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

TheRatmeister said:
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.
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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.
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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.
 
Java King said:
I'm excited more about the development opportunity on the USPS land rather than the SSX expansion specifically.
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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.
 
Java King said:
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.
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Maybe SSX could be future proofed by having some temporary stub end tracks at South Station with the option to extend? It may put some pressure on the NSRL moving forward.

But it's not like the "futureproofed" Bowdoin stop ever really put too much pressure on the BL extension outside of the occasional globe article.
 
thepixelnation said:
Maybe SSX could be future proofed by having some temporary stub end tracks at South Station with the option to extend? It may put some pressure on the NSRL moving forward.
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NSRL tunnels need to begin much further out than that for the grades to be adequate. The tunnel portals would be around Back Bay and Widett. A future proofed SSX would mean building a deep bore station, and at that point it would be easier to just build the link than make a bunch of stub ended platforms deep underground.

Maybe they could mine the station cavern during SSX? But I'm not sure that makes sense with the studied station location.
 
Badusername said:
NSRL tunnels need to begin much further out than that for the grades to be adequate. The tunnel portals would be around Back Bay and Widett. A future proofed SSX would mean building a deep bore station, and at that point it would be easier to just build the link than make a bunch of stub ended platforms deep underground.

Maybe they could mine the station cavern during SSX? But I'm not sure that makes sense with the studied station location.
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The station cavern is going to be either 100 ft. underneath Dot Ave. and the Channel (CA/T alignment) or 100 ft. underneath South St. almost a block west of the station (South/Congress alignment). It doesn't touch the footprint of either the existing station or the SSX-expanded station, so there's nothing to provision for.

Provisioning a cavern also isn't going to work unless you're doing the whole thing to Somerville, because the TBM has to have an exit chute or else it's going to be buried down there forever. There's no installment-planning of NSRL. When we build it, we build it all at once...nothing piecemeal.
 
And the NSRL is already future-proofed to some extent; not obstructing the hoped-for northern portals of the tunnel was one of the criteria for locating the GLX maintenance facility.
 
guitarguynboston said:
Does anyone have a link to the latest Alternatives with and without SSX, other portals, and if widdett fell through?
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2018 NSRL Reassessment Report (this is the Baker tankapalooza effort): https://www.mass.gov/lists/north-south-rail-link-feasibility-reassessment-study-documents
2003 NSRL DEIR Executive Summary: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/de.../2003-06 NSRL DEIR Major Investment Study.PDF. (Can't find all of the full report...only the Ch. 5 Operations Study.)
South Station Expansion documents (2014 DEIR and 2016 FEIR) including Layover Analysis: https://www.mass.gov/lists/south-station-expansion-documents

Note that the state has closed the eminent domaining of Widett Circle, so that isn't going to fall through. Its proposed budget is now fully de-coupled from SSX.
 
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