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

F-Line to Dudley said:
Ammunition? You mean...ammunition like troll-bombing a thread so hopelessly off-topic it's rendered impossible to parse. That kind of ammunition?

Heavens, no. I'll wait until this outbreak of insanity has tuckered itself right out and it's safe to get back in the pool. Right now imma goin' enjoy my afternoon on the Maps Thread.


"anti-RR folks" @ the railroad with the Rail Vision...lolz. 🤡
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Uh-huh. The Railvision cost sandbag? No, Steffie is 100% Pro-Regional Rail!
 
Guys, this is becoming a mess. @datadyne007 is among the leadership of TransitMatters. He flat out said that the org is paying attention to what's in this thread. Let's stop questioning each other's motivations and tactics and have a good-faith dialogue about the TM document.
 
So regarding Salem station, it looks by eminent domain there could be space to put a 2nd track with access to Beverly. By building a bridge over the tracks you could add better access to the neighborhood northeast of Salem.

And the building there is an apartment building, so there'd be less nimby opposition versus a condo building. Could provide better staging for more frequent trains through the single track tunnel without the expensive widening project.

F-Line is better versed oops wize, but I'd think you could provide every 10 min rush hour service with 2 tracks at Salem and South Salem and the short single track section.
 
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I saw a person on the freeway this morning with a North-South rail link bumper sticker. Who's making these?
 
tysmith95 said:
So regarding Salem station, it looks by eminent domain there could be space to put a 2nd track with access to Beverly. By building a bridge over the tracks you could add better access to the neighborhood northeast of Salem.

And the building there is an apartment building, so there'd be less nimby opposition versus a condo building. Could provide better staging for more frequent trains through the single track tunnel without the expensive widening project.
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Not eminent domain, but easement make-a-deal to square access on that side to street level (up-and-over also a likelihood, but if you're just outright egressing to Bridge St. a sidewalk along the apt. driveway is must-have). To install the platform there'd be dirt excavation on the side embankment + re-stabilization (moreso the closer you get to the portal), and track switch immediately coming out of the portal.

The rub is that they had the chance to lump that in with the main station reconstruction, and spaced on it. This is now mandatory, but as second bite at the apple and now the crux of negotiation they're going to get taken for all they're worth in negotiation with the apts. That hurts. Not like you can really blame the apts. for playing the leverage, either; that's potentially worth a decade-in-bank's worth of beneficial renovations for their tenants, so they kind of have a semi-responsibility to drive a hard bargain. No absolute blocker, but it's going to be sloooooowww going. And regardless of peaceful resolution, we will be reminded by the cost escalation of the missed earlier opportunity and be suitably cheesed that it came to this.

Now...Tk. 2 main platform is full-on mandatory for :30 RKP/:30 NBP any which way. You still need to play the Peabody-side offset for flex with its more fluid tunnel interface to inoculate against the swing bridge bottleneck (which gets worse in warm weather because it's mostly rec boats), so there's still a lot of brittleness with the all-trains-to-Bev mandate. Even if you're just turning out to terminate @ Salem and/or use the 3-track/1500 ft. long North St. Yard right across the station access grade crossing and not considering anything Peabody-related at this time it's still too-useful to pass up. Provision's all there for a 450 ft. curved platform entirely on station property unlike with the apts. brainfart, and as prior stated that lets you have free/fluid tunnel passage to the side platform while BOTH mainline platforms occupied by Rockburyports. There will be some bridge openings where a couple extra mins. is needed for an outbound Rockburyport pausing, so the ability to reserve total unimpeded 3rd way in that keeps the clock-facing tight is boss.

Take the free throws there. Hell...the cheap extra capacity will make us feel slightly better about having to get bent over by the apts. for that access easement.
 
mass88 said:
I saw a person on the freeway this morning with a North-South rail link bumper sticker. Who's making these?
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Wow...those are old. If it's the one that looks like a bi-color campaign bumper sticker it's some ancient promo item from that Duke/Salvucci-led .org thingy. Heyday of at least 8 years ago...maybe longer.

Those are collectors items...like the infamous "Kennedy for Senate" sticker that was stuck for decades to the trash barrel at Lechmere Station until its dignified retirement last month.
 
Another shortsighted project, the Beverly bridge was rebuilt 3 years ago, in hindsight they should have built it to be the same height as the auto bridge next to it negating the need for a draw.
 
I agree with the people who have suggested this new report doesn't meet the usual high standards we've come to expect from Transit Matters. There are inconsistencies, confusing verbiage, and overall it left me feeling less informed than I had felt before reading it. Not only are there internal inconsistencies, but it is even inconsistent with some of their previous work (unless my recollection is off). For example, didn't Transit Matters say in the original rail vision white paper that the Needham Line would need to be converted to rapid transit? If so, does it make sense to upgrade two of the station platforms when the stations will need to be completely rebuilt anyway? Or are they no longer advocating Needham Line conversion? If not, shouldn't they explain why? That's just one example that jumped out to me, but I think there were quite a few others. This is a work in progress, and I look forward to seeing the more polished version.
 
