Re: North-South Rail Link
If this hypothetically got greenlit, what would be the ballpark cost of just electrifying initial lines (literally stringing catenary) and buying electric trains? I understand only a couple of lines might get included in an initial build, so how many new electric trains would be needed, what would be the cost per train, etc. I'm trying to figure out the cost of this piece separate from the actual digging, tunneling, concrete, etc. Would a more detailed study need to be done before this could even be quoted properly?
For Cliffs Notes version? I know there's some generally acknowledged 'golden rule' cost ranges you can pretty reliably ballpark against, but having trouble pulling up anything specific enough in the RR.net search field. Try the Pedestrian Observations blog; I'm sure Alon Levy has done a lengthy post about this, and he's always the gold standard at separating out 'true' cost-by-country vs. difficulty of engineering vs. unreasonable lard.
We'd be using the de facto world standard of 25 kV AC @ grid frequency (60 Hz North America + some Southeast Asia; 50 Hz rest of the world). About as generic as it gets, and every new electrification or wholesale conversion from old/nonstandard to new/standardized electrification in N. America the last 30 years has done it that way (built: Amtrak Shoreline, Mexico City Ferrocaril Suburbano, Denver FasTraks, NJ Transit DC-to-AC conversion + expansion, AMT Montreal DC-to-AC conversion...design-build: California HSR, Bay Area Caltrain, Toronto GO Transit). Amtrak's New Haven-Boston specs guide is the template all of the new or proposed systems are working off of.
For the non-Cliffs Notes version? GO Transit's electrification DEIR is about as detailed as you'd get there for a system comparable in track miles to the T:
http://www.gotransit.com/electrification/en/default.aspx. Not exactly light beach reading, unless you're looking to cure your crippling insomnia while on a beach.
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It would be way different northside vs. southside since South Station and the terminal district are already wired vs. nothing north. And of course you need readily available high-tension power lines in the vicinity capable of feeding a 25 kV railway electrification from a source...availability of which is going to vary line-by-line (though thankfully Eastern MA has no shortage of those).
For example...
To electrify 9 miles X 2 tracks of Fairmount the only things you'd need on the Fairmount Line-proper are:
- the physical wires
- 1 paralleling station (basically, a big circuit breaker) spaced 6 miles from the next-nearest one (i.e. this guy at Readville) somewhere in the Four Corners-Talbot range.
- Vertical clearances under 10 overhead bridges that are 2 ft. 1 in. above the the tallest unshielded car roof cleared to run on the line. If CSX is taking shipping cubes out of Marine Terminal on freight trains then you'd need 19'7" total underclearance.
- That's not nearly as expensive as it sounds for Fairmount-proper since most of those bridges are already there. Once you toss the ones solvable by trackbed undercutting (cheap, can be done in a single weekend's bustitution) you may only be talking 1 or 2 structures. And there's non-T funding sources to tap for offsetting the freight impacts such as fed TIGER grants, Massport's budget, etc. Not particularly consequential for the total project cost.
- Caution: Nat'l Bridge Inventory is notoriously old/inaccurate/incomplete and goes by minimum clearance anywhere under the bridge (e.g. side abutments, not centerline). Don't rely on an Uglybridges.com search to estimate bridge count/costs. According to the NBI, the Worcester Line is 3 feet shorter than it should be for clearing the double-stack freights that are moving today from Westborough to the NY state line.
The rest of the power draw, including the terminal district, chains off the NEC's sole Massachusetts substation in
Sharon (top; note the gigantic power line ROW it taps off of at bottom). Amtrak only installed enough capacity 15 years ago to feed its own trains, so the empty half of that slab of pavement in Sharon needs a T-paid substation expansion to enable commuter rail electrics @ South Station + Providence + Fairmount and pad the terminal district for expansion. But one investment would solve all three.
Worcester's the next-easiest. You'd need one full-on substation out in MetroWest where some of the big-ass power lines cross the ROW, paralleling stations once every 6 miles, and you'd need a replacement for the Beacon St. bridge because that won't even clear a commuter rail bi-level under wires. But all the vacated ex-CSX freight clearances west of there absorb it, and there are only 6 underpasses in double-stack territory that would have to be cleared for 23'1" (some already that tall,
all can be trackbed-undercut).
It gets harder from there, but Providence + RIDOT + Fairmount + Worcester take up about 60% of the southside equipment pool. So you've already solved the problem of getting >half of those lines on more nimble EMU's. Dual-mode locomotives hauling push-pull trains doesn't slow down the tunnel if they're a decided minority of the total traffic. And branchlines are going to stick to the surface terminals far more often than they run in the tunnel, so tunnel assignments get weighted pretty heavily to the EMU-running trunk mainlines.
- Old Colony was cleared from Day 1 to support electrification, but the 3 branches diffuses the service levels on majority of the past-128 track miles. Greenbush and Plymouth are never going to hit the service density thresholds to hit an electrification sweet spot, and Hyannis is a long freaking haul for doing Middleboro. I doubt you'll ever see all 3 lines wired up, or see wires extend across Cape Cod Canal.
- We know how much South Coast Rail electrification doesn't pass the laugh test for the service levels; FR/NB are branches-off-a-branch. *Maybe* you can justify wires to Taunton Depot if you see lots of EMU's short-turning there, but you're using dual-mode push-pulls any which way to get to the endpoints so it makes no difference to those trains if the power switch is at Canton Jct. or Taunton.
- Franklin is a protected freight clearance route that's forever going to have mini-high platforms, and if electrifying it'll cost a premium in future-proofing the overhead bridge clearances. Don't want to salt over at the 100-year level the last southside freight main into Boston-proper, so defer until the lower-hanging fruit is wired. It's doable, but not one that's wise to rush into.
