Ruggles itself isn't that big of a draw, you have Northeastern right there but the bigger employment draw is LMA. Green would be better for sure there since it's closer.
Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)
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Ruggles itself isn't that big of a draw, you have Northeastern right there but the bigger employment draw is LMA. Green would be better for sure there since it's closer.
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Raw upper speed isn't really that important. While the MLV EMU's will be rated for 125 MPH because NJT's RFP specs that for the Trenton super-expresses that can hit that speed, in the real world they probably aren't going to be maintained to that standard. There's such vanishingly few spots at commuter rail station spacing where >90 is sustainable long enough to make much difference when drawing up a schedule that there's never been a New Haven Line EMU in the last 86 years ordered with a top speedometer rating of >90, never been a third-rail EMU in New York with a top speed of >90, and never been a NJ/PA/MD EMU maintained at any higher than 100 MPH (even the ones that were factory-orderable at higher than that). For the Providence Line, you're really looking at an absolute cap of 100 MPH where anything higher--even factory-orderable makes like the MLV's--ends up shortening component livespans to hold them to a maintenance standard for 110-125 MPH when they might not see more than a few seconds' worth of triple-digit speeds during the course of an entire service day. Indeed, the Rotem and rebuilt Kawasaki bi-levels + HSP-46 locos are capped at 93 MPH, which is about the most they could rev up to on a Providence Line schedule. An EMU set is looking at roughly the same, because Providence does not feature very many express runs; Sharon, Mansfield, Atttleboro, et al. are just too important to skip.
That's only on the short lengths of freight track that both stations sit on. The mainline is entirely wired state line to state line. RIDOT will need a federal grant of its own to fund Cranston substation upgrades, wire-up of Pawtucket layover, and a couple infill sites. Not big money, but because they're a financially constrained state and MassDOT can't launder the money some fed help would really make a difference. The complete list of electrification upgrades you have to do to the NEC:
- Sharon substation doubling of capacity (covers South Station terminal district + Fairmount Line needs)
- Other terminal district fittings (TBD electrified layover tracks, etc.)
- Wire-up of any service-increasing trackwork, such as tri- and quad-track construction (not needed as a base requirement for electric-anything, but practically needed to support RUR frequencies)
- Attleboro Station platform track wire-up (center Amtrak passers are the only powered tracks).
- Pawtucket Layover wire-up.
- Pawtucket Station wire-up (planned during construction).
- Cranston substation expansion for Norton, MA to Groton, CT power section (less intensive work required than Sharon)
- T.F. Green. . .
- northbound/Track 4 platform construction + wire-up
- construction of freight gauntlet track on current platform track (so P&W autoracks can slot *between* the wires on Tk. 1 & 3
- wire-up of Tk. 3
- (if greenlit by RIDOT & Feds) construction of Amtrak platforms on Tk.'s 1 & 2
- Wickford northbound/Track 4 construction + wire-up, and wire-up of the existing platform track (no special freight clearance considerations)
- Any other RIDOT infills (Cranston, East Greenwich, West Davisville) greenlit for construction to coincide with the base electrification requirements.
- Davisville Yard construction (shared RIDOT/T/Amtrak maintenance Yard at the Quonset Point freight turnouts...tracks here would be powered).
Minor quibble, but the northbound easternmost track (Track 4 I think?) is also powered right now. Or at least it's wired. I've wondered about that for a while, actually, why there's that asymmetry.
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That might've been recent for track work, since old Street View pans of the station had only the center tracks wired.
It's only a few thousand bucks in hardware, so could've easily been done in secret if Amtrak was track-shifting for an expected track outage.
tangent
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Good to see our DMU estimates are in the same range... 5 to 7 years. Which is nearer term than electrification unless you think electrification can practically happen in the next ten years? I mean realistically. Large capital investment and scheduling years of service disruption for construction. Buying additional buses to carry passengers during all those service disruptions. Selling years of commuter hell to politicians once they realize the price tag and service disruptions which will inflate the price as they try to reduce disruptions or more likely just spread them out making it overall more expensive and more disruptive but more palatable from a re-election perspective.
