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

[JeffDowntown]

Re: North-South Rail Link

So this looks like it'll be another years-long Big-Dig-style project after all!

Actually not really.

Tunneling will mostly be out of sight, using tunnel boring machines (TBM). Surface disruptions will be much less than the Big Dig, concentrated at the terminal locations, North and South Station and portals (which are in rail yards!).

Remember, this route is mostly under the existing Big Dig tunnel, in land that was cleared and prepared during the Big Dig. This will be a very different process.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

^ +1

 

[Rover]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Would like to see the project done (within reasonable cost) and really appreciate the condensed version of what the goal is and how it would happen, but I have to say I don't see this one getting off the ground. A combination of political will plus federal help on par with the Big Dig would be needed and I don't see that on the horizon unfortunately given the current state of affairs. You'd need a transit crazed governor along the lines of the Duke plus kick ass political clout in DC like we had with O'Neil and Sen. Kennedy.

 

[orulz]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Baltimore is looking at building a new rail tunnel through town, and it seems pretty likely to happen. So I don't see why it's so unlikely that Boston's can happen too.

Of course, comparing the B&P Tunnel project to the NSRL is not quite apples-to-apples but they are very similar magnitude.

First, the similarities:

• Both projects call for four new tracks.
• Both projects go through dense parts of a major Northeast city.
• Both will use TBMs at significant depth.
• Both require some tunnel boring gymnastics to shuffle around tunnel.
• The length is pretty comparable, NSRL is 1.5 miles while B&P is 2 miles.

Now the differences that make Baltimore's project harder:

• Baltimore's tunnels will be much larger diameter since all four will be expected to accommodate double stack freight trains as well as 25kv electrification.
• Baltimore's tunnels will have much greater problems with ventilation since they will be expected to accommodate diesel trains.

Now the differences that make Boston's project harder:

• Baltimore's project can be passed off as a state-of-good-repair project for the DC-NYC stretch of the NEC, and therefore a project of national priority, whereas NSRL more, though not entirely, for commuter trains and is thus more of a regional project.
• NSRL requires electrification of many outlying commuter rail branches, which is a good thing to do anyway, but it does add scope.
• The biggie: NSRL will involve three new underground stations, whereas Baltimore's project will involve rebuilding one aboveground station (West Baltimore.)
• NSRL is through the CBD whereas Baltimore's is through an inner-city neighborhood, though I'm not sure it really makes much difference when you're digging with TBMs at this depth.

All in all I would say these are comparable projects; the larger tunnels and ventilation are complications for Baltimore whereas the stations and the electrification are the issues faced in Boston. Current estimates for the B&P tunnel are about $4 billion. If the tunnel portion of NSRL can get done in that ballpark, I think it stands an excellent chance of getting built.

 

[bakgwailo]

Re: North-South Rail Link

So this looks like it'll be another years-long Big-Dig-style project after all!

Yes and no. It is a big project, but, as already stated, most of the nasty work of getting the tunnel prepped/utilities removed, slurry walls in place, clean filled, etc, are done. The only really crazy stuff is in the portals - but that should be way less disruptive than trying to do the Central Artery tunnel in the middle of the city while keeping the elevated on top of it running as it was built.

 

[boston85]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Yes!

By the way, Amtrak's NEC terminating at Anderson Woburn twice an hour (an Express on the hour and a Regional 10 minutes later) is the most logical assumption. Go crazy and call it an Amtrak 3 or 4 times an hour. You still just slip them in (maybe displacing another NEC-Lowell MBTA train or two) on a well-run 2 track railroad in the NSRL.

Knowing that a train leaves south station every 10 minutes and gets you to Woburn would be a huge sell. This frequency would convert many drivers from 93 to park at Anderson and ride the train. My dad has been doing the commute down 93 to south station for over 15 years now. He hates the traffic, but drives all the way into Sullivan and takes the T from there. He tried the trains, but meetings run late or the subway takes longer than scheduled and he misses his train. He would be stuck waiting 30, 45 or and hour for the next one.

 

[ceo]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Do we know that the NSRL path under the Central Artery tunnel is clean fill? That doesn't make any sense; it implies that they dug down twice as deep as they needed to building the Artery and filled it back up again, which strikes me as unlikely.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Knowing that a train leaves south station every 10 minutes and gets you to Woburn would be a huge sell. This frequency would convert many drivers from 93 to park at Anderson and ride the train. My dad has been doing the commute down 93 to south station for over 15 years now. He hates the traffic, but drives all the way into Sullivan and takes the T from there. He tried the trains, but meetings run late or the subway takes longer than scheduled and he misses his train. He would be stuck waiting 30, 45 or and hour for the next one.

