Seaport Transportation

Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

-- Dudley to Seaport direct (secondary route as envisioned by SL Phase III)
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Once the tunnel to SS came online, this would have to go to Tufts and turn around the loop to get to the SS/Seaport right?

-- Urban Ring Airport LRT to Lechmere to anywhere inbound.
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What's the best routing to get the UR from Sullivan to Lechmere? It can get to the Lowell or Fitchburg outbound routing pretty easily by using Somerville Yard leads, but can you get it inbound hitting Lechmere on the surface across the yard tracks?

(sorry to everyone for turning this into a "LRV System of the Future" discussion)
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

I may know an editor at the Globe. I'm considering letting them know about this thread, since a journalist might be able to put together a story about it. (a proposal countering the self-destructing DMU plan. Also more people need to know about the utility of the abandoned part of the Tremont tunnel in general.)
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Is there some kind of map showing all the unused but still existing subway tunnels in Boston?
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Arch101 said:
Is there some kind of map showing all the unused but still existing subway tunnels in Boston?
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Other then a few stubs for abandoned portals here and there, the one above is pretty much it.



Edit: There is also a short stretch of tunnel between Harvard and Brattle Square left over from when they rebuilt the station to follow Mass Ave north instead of curving towards the river and the old yard where the JFK school is now. Harvard purposely left a space between the two buildings there so it could be extended to the river, provisioning for a way to connect to the Allston campus. If you walk through there you can see the old retaining wall for the yard where that small parking lot is.

Somewhere there is a video the T made giving a tour of it. Someone on rr.net has some great pics too. F-Line or UrbEx might know the links offhand.

For some fucking stupid reason google is insisting the links go into the 45° mode. Turn it off to see what I'm talking about with the links.

The rest off the top of my head:

Green:
Right around Boylston there are three small artifacts. The wall on the outbound side after the station and curve peels away briefly where there used to be a portal to the surface on the public garden. Then immediately after that the tunnel widens where a portal existed for the E before copley junction was constructed. The vents on the surface in the median of Boylston St correspond to where that was. Then on the inbound side before the curve and station the wall also peels away for an unused provision for a Post Office square extension under Essex Street.

There is a small section of tunnel under/ajacent to city hall that they use for archive storage from the original crazy Scollay/Adams/Dock Square alignment that was torn out and straightened during urban renewal in the 60s. Its not accessible from the current T, and I believe it was an accident they found it at all.

Haymarket was also drastically reconfigured at some point. When you're walking through the station you will notice columns running across the platforms and passageways. Youre basically walking through the original tunnels there.

The portal at North Station is also more or less intact. Its basically behind these doors.

Not really a tunnel, but the new incline after North Station was built to allow the two storage tracks to continue as an extension underground if ever needed.


Orange:
I'm not sure if there are still any leads underground, but a signal and holders for utilities are still strapped to the side of this building for the old incline at North Station. That old signal is one of my favorite things (zoom in, its at the far end of the building by the big vent). Related, the center section of the N Washington St Bridge was for the el to get to Charlestown.

At the southern end, there is a bit of tunnel extending to the former portal for the elevated, which begins right before the curve to Tufts Medical Center. There are pictures online somewhere, I believe they figured out it basically ends with a cinderblock wall directly at the pike..


Blue:
Maverick Station is so wide because there used to be a trolley portal right in the middle. I think there was also a turning loop, but don't take my word.

The tunnel extends beyond the Bowdoin loop to this vent, where there used to be a portal to the surface. At the other end of the Longfellow, this gate exists because they used to take the blue line cars across the bridge on street running tracks, and then tow them to Eliot yard through the cambridge subway for maintenance.

Not really the blue line per-se, but its predecessor the BRB&L RR ran through a tunnel under Jeffries Point that exists (although sealed at both ends) to a ferry dock. You can trace its route as the grassy patch no one has built on.


Red:
Other then the Eliot Yard leads I talked about above, the only other thing is the old Broadway Upper trolley station, which is now being used as a training facility.

