Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)

Neither the T, nor the federal government, nor the state has committed to SSX. Right now it's just a proposal/pet project from a few people at MassDOT and the Legislature, and there have been basically no substantial updates in around 10 years. If the fact-sheet is to be believed, a major motivation was to increase layover capacity at South Station itself, but with Widett Circle going ahead that would seemingly make that a non-issue. Saying that the T would "rather spend money on SSX" is misleading at best.

If there is one person who WOULD rather do SSX than NSRL, it's very clearly Steven Lynch, and it seems he's pressing on some of the other key stakeholders. Today from the globe:

A South Station expansion? Some are optimistic after visit from Postal Service head.

What would it take to persuade the US Postal Service to move out of the way? We may soon find out now that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy seems ready to play “Let’s Make a Deal.”

DeJoy and his entourage quietly visited Boston to get negotiations going earlier this month, first to meet with Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll at the State House. DeJoy and his crew later reconvened in a private meeting over lunch with state Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt, Amtrak chief executive Stephen Gardner, and a number of top aides.

Playing a key role in all of this was congressman Steve Lynch, a longtime proponent of a South Station expansion. He helped make this event happen — and he left the meeting with DeJoy feeling more optimistic than ever that a deal could get done.

[...]

Lynch has been down this track before. If you follow Boston politics, you probably have, too. The South Station saga dates back two decades, to when the dust was still settling from all that Big Dig construction next door.

But the congressman maintains he is more hopeful than ever.

After all, DeJoy wouldn’t come all the way to Boston just to say no, right? Now that Lynch and the Healey administration have DeJoy’s attention, they need to figure out a deal that will get him to say yes.
 
I'm excited more about the development opportunity on the USPS land rather than the SSX expansion specifically. However as @F-Line to Dudley has mentioned multiple times, both SSX and NSRL are needed and not mutually exclusive. A few more stub-end tracks at South Station would be great, and the development potential along the Fort Point channel for waterside activation is super exciting. I hope the deal goes through quickly.
 
I'm excited more about the development opportunity on the USPS land rather than the SSX expansion specifically.
De-coupling the real estate elements from the transportation elements is going to be key to getting a rational valuation for SSX. Too much of the scary (and sandbagged) price tag for the monolithic project was tied up in the real estate redevelopment, the palatial Dot Ave. headhouse that was planned, and unrelated junk like a Harborwalk extension and potential public dock space in the Channel. Those have nothing to do with platforms and trackwork for the capacity expansion. It needs to be broken into pieces so each unrelated part can live on its own budget with its own backers. I'm fine with the USPS redevelopment kick-starting sooner than the 8-years-stalled everything else, so long as the buildings conform to the acreage footprint scoped out by the SSX studies. Let the raw track expansion live within the Rail Vision budget at however many additional tracks ops reform numerically studies out to require (it's not zero, but it might not be all the way to +7 either). Let the monument-building headhouse live within its own budget (or, better yet, don't do it at all or at least for a long time). Let the Harborwalk and anything they're doing to tart up the Channel interface be somebody else's budgetary problem.
 
The sandbagging sounds like the reflexive larding of any hot project with ancillary projects that wouldn’t be funded otherwise.
 

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