Cosmo wrote:Thanks F-line!More likely exactly what they do today. Singles to Framingham to be sorted in the correct order (or start doing that at Readville if Framingham's overloaded), then off to Worcester where the cranes systematically drop the second stack on top. They do it that way because CSX deems that the maximally efficient way to serve New England.
I'm not going to go back through point-by-point, but that answers a lot of the questions I had (and a few I didn't know I had to boot!)
So it would be far more likely based on operational/logistical needs for singles to run to Readville or Framingham to be sorted into DS trains to head South/West from there.
Something big would have to change about the very foundation of Eastern MA freight for there to be any reason to move the stacking further inbound. Which is why that one gets filed under "century-level needs are impossible to predict". I mean...it happened once with the postwar decline in Greater Boston freight, so you can't rule it physically impossible that something equally unforeseen would swing the opposite direction. But that's well out-of-range of any means of prediction. We've got a pretty good handle on what the dynamics and relative ceiling for local freight are going to be at the 25-year level, and it's nearly improbable that it'll involve double stacks needing to venture inside I-495 much less inside Route 128.