The Summer/Winter St concourse above the red line also continues almost all the way to South Station, it was chopped up by the Dewey Square tunnel back in the 50s. The part you cant access is used as a counting room by the T I believe.


Whats more interesting are abandoned stations, abandoned station entrances, and abandoned station concourses / pedestrian tunnels. I couldn't even begin to chronicle those.

Foamers, did I miss anything?
 
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Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

F-Line to Dudley said:
I don't think you can build the Boylston-Transitway and BBY bypass of Copley Jct. at the same time or same funding commitment. It's way too scary a price tag and construction scale to swallow in one bite. Those are separate projects you have to stage out as part of some multi-decade vision for LRT in Boston. Real long-term commitment stuff.

What I'm thinking as an initial build is:

1) Do the tunnel reactivation with Tufts station under the park.

2) Since the tunnel's a 4-tracker to the old portal, build the Tufts station as a 4-tracker right off the bat. That way you have a second set of platforms that can be used immediately as a stub turnback while the other set sees thru service. With this you can turn trains coming from the north through every single downtown transfer station instead of missing Red by turning at Brattle Loop or being permanently consigned to a hard-to-dispatch Medford-Riverside marathon. And get an OL transfer at the last stop that also helps OL traffic a lot by hitting it on both sides of the State-DTX choke point via Haymarket and Tufts. You can either do this platform configuration as stub-end, or take the profile of the park and the old 'pit' incline and craft a turning loop. It would be less sharp a loop angle than Park St. loop by a good margin.

3) +2 blocks of tunneling under Shawmut and the Pike/NEC. The urban renewal blast zone where the utilities are all mid-60's known-knowns. Portal up from the NEC on the Herald St. wall to the Washington/Herald intersection on one signal phase

4) Find your surface-level trajectory to SS and the grassy plaza along the bus terminal. Multiple options, some more grade-separated than others.

5) Portal-under shallow on the plaza next to the bus station. Tunnel roof just 3-6 ft. below and supporting nothing but grass and park benches...i.e. a far less invasive Fields Corner-Ashmont air rights cover-over and not a street cut-and-cover that's 25+ feet down with all utilities sandwiched between roof and street. However far along the plaza 93 descends ultra-deep, start the incline down to the Transitway's level. Make the sharp turn at the Summer St. intersection and merge into the busway pavement. Buses still loop at SS, trolleys loop at SL Way with a small layover yard, both modes overlap the length of the Transitway.

soon.
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The Orange Line tunnel from Tufts to the portal before Back Bay crosses under Shawmut Ave. and the goes under the pike. If you have a shallow underground Green Line station at the park at the same level as the Orange Line fare collection area, the new Green Line tunnel extension is going to have to dip down very quickly to get under the Orange Line tunnel and then get under the pike. Might be a bit complicated. The Orange Line South Cove tunnel was built cut and cover where it crosses the pike, with temporary lane changes to accommodate it.

The grassy area next to the South Station bus terminal includes emergency exit stairs from the auto tunnel and some vent shafts as well. One of those stair cases along the façade of the bus terminal is actually an emergency exit staircase from the highway tunnel. The Silver Line tunnel at the Atlantic Ave turn-around loop is pretty much boxed in by the auto tunnel to the south, the South Station foundations (provisions for future air rights ) to the east, and the Red Line tunnel underneath it to the north. The only provision to access it is from Essex St. It would be difficult to get a portal in at Essex St. as the shallow southbound lanes of the highway (the Dewey Sq. tunnel) are not that far to the west. If you built an Essex St. tunnel under the highway tunnel, the portal would then take up the entire width of Essex St.

