crossovers for timed overtakes with the freights at cost of doing up new interlockings. Then, in order for the old track to operate at the same speed as the new track (remember: CSX is the dispatcher, so they run you on the track they want not the one you necessarily want), all of the existing rail would then have to go through the same "destressing" process for its maintenance class that the Framingham-Worcester portion of Commuter Rail had to go through after the state bought it from CSX. Destressing was a pretty involved project by the T that would have to be applied over the route. It adds up.

"Billions" is not accurate, however. NNEIRI, with enough crossovers for 9 daily round-trips and full construction for a Palmer intermediate, priced out at $554M-$660M. For only "a few" more trips you'd still be doing the complete DT and destressing over 54 miles of ROW, but far fewer crossovers and no Palmer Station. Scale that down to $300M-$350M, then. It's never going to be cheap at the miles we're talking, and the freight is not going away or getting more nimble with time. But don't rely on the East-West study's "billions"...that's already been torn to shreds by every advocate on the planet for relying on 'voodoo' metrics that don't source anywhere in the real world (it's B.S. in spite of the mileage in question being 2x to Pittsfield). It's a question of Pollack's minions telling the study group "find me a $B scare quote so I can trollolol this with maximum killing power, but don't worry about showing your math." Anything here is going to be expensive; nothing here is going to be "billions" expensive. East-West has already been revised by the state after admitting the numbers were jacked, and will continue to be as more pressure is applied.
 
My apologies in distracting from the Springfield conversation, but NHDOT just posted a project page for Capitol Corridor, and within it, a presentation dated 5/25 showing more detailed renders and options for future Manchester station and layover from a stakeholder meeting; a couple of screengrabs are below. While I personally like the Granite St Option the best, but I can see the appeal of Valley Street for catalyzing TOD development in that 2020 plan.

Other interesting items: public meetings in November, and a project timeline showing that the preferred alt should be done by September. I would probably expect to see more of these stakeholder presentations show up relatively soon for Nashua and Bedford?

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My apologies in distracting from the Springfield conversation, but NHDOT just posted a project page for Capitol Corridor, and within it, a presentation dated 5/25 showing more detailed renders and options for future Manchester station and layover from a stakeholder meeting; a couple of screengrabs are below. While I personally like the Granite St Option the best, but I can see the appeal of Valley Street for catalyzing TOD development in that 2020 plan.

Other interesting items: public meetings in November, and a project timeline. I would probably expect to see more of these stakeholder presentations show up relatively soon for Nashua and Bedford?

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Good. They're finally doing it right as a full-high. The last Downtown Manchester presentation several years ago was similar on location but pinched pennies with a mini-high. Reminder that NHDOT isn't held to the same nation's-toughest accessibility regs as the Mass Architectural Board holds in-state Commuter Rail. Given the absolute dearth of a freight schedule here, if they can do Lawrence up as a single-side full-high they should have no issue doing up Manchester as a single-side full-high given that 14/15ths of the daily schedule is going to be them only.
 
"Billions" is not accurate, however. NNEIRI, with enough crossovers for 9 daily round-trips and full construction for a Palmer intermediate, priced out at $554M-$660M.
That'd only get a train to SPG as I recall, since NNEIRI was pricing SPG-BOS upgrades . I don't recall it including a PIT-SPG leg. Jass wanted a train all the way to PIT and I was swagging PIT-BOS
PIT.png
 
Yeah the issue with PIT is that its only one long distance train, period. No additional local options from Springfield or Albany
 
Yeah the issue with PIT is that its only one long distance train, period. No additional local options from Springfield or Albany
The Berkshire Flyer was funded (but pointless during COVID) to extend service from the NYC side. That's bigger, closer demand and shorter rail, and an extension of an existing service (NY State sponsored Amtrak), making it much easier to launch than pushing a new Mass-side train.
 

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