To be practical we are going to have to see a 10 to 15 year build out of dedicated bus lanes along routes that parallel those lines. Which would be a good thing, but it doesn't get us to electrification in the next 10 or 15 years. I think 20 years is more realistic.
Though I am interested to hear more how they could practically achieve higher frequency service with existing rolling stock and equipment? That would be a preferable nearer term stop gap solution. If it just means hiring some people, better management and some smaller less disruptive infrastructure investments that could be a 2020 to 2025 win.
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That's 5-7 years IF the market warms. Right now Stadler is still non-waiverable for the freights one has to encounter in MBTA terminal district territory, and because those were the only things being pushed around Buy America regs they've managed to do a steady if not altogether gangbusters business off the backs of expansion systems. That is still not a sustainable blueprint for success. The FRA-compliants are--of course--designed from the ground up as domestic product. So when all of the vendors producing said product are foreign you can't simply can't open up a pop-up factory factory to assemble orders or 7- and 18- units like Nippon-Sharyo did for SMART and UP-Express (which is immediately electrifying!!!). Nobody's can make money on orders that small. N-S thought this business was going to be gratis while it built 130 bi-level corridor cars for Amtrak, muscled itself in as the heir-apparent for the Superliner III LD cars, and continued to schlep some Metra gallery car (EMU and push-pull variety) business. Then their Amtrak product, already years late, failed a crucial crash test....and never ever un-failed it. They lost their shirts on the penalties from that canceled contract, and this DMU product of theirs that was supposed to be a loss leader to lock up favors while they pursued world (or at least 8-inch boarding) domination was suddenly a very expensive commitment to still be saddled with. They finished the orders and promptly withdrew the product from the market.
No one else can make a buck doing this on the FRA-compliants when orders are line-by-line, expansion-by-expansion, no more than 1-1/2 dozen at a time. The Stadlers move because no modification = no need to bother engaging any of the Buy America machinery. Great if you can get it; too bad we can't. Nothing projects different in the FRA-compliants space for the forecastable future. The next buyer who's got to make an FRA-compliants purchase is either 1) West Side Express, who have ridden out their original-purchase Colorado Railcar lemons and are now mixing/matching refurrbbed Budd RDC's until UP-E electrifies and puts its fleet for sale, and 2) SMART who'd also be gunning for UP-E's fleet as expansion room (possibly making them the only user in the world of that make by this point). It's all lateral movement driven by the pending fleet replacement of Toronto's diesels. Meanwhile, the smallest EMU order of the last 30 years was Metra Electric's initial '05 batch of Highliner II's with only 25...and they and NITCD followed that up with a second batch of 175 barely 5 years later. You have orders of 113 MLV's for NJT, another 120+ for SEPTA, and 500+ options...then 94 more Kawasaki M8's on-order from Metro North and 328 M9 cars from LIRR. Not 6 or 8 or 12 cars...hundreds apiece.
The only manufacturer with an extant FRA-compliant DMU determined they could no longer afford to assemble their product here. And right now...they're the only manufacturer with such a product to float. So you are either looking for CRRC or the Chinese to pull a DMU rabbit out of the hat with a product we don't know yet they're even R&D'ing (and why would they when the push-pull, EMU, and subway markets they are trying to crack will keep a factory open for years with far larger orders). Or, we've got to hope that the recent relaxing of FRA standards gets the Euros like Stadler a little more adventurous about adapting their wares for the domestic market. At those unit totals, fat chance...if there's only going to be dreeps and dribbles of domestic interest, then they have to keep living outside of Buy America like they always have. There's the extremely unlikely chance Bombardier will do something for Canada, but they didn't think to do that already when UP-E needed DMU's and now they don't. If not those possibilities...that have no quantifiable probabilities going for them in 2019...then who???
Yeah, the market can get off the fence in 7 years. It can also not just as easily. This isn't an aB-only question. The whole editorial board of Railway Age Magazine asks this every day.