When will it be time to address the track imbalance between OL having 3 tracks between BHCC and Malden but CR only getting 1 track? Is that an RUR Reading? Or only when trying to pair Southside with Northside under NSRL?
 
tysmith95 said:
Another shortsighted project, the Beverly bridge was rebuilt 3 years ago, in hindsight they should have built it to be the same height as the auto bridge next to it negating the need for a draw.
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Not enough room to incline-up to fixed level from the March St. overpass on the Salem side is the answer there. They could've tried replacing the swing with a variable-height lift and wider navigation channel so the boats clear faster when it's open, but that's it.

Mind you, we aren't talking Cos Cob on the NEC in terms of high-stakes traffic here. It's only a moderately busy waterway in summer, and boat traffic is nearly zero in winter. It's no problem for running Rockburyport RUR. B&M ran much higher overall traffic levels through here back in the day.

The only issue is this putting all eggs in Beverly's basket thing TM is hung up on. You are going to have outbound correcting pauses on the Salem main platform for openings, and are going to have to scramble a couple close-succession bunched inbound slots in recovery from an opening. With or without electrification, and with or without this "we're electrifying but 90% of the schedules are still going to be diesel" cognitive dissonance in the report. It leaves the clock-facing schedule adherence a bit on the brittle side. You have no such brittleness if you work the Salem Peabody-side turnout because pattern #3 plays the smooth-out role that buys more bandwidth for the swing bridge pauses. The only thing that makes the bridge a bottleneck is chaining it in a trio with the Salem main platforms + tunnel and winging it as an ironclad requirement for 100.00% of service. You don't need to do that. With Salem having such high potential as a breakaway bus hublet you also don't have strong reasoning for being so severe/absolutist about the Bev mandate. I mean...they're going to average :15 at Bev Depot any which way as happenstance byproduct of the Newburyport & Rockport endpoints netting :30. Just clock-facing wise it's going to be 15 +/- 3 during heavy bridge use times with *potential* for a too-close unidirectional bunching meriting a one-off skipped or rescheduled headway. The day-long average is still :15 amidst the variability.

You're just careening self straight into trouble shouting out a mandate that it's got to be :15 on-the-minute every single time all-day or else we've failed / it's a miscarriage of "justice" / everything is horrible. That's where TM is getting itself into trouble...on the mandate that specs Beverly or bust. In the real world people are not even going to notice the small wobble in arrivals around the bridge. And in the real world you can hit all of that exactitude by playing the supporting options at Salem, so it's a very arbitrary difference that's small-potatoes for any above-and-beyond upside and a bit too much downside that the wobble in arrivals is going to bite them on the rigid clock-facing.


Now...if you want to sound an alarm about a drawbridge reno that SHOULD be changed into a fixed conversion, Saugus Draw rehab is in-design right now. That one is REALLY pointless, because there's all the room in the world to incline-up on both sides and if BLX-Lynn ever happens there has to be a fixed Saugus River crossing. The correct decision there would be to buid a 2-track deck fixed replacement with 4-track piers so BLX can be slapped on later. Instead we may have a completely rehabilitated bascule with a wholly structurally-separate rapid transit fixed bridge needing to be built 15 years later 20 ft. next to it. That'll look extremely dumb on the side-by-side comparison. Saugus Draw is a nothingburger for train traffic because GE does nothing for barge traffic anymore and the uncontrolled silt runoff from Rumney Marsh runoff is a goddamn ecological disaster that's choked the rivers off of most practical navigability in the last 50 years. Not going to impact the mainline layer-cake of services but once in a blue-moon hiccup. But, damn, is rehab-over-rebuild going to look silly-shortsighted when we have to duplicate-build the fixed BLX span right next to it on the same river.
 
Arlington said:
When will it be time to address the track imbalance between OL having 3 tracks between BHCC and Malden but CR only getting 1 track? Is that an RUR Reading? Or only when trying to pair Southside with Northside under NSRL?
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Never? Because :15 to Reading is fully doable with just 3 small touches:
  1. Re-grading of Reading Jct. split with Eastern Route into 2 x 2 instead of 1 x 2 track split (i.e. instead of there being a single-track split and immediate passing siding on the Western, the DT siding gets full-on tied into the junction and start of the branch is full DT until the bridge).
  2. Reinstatement of Medford Jct. passing siding on the surface track above the tunnel. This work is already underway for reanimating the in-situ 2750 ft. passer. The only future enhancement is to extend it another 1100 ft. over the Medford St. bridge and re-grade the other side of the bridge (currently the tip of the ex- Piantedosi Bakery freight siding that began inclining down to ground level and grade-crossed Commercial St. to their loading dock) with some stone fill to fit in a revised interlocking.
  3. 1/4 mi. extension of DT from Ash St. through Reading Depot Station so it can berth 2 trains at once. The TM footnote about possibly moving Reading Station east to abut the Ash grade crossing also accomplishes that, but raising the platforms around the current depot building probably isn't sooooo hard an ordeal that it needs to come to that.
You need Haverhill trawling the NH Main just for contributing half of Wilmington-inbound's :15 frequencies, and because it rounds Haverhill travel times down more tolerably to an hour while easing the overcrowding that on today's mashed schedule loses the plot in Wakefield-Melrose. So the long-haul schedule is vacating the inner Western simply on its own best-practices...and that in itself 'fixes the glitch' on all other capacity issues re: the single track. Nice and clean, which is why it's a shame TM let an outright proofreading error confuse the plan to hell.