I'd forgotten that some versions assume Amtrak NEC Electrics would only do:
WOB Woburn
BOS South Station
BBY Back Bay
RTE Route 128 Westwood

While the Downeaster would connect to the NEC at Woburn and terminate on the surface at North Station (because it would still be a diesel train unable to make the grades in the NSRL

Wikipedia says:

The DEIR/MIS assumes that about one-third of Amtrak trains to and from points south would be routed through the tunnel, stopping only at South Station, but with a stop north of Boston in Woburn, Massachusetts. The Downeaster service from Maine and New Hampshire was assumed to stop at North Station only, with a direct connection to more southerly service in Woburn rather than Boston. Thus, some operations would continue above ground at North Station and South Station, and all track and facilities would remain in place.[6]

I read that "One Third" to be Hourly Acela IIs, as conrasted to locomotive-hauled Northeast Regionals still terminating on the surface at South Station.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: battery EMU

So, no, that a battery bus can climb on 4 rubber drive wheels tells you nothing about battery trains being able to climb the NSRLs grades. The battery may not be too heavy, but you're still going to need lots of powered axles

I was thinking of having a train where every single car is a battery EMU that would have at least one powered axle per truck, and could certainly have both axles in every truck powered if that is needed.

Presumably such a battery EMU would be heavier than a typical catenary / third rail EMU but lighter than an ACS-64 or AEM-7 or HHP-8, and if neither the non-battery EMU nor the locomotive has any significant problems with wheel slippage, then I wouldn't expect something weighing somewhere in between to have problems either.

A pair of ACS-64 locomotives with 8 Amfleet cars is probably going to only have about 1/3 of the total weight of the train on powered axles. Is there any reason to think that that isn't sufficient evidence that battery EMUs with one powered axle per truck should work fine on a 3% grade?

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Would like to see the project done (within reasonable cost) and really appreciate the condensed version of what the goal is and how it would happen, but I have to say I don't see this one getting off the ground. A combination of political will plus federal help on par with the Big Dig would be needed and I don't see that on the horizon unfortunately given the current state of affairs.

In the last presidential election, one of the two major parties' primaries had a relatively close race, and if you look at which candidate got the most votes from younger voters and which candidate got the most votes from older votes, and what will happen as the older voters die off and the younger voters favor different policies, it seems quite possible that within the next decade we might get significant federal support for something like the NSRL.

 

[Arlington]

Re: battery EMU

A pair of ACS-64 locomotives with 8 Amfleet cars is probably going to only have about 1/3 of the total weight of the train on powered axles. Is there any reason to think that that isn't sufficient evidence that battery EMUs with one powered axle per truck should work fine on a 3% grade?

I've since learned that planners were not even planning that FRA compliant (heavyweight) ACS-Amfleet-ACS trains would run through. I think we can assume that planners picture only Acela-spec (or really Acela II-spec) trains running in the NSRL

Upthread I posted that planners assumed that only 1/3 of Amtrak's trains would actually use the NSRL, which I take to be the lightweight, double-engined Acela IIs that the FRA has since made possible and that Amtrak finally ordered. Acela IIs (working title Avelia Liberty till Amtrak choses its service brand).

Any number between 1/3 and 2/3 seems a reasonable guess for how many Amtrak trains will be able to make the grade. 2/3 would be in some future where Amtrak was running hourly Acela IIIs and alternating Acela IIs operating as Northeast Regionals (but starting from Woburn) and then, say, diesel hauled Amfleets operating on the Inland Route (South Station Surface-Worcester-Springfield-Hartford-New Haven)

And you never quite get to the point where an Amfleet-anything consist runs in the NSRL. The (Amfleet-Diesel) Downeaster terminates at NS, but those going electric get transfer to Acela II at Woburn. The (Amfleet-Diesel) Inland Route see their passengers transferring to the Acela IIs at either New Haven or South Station.

I was thinking of having a train where every single car is a battery EMU that would have at least one powered axle per truck, and could certainly have both axles in every truck powered if that is needed.