Here's a link to an old BIg Dig project map showing how the tunnels under Atlantic Ave. take up a lot of room and block access to the Silver Line tunnel:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040612110751/http://www.bigdig.com/thtml/mapframe.htm
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

davem said:
The Summer/Winter St concourse above the red line also continues almost all the way to South Station, it was chopped up by the Dewey Square tunnel back in the 50s. The part you cant access is used as a counting room by the T I believe.
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Do the South Station platforms extend far enough that they could be connected to the counting room section of the concourse?
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

davem said:
I may know an editor at the Globe. I'm considering letting them know about this thread, since a journalist might be able to put together a story about it. (a proposal countering the self-destructing DMU plan. Also more people need to know about the utility of the abandoned part of the Tremont tunnel in general.)
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You should probably let their transit reporter know about this thread. She'd be the one who'd pitch to the editors.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

PaulC said:
Do the South Station platforms extend far enough that they could be connected to the counting room section of the concourse?
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Currently, no. The RL platforms go to more-or-less Purchase Street; I may be able to find an exact location from a ca-1913 BTC annual report. Latest I heard was the Winter Street Concourse not going past Devonshire. That's still a substantial section of tunnel - but that doesn't mean it's undoable.

As with all the discussion on this thread, the utilities might be an issue. However, this would be a relatively small-profile, pedestrian-only tunnel above an existing transit tunnel. This would require some reconfiguration of what's inside fare control, and become a giant New York City-style complex, but the price of a comparatively easy tunnel you get walking connections from Orange (and Green, for the masochists) to SL Waterfront.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

The EGE said:
Currently, no. The RL platforms go to more-or-less Purchase Street; I may be able to find an exact location from a ca-1913 BTC annual report. Latest I heard was the Winter Street Concourse not going past Devonshire. That's still a substantial section of tunnel - but that doesn't mean it's undoable.

As with all the discussion on this thread, the utilities might be an issue. However, this would be a relatively small-profile, pedestrian-only tunnel above an existing transit tunnel. This would require some reconfiguration of what's inside fare control, and become a giant New York City-style complex, but the price of a comparatively easy tunnel you get walking connections from Orange (and Green, for the masochists) to SL Waterfront.
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The South Station Red Line platforms extend just to about the point where the Red Line tunnel passes underneath the Dewey Sq. expressway tunnel. If you look up at the tunnel ceiling at the end of the platform, you can see where the tunnel roof was shaved down in the 1950s to accommodate the auto tunnel. The original fare mezzanine level at South Station used to extend farther towards Purchase St., but was demolished when the auto tunnel was built in the 1950s. So a South Station-Downtown Crossing pedestrian walkway would have to be next to (not on top of) the Red Line tunnel to get under the highway. You would have to excavate from just before Purchase St. to just before Devonshire. As you note though, it would only have to be a small profile for a pedestrian tunnel, somewhat like the little pedestrian tunnel that was recently built to provide the accessible ramp from the westbound Blue Line to the northbound Orange Line at State.

Speaking of State, a pedestrian tunnel from the southbound Orange Line at State to the northbound Orange Line at Downtown Crossing would make a much cheaper Red/Blue connector. Because of the tight constraints, they would probably have to secure easements in the existing basements of several businesses to squeeze it in. Probably very expensive on a per foot basis, but still much cheaper compared to the costs of connecting Red/Blue otherwise.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Speaking of State, a pedestrian tunnel from the southbound Orange Line at State to the northbound Orange Line at Downtown Crossing would make a much cheaper Red/Blue connector.
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That's intriguing. The Android maps show that there's only about a half-block gap between the DTX and State Orange line platforms, just past Bromfield Street.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

F-Line to Dudley said:
Besides, with how dog-slow the Silver Line turned out to be through the Transitway I bet an LRV through the South End still matches or beats the defective-by-design Phase III BRT tunnel. So a mapmaking compromise is still going to perform with better travel time and capacity than the actual monstrosity they were all set to build us on a "direct" routing.
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This is no doubt true, but there's another benefit to the routing. It brings rapid transit to a fringe area of downtown, and will probably re-revitalize that section of the city. So it achieves in better fashion the same result as phase 3, for less, and has side-benefits the Silver Line would not deliver.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Matthew said:
That's intriguing. The Android maps show that there's only about a half-block gap between the DTX and State Orange line platforms, just past Bromfield Street.
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It's been proposed time and again, but I think the utility relocation cost and degree of difficulty have always ended up outslugging the benefits of creating a pedestrian tunnel through there. Nothing fatal, just a bit too invasive for the level of funding commitment that would normally go to that kind of ancillary accessibility project. The Winter St. concourse was a pre-bored empty tunnel dating to 1912 when they finally decided in '79 to put some wall tiles and lighting in it and open it up on-the-cheap. It's not at all surprising that even something as simple as a narrow ped tunnel is going to run into some of the same issues stratospherically raising the degree of difficulty in making new or widened subway tunnels under those same streets.


