Arlington wrote:This thread proposes to discuss the age-old Orange Line vs Haverhill Line turf fight in light of the T's apparent new-found love of DMUs.
I know that we've covered elsewhere how Melrose's grade crossings and mode snobs thwarted the Orange Line's ambitions to reach out to Reading and Rt 128. We've also covered how, if we'd known that 40 years ago, the OL would not have been built as a 3-track operation. And we've watched the transit rails rot in place as they pass through stations like Wellington, while the Haverhill line is constrained on a single track, and CR growth beyond N. Wilmington pretty much has to get to/from North Station via the Lowell Line.
And we've watched that uneasy stalemate for 30 years now: OL has more infrastructure than it will ever need, Haverhill has less than it deserves because too many decisions were cast in concrete and kept there by an FRA that wouldn't let heavy rail and transit easily intermix.
So far, its always been concluded that it is (nearly) too expensive to change the OL to favor the CR, and CR ridership doesn't merit taking back a track.
Do DMU's change that?
No. Because the whole point of this concept is to enhance service without dumping Titanic sums of money into capital projects. You work with the lines you've got and at bringing them up to full state-of-repair for their native capacity (e.g. new track and signal systems on Track 61 and the Grand Junction, not bridges and tunnels and 6 intermediate stops and borrowing every Urban Ring frill and trying to run a fossil fuel choo-choo on it instead). Not total makeovers creating new capacity where none existed before. That is a gross misuse of public funding when MassDOT still refuses to fund things like Red-Blue. There are not even supposed to be that many new stations built for this scheme, just mass (and long overdue) level boarding and state-of-repair upgrades to a lot of very substandard inside-128 stops. BCEC on Track 61, Kendall on the GJ, and a Riverside platform offset from the Green Line are the only three all-new stations planned (though Newton Corner should be on that list).
The more overreach that gets tacked onto the Indigo, the more bloated it gets and the less likely it is to happen at all or on anywhere close to the desired scale. That's why it has to have a tight integrity of concept around tapping native capacity over creating expansion capacity. Consider this "Golden (or Indigo) Rule #1" and measure all your proposals for enhancements against it to separate out the realistic from unrealistic.
What if the whole CR operation south of North Wilmington were converted to DMU? (with CR being redirected to the Lowell Line).
That would be the ideal thing to do. Although North Wilmington would get swapped back to its pre-1965 location at
Salem St. on the Wildcat Branch and not stay with Reading if thru service to Haverhill were moved. N. Will's too far from the Reading layover for headway management, too swampy to make an adjacent layover, Zone 3 is tougher to square than Zone 2, and Salem St.'s in a superior location for a station anyway.
If the T buys DMU's with a door configuration that only allows high-level boarding, they're going to be too awkward to use on the Lowell Line to begin with needing to line up to the mini-high and not being able to trainline 2 DMU's at once. So by divorcing Haverhill from Reading and doubling up Lowell with Haverhill the rush hour push-pull headways on the NH Main can natively hit Indigo levels. Even moreso than the Eastern Route which will be majority push-pull at rush...Lowell has capacity and enough growth at the ends (esp. with Plaistow + Nashua and bigger layovers serving either) for 100% peak push-pull at Indigo headways. Off-peak if they can't DMU to the low platforms they might just have to suffice flushing it full of a lot of Anderson short-turns with a short consist.
Could the grade-connections be severed and the railhead height be tweaked to allow DMUs to serve the unused OL platforms as their own?
Platforms are same height since Malden Ctr. and Oak Grove's CR platforms are build for future conversion to Orange Line. But it's way more complicated than that if you're thinking the other stations downstream are fair game. Community College is on the opposite side of I-93 from the commuter rail tracks. Sullivan is right in the middle of where the Eastern and Western co-mingle. Ripping up the OL track for a turnout is going to create new conflicting movements on both routes at the crossovers. Assembly isn't being built with a 3rd OL platform. Wellington would need expensive retaining wall reworking on the east side. And Malden Ctr. and Oak Grove are still single-track only so every stop introduced downwind makes that track all the tougher to stage variable headways around. And see golden rule above: if it requires hundreds of millions in all-new capacity enhancement construction to make work, it is way outside the scope of what Indigo was designed to do.
Furthermore, these stations are not going to get good ridership duplicating the Orange Line to such an extreme degree. I am not even sure Oak Grove is worth reopening on a DMU given duplication to Wyoming Hill and Malden Ctr. being the huge bus terminal where the transfers are going to go. Plus the single-track congestion. If people need to get to Sullivan and Assembly, fare equitability and the easy Malden Ctr. cross-platform transfer are the way to do it. Enhance Malden as a super-node. Don't try to make the DMU into the Orange Line. It's not. Nobody's going to mistake a 15 minute headway at Zone fare for a 7-minute headway at subway fare with free inter-line transfers. It is likewise an overreach of the Indigo concept to treat them the same. It's the same mistake in logic of treating BRT as a real subway line. It's intended to be the next-best-thing...not 'The Thing" itself. Enhance, complement, integrate. Don't disguise or blur the lines between modes.
Or is the real DMU on the Orange line just more Orange Line EMUs, and actually using the 3rd track for something?
FRA-compliant vehicles can never share track with rapid transit. And these must be FRA-compliant vehicles because every single DMU line overlaps with daytime freight: either right at BET for the entire northside, at Readville where the CSX freights back briefly onto the Fairmount to get into the yard, or on the Worcester Line and Track 61 where the Everett Terminal daily still goes every afternoon.
And it's not trivial to simply disconnect/reconnect that OL track. The quantity of Orange Line crossovers and signal blocks that would have to be reconfigured costs enough in itself for no service enhancement on the OL and repeats all the delays we barely just finished for that years-overdue Haymarket-north ATO upgrade. There's a good reason why they left the 3rd track alone in that arduous and ridiculously over-budget project. It's beyond their pain threshold to bother with. Doing so violates Indigo Rule #1...use native capacity to its fullest, don't invent large over-expensive projects to create capacity where there is none.
Or does the population between North Station Reading just not need any more transit?
It needs it, but it doesn't need every stop on a mode that can't move between stops as fast as an Orange train. That's why Malden Ctr. as a super-node and locus of transfers is a more important 'branding' consideration than trying to hack together one-seat rides to every other station (including Oak Grove). And DMU's just cannot beat a heavy rail train at between-stop travel time, so the mode fails the more you try to turn it into an Orange duplicate. Also...the single-tracking and fact that double-tracking requires flagrant violation of Golden Rule #1 means you may not be able to push the envelope on headways. Maybe it's not 15 minutes. Maybe it's 20-25 minutes clock-facing. Folks in Melrose and Wakefield and Reading will do cartwheels at 20-25 minutes and being able to throw their paper schedules away, so don't hold this to a standard of utter perfection. The densest headways matter more to intra-city Indigoers like the Fairmount Line than they do the first ring of 'burbs like Melrose. This is well inside the Indigo sweet spot, and true rapid transit headways will never be possible without violating Rule #1 or outright extending the Orange Line. So don't sweat it when this line can't hit 100% of Fairmount's or Fitchburg's native capacity (and well, you better be prepared to adjust your frequency expectations way way down for Track 61 through Southampton and Grand Junction through Cambridge traffic hell); exponential improvements at 'native' track capacities is exactly what Indigo is supposed to do.