From a risk management standpoint, it does not make sense to build the tunnel assuming that somebody else will cook up a sole-source, custom-built vehicle required to make it work. A FRA-compliant light rail DMU or EMU vehicle was also thought to be the cure for a bunch of "we can make the infrastructure work if we have this new kind of vehicle", but mostly that assumed accepting the vehicle-tech risk in order to use cheap existing surface freight lines. These special-purpose vehicles don't seem to have been worth the wait or risk, and I don't see designing the NSRL around as-yet-unproven tech. I will admit that if the NSRL gets delayed long enough a new kind of vehicle may come into operation that would save us a boatload on branch electrification. In some sense, the longer we wait, the more likely the NSRL becomes, either because demand will be obvious or because tech will have solved the tunnel-boring-machine costs or solved the branch electrification/grades problem.

Building the NSRL for a vehicle technology that's still "on the come" would be unprecedentedly risky. Either the vehicle tech arrives before the engineering is done or the engineering will have to assume that EMUs and Acelas will be the only trains making the grades.

 

[bakgwailo]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Do we know that the NSRL path under the Central Artery tunnel is clean fill? That doesn't make any sense; it implies that they dug down twice as deep as they needed to building the Artery and filled it back up again, which strikes me as unlikely.

They did. The NSRL link was originally part of the Big Dig until it was cut due to cost overruns. The clean filled "tunnel"/slurry walls was the future proofing for when the NSRL was done.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

They did. The NSRL link was originally part of the Big Dig until it was cut due to cost overruns. The clean filled "tunnel"/slurry walls was the future proofing for when the NSRL was done.

Here are my impressions that I'd like confirmed:
1) Coming from the NEC did they make any allowances for NSRL when they did the ground-freezing for the I-90 tunnel under/acroos the South Station lead tracks?
2) From Herald St to Dewey Square it'd be deep under the Atlantic Ave (the Southbound re-used the Fitzgerald's shallow tunnel, so it can't be there)
3) Hooks Lobster to North Station the Slurry Walls were dug double deep, and we believe they excavated wall-to-wall and then re-filled which is why the red diagram shows two bores deep under Surface Artery.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: battery EMU

I've since learned that planners were not even planning that FRA compliant (heavyweight) ACS-Amfleet-ACS trains would run through. I think we can assume that planners picture only Acela-spec (or really Acela II-spec) trains running in the NSRL

On the other hand, the newest Amfleet cars are from the early 1980s, and at this point it seems highly unlikely that the NSRL would open before 2025, at which point the Amfleets would be well over 40 years old, and in some cases near 50 years old. We probably simply should be trying to make sure that when Amtrak plans Amfleet replacements that they're thinking about being able to run them through the NSRL.

From a risk management standpoint, it does not make sense to build the tunnel assuming that somebody else will cook up a sole-source, custom-built vehicle required to make it work.

And yet the Seaport transitway was approved by people who weren't thinking the way you would, with the unique dual mode buses whose maker is now out of business. (Weren't there several months of running new 40' Cambridge trolleybuses in that tunnel only as far as Silver Line Way when the tunnel opened before the 60' dual mode buses appeared?)

What I want to see in 2017 is someone from MassDOT formally contacting Tesla, Proterra, BYD, GreenPower Motor Company, and any other company that seems to be interested in the battery transportation business to see if they are interested in providing either complete FRA compliant battery EMUs that could handle a 3% and maybe even 4% grade, or at least are interested in supplying parts for such EMUs. (Tesla's busy with the Model 3, has been doing some work on an 18 wheeler that's on the back burner until Model 3 production is running smoothly, and then there are rumors that they're planning a pickup truck. So it might be best to focus on using Tesla batteries and having someone else integrate those batteries into a rail car.)

If someone was actually starting to try to build a fully viable battery EMU in 2017, I think it's quite likely that we'll see demonstrations of working battery EMUs long before MassDOT has money to commit to NSRL construction.

 

[Arlington]

Re: battery EMU

And yet the Seaport transitway was approved by people who weren't thinking the way you would, with the unique dual mode buses whose maker is now out of business.

This is a random fact not necessarily in your favor. The Silver Line vehicles were a fairly simple marriage of a transit-standard diesel (found in the T's RTS and CNG fleets) and the world-class chassis and electrical made by Skoda. Both technologies were mature, and the T owns the design for putting them together.

