The EGE
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Re: North-South Rail Link
Correct - the original Charles River Railroad line. The ROW is plenty wide to accommodate rail + trail. The current trail (Upper Falls Greenway) only goes from Easy Street to the Charles, so "we can have your trail go from Newton Highlands or Eliot all the way to Needham" would be a legitimate selling point.
The Green Line ran 50 trains per hour per direction as recently as the 1990s. As of my 2015-2017 thesis, it was scheduled for ~43 and actually ran ~39. So with good headway management (see my research partner's thesis) and some infrastructure fixes like reconfiguring signals that cause unnecessary stops, there's no reason that the Green Line couldn't run 6-minute headways on the B, C, D, Needham, and E branches. (Or shifted around slightly).
But the future probably looks more like longer trains (Type 10s will be 90-110 feet long, so ~1.5x the capacity of current cars) on slightly longer but much more reliable headways (which will actually decrease both waiting times and running times). Just with new vehicles and proper terminal headway management, you could have headways of [B-5, C-7.5, D-10, Needham-10, E-6] with significantly less bunching and crowding than today.
With Needham trains duplicating every stop from Newton Highlands inbound, you're not really adding a full additional branch line - just adding a few extra trains to the D to make the split headways to Riverside and Needham decent. And Riverside will hopefully have Indigo service anyway, so GL service there doesn't have to take the whole park-and-ride load.
So tl;dr: Type 10s plus associated infrastructure upgrades plus operational practices would make a Needham Branch extremely practical.
Correct - the original Charles River Railroad line. The ROW is plenty wide to accommodate rail + trail. The current trail (Upper Falls Greenway) only goes from Easy Street to the Charles, so "we can have your trail go from Newton Highlands or Eliot all the way to Needham" would be a legitimate selling point.
The Green Line ran 50 trains per hour per direction as recently as the 1990s. As of my 2015-2017 thesis, it was scheduled for ~43 and actually ran ~39. So with good headway management (see my research partner's thesis) and some infrastructure fixes like reconfiguring signals that cause unnecessary stops, there's no reason that the Green Line couldn't run 6-minute headways on the B, C, D, Needham, and E branches. (Or shifted around slightly).
But the future probably looks more like longer trains (Type 10s will be 90-110 feet long, so ~1.5x the capacity of current cars) on slightly longer but much more reliable headways (which will actually decrease both waiting times and running times). Just with new vehicles and proper terminal headway management, you could have headways of [B-5, C-7.5, D-10, Needham-10, E-6] with significantly less bunching and crowding than today.
With Needham trains duplicating every stop from Newton Highlands inbound, you're not really adding a full additional branch line - just adding a few extra trains to the D to make the split headways to Riverside and Needham decent. And Riverside will hopefully have Indigo service anyway, so GL service there doesn't have to take the whole park-and-ride load.
So tl;dr: Type 10s plus associated infrastructure upgrades plus operational practices would make a Needham Branch extremely practical.