If Regional Rail is not derailed,we will have so many projects to hit the feds with that we could buy alt compliant euro stuff, like the DEMU FLIRT for ER with state money and not worry about Buy American. Get them in three yrs, plus a year for the RFP etc. NEC/Fairmount electrification should be quick and relatively painless, and there and platforms is where we should be looking for grant money. Either piggyback on the MLV order for the EMU needs with fed money. Four-five years out? Or use state money to buy european here as well. I happen to like the Bombardier Aventra myself, but you pickem. First order would be for 20 trainsets. Could have nearly bought them for the money we are spending on the H-R crapcars.
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Absolutely. Arguably we need the FRA-compliant DMU's market to un-freeze to put all the tools to work, but frozen solid it continues to be...longer than anyone thought it would go for. The original RFP for Nippon-Sharyo equipment on the Fairmount LIne from over half-decade ago was a 24-car (married-triplet) base order. With N-S shutting its doors soon after, that's exactly the kind of quantities that are much too small to open an assembly factory when nearly all EMU and coach orders (or both in the case of the Bombardier MLV's) are far larger. So unfortunately finding a way around the deep freeze means finding a way to increase the unit quantities to something "general purpose". That unfortunately is very hard with DMU's when fuel efficiency stinks on a trans-495 schedule compared to P-P, the better-than-PP/much-worse-than-EMU acceleration only finds its niche on certain stop spacings most likely to reside on intra-128 schedules, and the extra fuel/engine bulk makes hybridizing the setup with trailers for capacity management far more difficult than, say, the plug-and-play MLV's. They'd have to filet diesel ops to keep the cost margins appropriate for each type of equipment, but that pigeonholes DMU's into a very small fleet size (which would be fine if it the market hadn't already spoken such volumes about how that doesn't wash with Buy America). 'Round and 'round we go.
I wish Bombardier would qualify something for the relaxed regs too, but they show zero indication of wanting to. And why should they? 600+ MLV's 'slush'-orderable, going gangbusters for the GO Transit electrification order of 8-inch boarding BLV EMU's that'll be almost as large units-wise, then no doubt a single-level product of some sort to cap off the modular product offerings. Moving a dozen DMU's here and there between those monster EMU and P-P orders means nothing to them. They're happy to keep that product in Europe where the build quantities are much larger. If the Canadian gov't charity doesn't compel it under their "Buy Canadian" home-field advantage, then they see less than nothing to chase wrestling with "Buy America".
So it's getting to the point where now that RUR is a go we have to start plotting for what the Plan B's are going to be if the market doesn't jar loose in the given time frame. Because this deep freeze has outlasted prediction and is persisting into a volatile tariff environment which means the small-unit orders really aren't rounding out the mix like they used to. I think those Plan B's have to include a 12-year max (no more, even the pretty-good condition Pullmans and rebuilt F40PH-3C's aren't going to stretch longer than that) of subbing the P-P equipment on seeder routes with aggressive PoP automation and precision trainset management...so long as there's an up-front transition plan for moving off the costlier-to-run (but very much schedule-capable) equipment when better stuff is available. We can do that much, and it doesn't have to succumb to the "vehicle is the service"-itis of the initial Fairmount/Indigo DMU plan so long as there's an established budget + pecking order of wean-offs to electric equipment or _____ TBD.
tangent
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Perhaps we need to rethink the procurement then. Pooling our needs with other cities would give us the buying power to kick start the market. Make it a multi-city procurement for say 2 winners for 100 units each. Or three winners 100 units, 100 units and 50 units. I expect there is sufficient demand in aggregate. And once the market is established there should be additional demand for smaller FRA compliant orders.
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The "Full Transformation" Alternative 6 from the Rail Vision study that was endorsed includes the NSRL.
Most of the other alternatives other than the no-build and the most minor one, included South Station Expansion.
They're expecting to have to do at least one or the other as part of it.
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That said, a lot of this is about all day frequencies. South Station isn't bursting at the seams all day, it's at rush hour that it's slammed. There's plenty of capacity to increase off-peak frequencies from where they are now in terms of space at South Station.
The last transitmatters report found that by re-doing all the switches and giving dedicated platforms for each line they could increase increase track speed up to 30mph in the entire SS approach and effectively reduce the turnaround time by half and double the capacity.