- Needham's not going to exist on the commuter rail by this point. I don't see how you can open the traffic floodgates on the NEC post-NSRL without trading Needham to Orange+Green and shifting all Franklin trains over to Fairmount. It's never going to get the slots it needs as long as it's attached to the RR network, NSRL or no NSRL.
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Northside, after the pain and suffering of getting the terminal district wired:
- Lowell is the obvious #1 electrification since it's the highest-capacity mainline, funnels all of the interstate traffic, and is the matching compass pair to the NEC. The NSRL study is predicated on wires out to Anderson RTC, although there's no reason why they can't go all the way out to Lowell, Nashua, Concord. There would be a lot of bridge mods to do Lowell-Somerville because it's a 17' freight clearance route and a lot of them can't be solved by trackbed undercuts. But you've seen the decrepit condition of a lot of those bridges; MassDOT can pretty much cobble together another "Fast 14" blitz of nuthin' but falling-apart Lowell Line overpasses to replace. So...file under: eating one's peas.
- Eastern Route is the obvious #2 electrification choice since it's the highest-ridership northside mainline and the nearest compass pair match for Worcester tunnel slots. You may only Phase I it to Beverly or Peabody for Day 1 of the tunnel ribbon-cutting and tack on Newburyport/Portsmouth and Rockport on next funding shot, but it's pretty obvious you're finishing the job the second funds are available. Santilli Circle rotary on the Everett Terminal freight route is the only tight freight underclearance of note, but if MassDOT ever replaces that decrepit elevated rotary atrocity it'll be built taller by default so this will probably be solved long before electrification goes on the table.
Then it gets hard...
- Fitchburg points west of the junction just east of Ayer station and Haverhill/Downeaster all points north of Wilmington to Portland are going to be double-stack freight routes within the next 5-8 years. And unlike Worcester the extra clearance space is hard to come by because those lines weren't as luxuriously overbuilt as the Boston & Albany and have already been modded multiple times over to squeeze taller freight trains through. It is very likely you simply won't be able to find 23'1" on the Western Route without it mushrooming into a megaproject. And maybe not out to Wachusett either.
- Haverhill is probably a forever- push-pull + dual-mode. But it sort of matches up on the compass with Franklin so it stays neat-and-tidy that way for scheduling tunnel slots. If HSR to Portland is going to be in the cards some day in the future, it's probably going to be via the Eastern Route and not Western.
- Fitchburg you may have to decide: electrify to Waltham/128, or Littleton? It probably doesn't make any difference going past 128 where the Indigo EMU's would turn because stop spacing is so wide past there, so save your money stopping at Waltham the same way you're saving money on Canton vs. Taunton.
- Reading Line is the misfit, being the most capacity-constrained mainline north.
- The mash-up with the Eastern Route through Sullivan Sq. is going to rear its head as a big capacity pinch when the tunnel opens, and the Eastern is going to need more of the spoils. No easy way to fix this because the incline of the Orange Line viaduct eats up any practical physical room for rebuilding Sullivan with an extra track.
- The single-track through Malden means the tippy-top service levels are pretty much just Indigo-Reading short-turns with all thru service Wilmington-Haverhill being relocated to the Lowell Line. It's the only mainline whose capacity in/out of Boston is capped outside the terminal district, and wouldn't see appreciable gains by very existence of the NSRL.
- If you spent a chunk of change to rip out the Orange Line express track all that accomplishes is shoving the capacity limiter further up the line to the toilet clog of grade crossings in Melrose + Wakefield. Meaning you're starting to count up costs for gaining a full-capacity mainline in $100M increments with all the track expansion and crossing elimination to-do's.
- It's got duplicate Orange Line electrification part of its length.
- There are more Indigo routes on the northside (Lynn/Salem, Reading, Waltham, Woburn) than there are southside (Riverside, Readville) since NEC along the SW Corridor is reserved for the big boys. Old Colony is duplicated by Red, has a lot of branches to feed, and even if you fixed the Dorchester single-track pinch you may not physically be able to fix the Wollaston-Quincy Ctr. pinch. There's a mismatch in Indigo pairings that's going to leave somebody short on service and/or too many 128-to-128 trains turning at the surface terminals.
^^Do you bite the bullet and finish the Orange Line extension, and expunge Reading from commuter rail? It solves the Charlestown-Malden track capacity dilemma without making a great big construction mess. And if making it work as a load-bearing mainline rail route requires spending a shitload of money zapping crossings, does it make any difference if that money is spent under a Purple or Orange banner. I don't know if you do this immediately, but you think long and hard before stringing up 1 foot of commuter rail electrification because that mismatch in north vs. south Indigo pairings is kludgy to balance and you're going to be walking up a cost escalation treadmill to ultimately square that *elegantly* under the Purple banner. 3 Indigoes north vs. 2 south is much more logical to blend than 4 vs. 2 / winners vs. losers. If it's going to cost an arm and a leg on either mode to get it right, don't pussyfoot around...go Orange.
^^^That's the other myth that needs to die: that NSRL is somehow a substitute for rapid transit expansion. It's not...though I'm sure some of the "monorail" pols wish it were. You don't want to be forced to ride Red or Silver if all manner of northside traffic is slamming South Station into oblivion. Sans any radial rapid transit expansion you'd have to look at carving up every Red and Orange station for 8- or 10-car platforms to keep up. Seaport-Back Bay, Red-Blue, and Urban Ring are eight-alarm necessities with NSRL. Needham trade-in is possibly a prerequisite for the Link...maybe a prerequisite for Amtrak 2040 SuperduperHSR
without the Link. BLX-Lynn gets ratched up several notches as mission-critical load distributor for North Shore vs. downtown. As above with the Reading/Indigo example, NSRL isn't all things to all CR lines and creates some minor service inequities in the inner 'burbs that need correction.