You don't fuck around with track in Medford-Malden if there's no upside to doing so. And there's no upside to doing so when you get everything you want out of Urban Rail without it. Ditto when the deep-future considerations and NSRL pair-matching come into the picture...extending Orange to eat CR doesn't fuck with Medford-Malden at all up on the embankment, but trying to tart up the CR side to have any sort of capacity parity with a southside pairing requires tearing the crap out of Medford-Malden with invasive mods. So don't bother...OL W. Roxbury-Reading is a north-south pair matching of lesser overall construction invasiveness.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/hkjphk

[PRIMAL SCREAMING]
Enough with this "half-mile" talking point! Are you pols trying to sow confusion and keep this thing forever unbuilt!?!?! Fucking hell. 🤬​
[/PRIMAL SCREAMING]
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Watched it. Lots of tech difficulties, but covered the very basics.

I am all for Senators pushing interest in the project. Elected officials want support from their constituents, and this project requires support at the Federal level. The general populace wants the simplest overview of what will benefit them. Get to work Markey!
 
But that's just an incidental benefit of NSRL. The main one is connecting the two networks. It creates a new subway with 4 branches north and 5 south. I get nuts when people use the "traveler going from NYC to Portland with luggage" argument. Thats .01 percent of the potential.
 
shmessy said:
What's the problem?
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"It's the frequencies, stupid!" is the #1 argument by-far. Trips across the north/south break and greater linked-trip options all around from the frequencies the #2.

And yet...with that, a whole generation of politicians has gotten sidetracked with the physical break from one end of downtown to another and used that as the drumbeat instead. When "cahn't get to Nawth Station from South Station" or "¡MILE GAP!" says less-than-nothing about what the project actually does. Blame Dukakis, Salvucci, and Weld. They've been doing it on-repeat for 25 years...and continue humping at it long after their singular insistence on that talking point has diminished their stature as advocates.

Markey, who as the senior member of the state's Washington delegation seems to be applying the confetti-cannon approach of late for transpo advocacy rather than picking his spots in any sort of coherent strategy matched to our highest-priority interests, is just the latest victim to fall prey to it. As a publicity stunt the walk was a nice get-together for a pretty dead weekend so it certainly didn't hurt him. But what's the symbolism of tracing out the distance between terminals other than re-enacting Duke's Old Man Yells At Cloud Act? The more they lead with that one, the more confused the public is about what the project does. TransitMatters has the best framing by far--RUR revolution first, NSRL as the encore--because that's wound nice and *tight* around the primary frequencies/options-via-frequencies argument that's going to light a fire under the average voter. But the pols aren't getting with that...they're still in early-1990's world and playing follow-the-leader with "¡MILE GAP!" and "one-seat everywhere to everywhere" with no clue how to translate any of that in concrete terms to making their constituents' lives better. That division in talking points plays right into the hands of critics like Baker/Pollack who don't want to build it, because they can seize right on the cacophony and sidetrack it.

Unfortunately even though we've got the *right* set of talking points out in the wild, synthesized and pushed by TM, as long as the Zombie Duke "¡MILE GAP!" soundbite exists and keeps baiting high-level pols we're going to keep having a divided advocacy that struggles to keep its stories straight. The best you could say is that a lot of the folks hewing to that unhelpful line are either (1) rather quite old and won't be around forever (that includes you, Senator); or (2) zero- attention-span pretenders like Seth Moulton with his 5-minute dalliance of NSRL advocacy before he got sidetracked by PAC fundraising and quixotic Washington pursuits. So the messaging will probably get bent over by pressure and time onto a more consistently resonant set of mobility points. But goddamn is it frustrating when the latest short attention-span theatre steps up to the podium and starts making loud noises on that same old Duke stump speech. Just once I want one of them to get the crowd going with a good "It's the frequencies, stupid!" chant loud enough to hear inside the State House.
 
Tallguy said:
But that's just an incidental benefit of NSRL. The main one is connecting the two networks. It creates a new subway with 4 branches north and 5 south. I get nuts when people use the "traveler going from NYC to Portland with luggage" argument. Thats .01 percent of the potential.
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I know it is not just long-haul passengers. The gap is the truth for every thru running commuter -- 26 minutes on foot (minimum, plus connection dwell) to make your thru connection, regardless start and stop.
 
JeffDowntown said:
I know it is not just long-haul passengers. The gap is the truth for every thru running commuter -- 26 minutes on foot (minimum, plus connection dwell) to make your thru connection, regardless start and stop.
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But no one actually does that. "The gap" baked into people's commuting behaviors and patterns. It's not a great political talking point compared to all of the other benefits.
 
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