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Problem with that (and why TM's SSX opposition is irrational) is that the platform needs for each line are not static. Amtrak is the aggravating factor there as their schedules are fundamentally different from commuter and come in dips and surges all day. This impacts commuter NEC users most directly as Providence/Stoughton, Needham, and Franklin have to routinely get bumped from their idealized platform slots to fan further out across more switches when an Amtrak surge hits during the peak period. Worcester and the Old Colony lines, being slotted at the far ends, have fewer such conflicts. But unfortunately the near-Atlantic Ave. side to middle platforms have an inherent instability. This is made worse by the fact that Amtrak, which goes in/out in revenue service on the Cove interlocking (NEC/Worcester) side of the terminal, has to make a non-revenue deadhead to/from Southampton Yard on the Tower 1 (Old Colony & Fairmount) side for between-run duties (changing ends on Widett Loop for all NE Regionals and Lake Shore Ltd.'s/Inlands, crew changes and food service restock for everything period, and occasional toilet pumping). That makes the surges worse, as the commuter trains must fan out...but then get pinned onto the platform by Amtrak needing to cross a bunch more switches during non-revenue duties. This is especially bad when the commuter train that's pinned can't simply be re-badged to whatever the next outbound schedule is, since a Needham peak train is going to have way fewer cars than a Providence peak train and be woefully inappropriate for swapping roles.
The biggest upside to the pure track-work SSX is restoration of tracks and revamping of switches so the terminal becomes more or less symmetrical again on the Cove and Tower A sides. It reduces the pinning-in-place for commuter trains when Amtrak has a surge that swaps from revenue-in to non-revenue -out to non-revenue -in to revenue-out in a short span because fewer paths get blocked, and the additional platforms period allow for more slush options in the middle for Amtrak to fan out when one of their surges conflicts with the more even churn of commuter runs. Thus, you can have set platform assignments and much quicker turnarounds all the same per the TM recs. Where TM can't seem to quite grasp it is that the extra platforms are a requirement of the restored switch symmetry that relieves the pressure and enables all the other optimization they recommend. They are unfortunately taking somebody's bait and opposing the project lock, stock because of the real-estate empire-building lard that's bloating the cost. Stuff that SHOULD be wholly divorced from the bare track work so the cost valuations (and whose backs it goes on) can be sane...but unfortunately is goading a lot of folks into throwing baby out with the bathwater instead of trying to sanefully segment the unrelated moving parts of the project.
TL;DR...you have to build SSX--the track & platform work portion--to net meaningful optimization. And that optimization is needed whether we build NSRL or not because it's the difference between a smooth-performing terminal and a crap-performing terminal when Amtrak and T schedules collide in waves at various points during the day. Unfortunately pols and advocates have locked themselves into a zero-sum game over it where all the headhouse and Dot Ave. real estate extras piled onto the price are warping the value proposition like a funhouse mirror, such that some advocates are making the excess real estate lard an indictment of the base track work. That's bad; TM can't enact nearly enough of the "switch optimization" it wants by canceling the project outright. Some degree of track/platform expansion has to happen, and something has to give with their reflex to oppose in-total. But for whatever reason cognitive dissonance has got the sides locking horns over this without any clear effort to simplify their way to a solution by stripping out the real estate cogs into separate projects like they should be. I credit Baker/Pollack for running a good interference game over SSX because it's got the transit advocates distracted and contradicting themselves whereas with just about every other initiative (RUR and--minus the doddering-old-fool Duke/Salvucci faction--all things NSRL) they're immaculately on-point and have the Administration on the run.
Do you have it on good authority that FRA is likely to impose operating conditions under (b)(2)(iii) on 238.201(b)(2) compliant equipment that would make it unusable for this application? Or somehow otherwise put the kibosh on it? I had the impression TexRail had the authority to operate among traditionally compliant passenger equipment and some degree of freight traffic (maybe not heavy mainline?) without temporal separation, but I haven't gotten around to FOIAing the bits of their waiver submittals that didn't seem to go in the public docket file. Really eager to see what happens when we see the first couple of alternative complaint projects begin operating under the new regs, rather than a waiver.