But let's face it...we need Red-Blue, we need a Blue-Orange walkway, we need a whole lotta other new line interconnections, we need basic stuff like that pre-designed second Blue-level headhouse on City Hall Plaza that they cut from the last minute from the GC renovation to save money, we need a second Red-level Park St. egress/headhouse onto the Common from the emergency exit end of the platform to relieve the overstuffed stairs and worsening dwell times. We need all that. The transfer dance between the Big 4 downtown stops is the crux of all these dire warnings about downtown transit circulation or lackthereof choking off Boston's continued economic growth within 20 years. None of it's going to be optional. And sitting and waiting while doing not so much as one prelim study makes it that much painful when the time comes that none of it is any longer optional.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

It would be long tedious slog from the east-bound Red Line to the east-bound Blue line. Walking through the passageway and upstairs to the north-bound ("Summer Street") platform, walking the length of the platform, walking through the new passageway which will probably involve stairs going down and then going up, walking the length of the south-bound State ("Milk Street") platform, walking through the passageway over the north-bound State platform and then to the east-bound Blue. Much easier and probably faster to get off at Park Street and take the Green to Government Center.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

The Orange Line tunnel from Tufts to the portal before Back Bay crosses under Shawmut Ave. and the goes under the pike. If you have a shallow underground Green Line station at the park at the same level as the Orange Line fare collection area, the new Green Line tunnel extension is going to have to dip down very quickly to get under the Orange Line tunnel and then get under the pike. Might be a bit complicated.
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Is the OL tunnel shallow enough at the Shawmut Ave crossing to disrupt a GL tunnel going over it? Is it deep enough to underpin such a tunnel?
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

BussesAin'tTrains said:
Is the OL tunnel shallow enough at the Shawmut Ave crossing to disrupt a GL tunnel going over it? Is it deep enough to underpin such a tunnel?
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The Orange Line tunnel is fairly shallow at that point as it was built with cut and cover construction, it also is descending down just beyond there to get under the turnpike. A new Green Line tunnel would most likely have to go below the Orange Line tunnel.

I think the location of the highway tunnel under Atlantic Ave boxing in the Silver Line tunnel and the inability to build an incline or connecting tunnel to the Silver Line tunnel under Atlantic Ave. (except for the Essex St. alignment) might be even more of a problem than crossing the Orange Line.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

FWIW I found this diagram of the Transitway loop:

silverlinetunnel.jpg


Depending on what's on the other side of the westerly wall of the Dewey Sq. tunnel near the portal and whether it can be done without destroying the Kneeland-Beach-Hudson-Surface block that shot off the grassy knoll next to Surface Rd. is probably the easiest trajectory from a South End routing. Have to squint like hell at this Big Dig map, but the Dewey does appear to avoid the west edge of the park and the Edinboro St./Kingston St. wraparound.

Whatever the complications, that's still a shitload easier than the $4B Essex dig + Boylston Under station.
 
Re: Track 61 (Seaport - Back Bay DMU)

Fred R said:
It would be long tedious slog from the east-bound Red Line to the east-bound Blue line. Walking through the passageway and upstairs to the north-bound ("Summer Street") platform, walking the length of the platform, walking through the new passageway which will probably involve stairs going down and then going up, walking the length of the south-bound State ("Milk Street") platform, walking through the passageway over the north-bound State platform and then to the east-bound Blue. Much easier and probably faster to get off at Park Street and take the Green to Government Center.
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This is the point of the Red-Blue Connector.
 
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