Jehochman wrote:I agree with F-Line that the first step is to get the Inland Route going, preferably to North Station. As I understand, South Station has capacity limits and can barely handle more trains without substantial investments.
If there were trains from the NEC to North Station, the Downeaster transfer becomes much easier, ridership increases, and soon enough it makes sense to merge the trains, providing single seat transportation from Maine to New York (or Washington) and points along the Inland Route.
It also would boost ridership from the northern suburbs of Boston, and take some pressure off the Mass Pike and Route 128/I-95, which are parking lots every day at rush hour, and sometimes at other hours too.
The best part of this idea is that Massachusetts and Connecticut are already planning to restore the Inland Route, so Maine can just piggyback on that investment.
South Station is fine for a tippy-top addition of +10 Amtrak trains per day on the B&A, so we're not talking anything revolutionary here. The far Atlantic Ave.-side platforms assigned to Worcester commuter rail don't require any crossing movements that foul other station traffic, so those trains can shoot in and out cleanest and most self-contained of anything that uses the station. A widely-scattered sprinkling of Amtrak trains on the B&A that have to deadhead in/out of Southampton between runs isn't going to crowd anyone out. South Station's fast-approaching capacity limit is very NEC-centric; the surging traffic levels to/from the NEC-proper require more crossing movements to fan out to more platforms. The crossing movements to reach the middle platforms in the terminal increasingly foul deadhead slots from the commuter rail layover at Widett Circle, which at busiest times of day requires commuter rail trains to lay over on those platforms for lack of clean yard access. They can't scoot in/out fast enough in the increasingly hard-to-come-by slots into the yard, and they're fast approaching the limits of how many dispatch tricks they can pull to dance around this (e.g. sending out the most recent arrival as an "any-line" departure, because that just ends up fouling more tracks if it has to cross way over to start on a different route). That's the ultimate price for half the station tracks getting lopped off decades ago; what was once a nicely symmetrical fan-out and set of interlockings is now very asymmetrical and squished to the Atlantic Ave. side. Past a certain traffic density, which we're now starting to see, the traffic distribution starts behaving like it's missing a limb.
Amtrak gets priority on the yard deadheads out of necessity because each of their trains has to get looped, crew-changed, restocked with food service, etc. So it's much less a burden on them (for now...different story post-2030). MBTA's the one staring at a hard ceiling on traffic growth if they can't fix the issue with these excessive criscrossing movements. And only way to do that is to make the platform distribution near-symmetrical again and loosen up the spacing on the crossovers. i.e. Worcester and the Old Colony + Fairmount lines hugging the far sides and never fouling each other, NEC fanning out in the middle half all by itself and never fouling the sides, crossing movements to/from the yard spread further out and weighted NEC-centric so stuff can clear the platforms quickly without getting pinned into an on-platform layover. That's what ends up being a 40+ year solution for the capacity pinch.
BON is limited by the drawbridges and the 4-track pinch over the draws. Induces a similar issue of clearing the platforms with a yard scoot vs. laying over on-platform. But big Boston Engine Terminal being right on the other side of the draws gives dispatch more tricks to pull than the constrained South Station terminal district, and northside traffic is flat-out more diffuse than southside with not nearly as aggressive expansion actively underway. So it's not at a crisis level yet. Eventually they will have to put Draw 3 back in and knock down the former Spaulding Rehab Hospital building (now just overflow office space for Mass General Hospital) to fan out a little bit more on the westerly side of the terminal. Traffic off the Fitchburg Line/Grand Junction, like Worcester on the southside, hugs the far side platforms and doesn't have to make any crossing movements of other traffic to get on/off the platforms and through the drawbridge. Traffic on/off the NH Mainline is the next-least invasive. So a single round-trip off the Grand Junction is no-impact; general-purpose expansion of the Downeaster schedule is minimal-impact. The limit (which they're not as close to reaching BON vs. BOS) is when you start throwing multiple Route 128-turning high-frequency routes and New Hampshire commuter rail on the pile. Then Draw 3 is going to be necessary. It won't be nearly as expensive a project as South Station because that ex-Spaulding building is acknowledged by its transient current tenants to be expendable, and the rest of the affected area is just bare asphalt. Maybe another 15 years they'll need to get on that for due diligence's sake, but NYC-POR could easily be celebrating its 10th anniversary before then and adding a second daily trip.
Actually, Amtrak's probably going to see a pinch sooner than that if the DE schedule fattens enough that they need to layover >1 more trainsets at BET. Space is getting a little tight there...more because of lack of appropriate facilities for stuffing southside cars and work equipment crowding the northside out of its home base. There'll be options for juggling stuff around, since southside will be gaining a small storage yard at Beacon Park a quick scoot off the Grand Junction once MassHighway straightens the Mass Pike viaduct through the vacated freight yard. Real-world impact of the BET storage crunch is more political (or schoolyard-political): expect more T vs. Amtrak sniping at each other over who's pinching whose space. That's the T's relished opportunity for payback after so many years of Amtrak bitching at them for hogging storage at Southampton.