RE: South Station.
Please forgive me if this is dumb or fantastical because I just don't know.
Is it possible to "stack" more than one trains on a single platform? For instance, if you had two trains that would leave in relatively short succession could you park both on one of the long platforms and the depart in order? Some of the middle platforms seem long enough.
Please forgive me if this is dumb or fantastical because I just don't know.
Is it possible to "stack" more than one trains on a single platform? For instance, if you had two trains that would leave in relatively short succession could you park both on one of the long platforms and the depart in order? Some of the middle platforms seem long enough.
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The platforms aren't long enough. Old Colony berths are 6 cars (shorter than average until you blow up USPS), most of the rest are a T-regulation 9 cars (Providence already runs some 8-car trips), and some of the middle berths used by Amtrak are 12-car for max-length NE Regionals. When an average consist goes 5 cars that means stacking is impossible without having closed-door cars on the lead train. And that clobbers dwells, which is doubly bad when the lead train has to board fastest to get out of the way.
Only way to lengthen any platforms is building SSX since that unsquishes the switch layout. All platforms including Old Colony would round up to the 9-car T max and Amtrak would net a couple more berths of 12-car flex to absorb Regionals growth. But it isn't possible with the switch mashup to unsquish enough to go super-long across the board.
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The longest platform is definitely long enough for this, as I've been on trains that needed to be pushed into the station by a following train. However, I'm sure there are a number of massive caveats and asterisks following that statement, not the least of which is that I'm pretty sure the longest platforms are generally used by Amtrak, and they wouldn't be able to fit two trains on them, and their operations wouldn't be able to take advantage of such a move given how they need to come in and out of service.
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Can't see it ever happening here, because northside you've got one of the biggest freight customers in New England (Boston Sand & Gravel) switching dozens of cars of heavy crushed stone right in the gut of North Station's main interlocking. And NSRL would be no different portaling up in exactly the same spot.
South you've got CSX-Readville running all day touching the NEC/Franklin/Fairmount. While the activity level is pretty tame by freight standards, Amtrak being the terminal + NEC dispatch lord and ruler means they're going to have little stomach for unorthodox waivers when it's their dispatchers shouldering the liability. Extreme unlikelihood of a co-sign from them; that's worth the turf warrage from their insurance perspective.
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From the Amtrak thread, the idea of a train carrying its own gap-filler so as to operate on high level platforms (single-level, high-platform coaches are a key part of RUR's plan to shorten dwell times) on freight clearance routes.
F-Line's example is from Florida East Coast RR (the freight RR that owns the tracks, and would not permit their freight ops to be spoiled by their child-later-spun-out Brightline (now Virgin))
E.g. on the Lowell line (and on all routes into Maine (Downeaster) and NH (if it happens)) this would have been a elegant solution at Winchester Center, and then applicable at Wedgmere and critically, would allow a simple 2 track CR tunnel (or 2 CR & 2 GL) at West Medford,
F-Line's example is from Florida East Coast RR (the freight RR that owns the tracks, and would not permit their freight ops to be spoiled by their child-later-spun-out Brightline (now Virgin))
- Technological solves for non- level boarding: Believe it or not, Amtrak has the answer for retiring those cumbersome lifts! Read it straight from the horse's mouth. The PRIAA No. 305 next-gen single-level car specs--ratified by Congress and the NEC Region member states 8 years ago--calls for automated gap-filler door mechanisms to shoot out from each vestibule door to cover any gapped platforms. This is a feature already implemented on the Siemens Viaggio Comfort-derived coaches ordered by Virgin Trains USA (formerly Florida Brightline), for VIA Rail delivery in 2022, for the Amtrak midwestern single-levels, and as prohibitive frontrunner for the Amfleet replacements.
E.g. on the Lowell line (and on all routes into Maine (Downeaster) and NH (if it happens)) this would have been a elegant solution at Winchester Center, and then applicable at Wedgmere and critically, would allow a simple 2 track CR tunnel (or 2 CR & 2 GL) at West Medford,