But ask take-a-chance-on-a-new-vehicle stories go, it was one with tech that had all proven bullet proof in transit service (and so seems less risky than the cutting edge stuff you propose...particularly married to a trainset)

And yet for all its apparent low-risk at the time of marrying a standard transit diesel into a standard Skoda Articulated Electric Bus, (and worked well) we still are re-living all that risk with the replacement fleet, where we again have to either find an assembler willing to do another set of diesel inserts into Skoda electric bodies, or find an all new (and still not standard design).

At best, the Silver Line is a "custom marriage of proven tech that worked...but don't try that again" story.

And worse, the MBTA's MPI HSP-46 order was a "try that again"...of bullet proof, years-proven tech (from GE & MPI) that still nearly self-immolated because of component-integration control system problems.

So both the Silver Line Skoda-Diesels and the MPI HSP 46 as custom integrations of even the most-proven industry-standard components had way too many risks.

I don't see you convincing anyone that the MBTA should play russian roulette a third time to cobble together a custom NSRL vehicle, and, worse, to do so with components that have no track record anywhere and were not developed for rail.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Re: battery EMU

I don't think ``custom NSRL vehicle'' is the right way to think of this, though; observe how we expect that the 60' New Flyer battery buses will not be unique to the SL1/SL2/Chelsea routes in the long run if they work correctly and if New Flyer can offer reasonable pricing on the batteries in the long run.

There's no good reason not to electrify all North American commuter rail, and only SEPTA has overhead wires everywhere, which means we're talking about a drivetrain that will be desireable for approximately all North American commuter rail agencies once it's debugged (unless you think that a 3% grade like the French TGV network is built around is some sort of oddball thing that nobody other than the MBTA will ever want in North America).

And the price of diesel fuel is riskier than the price of electricity (although if the Tesla 18 wheeler works out well, it may kill demand for diesel faster than the Model 3 ramp up kills demand for gasoline).

The negative health impacts of running diesel instead of solar + wind + batteries are a lot more certain than the possibility that something might go wrong with newer battery technology.

The Tesla battery packs are also not really an unproven techology at this point, although it's true that there may be some adaptation involved in building a rail version.

If we don't think we can make battery commuter rail work, we should go all in on battery bus rapid transit instead.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

^ make this pitch to your boss at a vehicle manufacturer, not here, as if taxpayers should take such a risk.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: North-South Rail Link

Here are my impressions that I'd like confirmed:
1) Coming from the NEC did they make any allowances for NSRL when they did the ground-freezing for the I-90 tunnel under/acroos the South Station lead tracks?
2) From Herald St to Dewey Square it'd be deep under the Atlantic Ave (the Southbound re-used the Fitzgerald's shallow tunnel, so it can't be there)
3) Hooks Lobster to North Station the Slurry Walls were dug double deep, and we believe they excavated wall-to-wall and then re-filled which is why the red diagram shows two bores deep under Surface Artery.

1) I definitely have heard that the NEC access was protected. It is very much a thread the needle access, and it is steep (hence must be electrified, also to avoid extra ventilation). The steepness also ends up with some grade still at the South Station deep station.

2) My understanding is the route Herald to Dewey Square actually swings all the way out to under Fort Point Channel (including South Station deep under), not under Atlantic Avenue (until further north near Hook Lobster).

3) No information on the subsurface work around Hook Lobster.

 

[Arlington]

Re: North-South Rail Link

^ On #2, the graphic upthread shows two possible routes past South Station, labeled "Central Artery Alignment" and "Dorchester Ave Alignment" in the graphic (reposted below)

The Dot Ave option (or Fort Point Channel, as shown in red-line-on-photo graphic upthread) wasn't touched by the Big Dig (so that isn't a place where we can claim it's already been dug & refilled) but digging 100' below the channel means no pollution or utilities in the TBM's path

The other Herald to Hook route is shown in this graphic as being directly below the northbound tube of the dig (and so we're counting on the bottom having been either double wide or double deep to leave space for NSRL). Ihe the Central Artery Alignment we really could claim that the NSRL has already been dug, but for some reason it isn't any longer the preferred option.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: North-South Rail Link

^ I think the Fort Point Channel/Dorchester Ave. alignment is preferred because there is more room for the South Station deep under station.

Note that the graphic you shared does not show a South Station platform set on the Central Artery alignment.