johnpbarlow wrote:I was going to ask a really naïve question - why not elevate the Grand Jct line over the street crossings in Cambridge to avoid the whole traffic mess but then I looked at Google satellite maps to see that MIT or someone has used air rights over the RoW for a major building adjacent to Main St. So, never mind!
But how about plan B: the T terminates some Framingham line commuter trains at the Mass Ave crossing? This might address the needs of most Metrowest commuters trying to get to jobs at MIT and Kendall Square area, at ~1/2 mile distant (this is currently a terrible rush hour commute by car). No road crossings are required. Only some track work/signaling and a platform wedged into the tight confines next to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse would be needed. Obviously this proposal doesn't facilitate a high frequency N-S rail link between BON and BOS but Amtrak riders and metrowest commuters can currently get to/from BON via Orange Line at Back Bay.
And where would they go? Board the godawful #1 bus and get stuck in traffic?
That's a nonstarter. Elevating the GJ is a nonstarter. If the GJ can't handle DMU traffic, the GJ is a nonstarter for everything except the light Worcester and/or Amtrak schedule previously studied.
The fact that the state is adopting DMU's is not an excuse to try to pass a kidney stone between every piece of standard-gauge rail inside Route 128 regardless of whether it can handle it and regardless of how senselessly useless the service is. The entire point is path-of-least-resistance utilization of RR ROW's up to their native capacity at full state-of-repair. Anything that tries to force-fit square pegs into round holes doesn't work. Any track upgrades that a
full commuter rail schedule out to the 'burbs can't also be enhanced to the max by are throwing money down a rabbit hole. Think Worcester speed/signaling improvements, mitigation for the grade crossing speed restrictions on the Eastern Route, a double-track Readville station that increases the flex for thru-routing more Franklin or future Foxboro trains, double-tracking Reading station and upgrading the Wellington-Malden freight track to a full-service passing siding, building that 128 superstation at Exit 26 on the Fitchburg Line, fixing the funky stop spacing on the Lowell Line with a downtown-accessible Woburn infill and throwing in the towel on Mishawum while quad-gating that problematic West Medford grade crossing: those kind of high return-on-investment upgrades that every schedule can tap.
Mass Ave. station is bonkers for traffic management AND useless for commuter rail. If they can't find high enough Worcester and Amtrak upside to go along with it, doing anything with the Grand Junction is probably surplus-to-requirement for the limited money they have to play with. When that native capacity is very low, accept it or move on. The Grand Junction's is very low. Track 61's may end up too low to be more than a bit player. It's the 6 non-NEC, non-Old Colony mainlines that have the capacity to tap and the most overlapping schedules to share in the benefits. Use the economy of scale argument as a brain filter for prioritizing the rollout in your brainstorming. That kind of thinking-outside-the-box can hit a lot of unproductive and infeasible dead-ends if obsession about using every piece of rail
period trumps the need to get a high return. It's about the utilization ceiling of the track, not about which track has the highest
increase in utilization. Some are starting at zero utilization for very good reasons.