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The proposed South Coast rail project to extend commuter service to New Bedford and Fall River could cost $1 billion more than expected and take at least six years longer than scheduled to construct, state transportation officials revealed on Monday.So now they are looking at cheaper alternatives such as routing the line via Middleborough, which they think coudl be done in 6-8 years or as long as it would take to get the permits for the Stoughton routing.
The long-discussed plan once had a price tag of $2.23 billion and a completion date of 2022. But consultants for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority now estimate it could cost between $3.3 billion and $3.42 billion and be finished between 2028 and 2030.
jonnhrr wrote:Surprise surprise. SCR will cost more and take longer to do than expected. From the Boston Globe:Except for the fact that it totally can't be done because the Old Colony can't support 2 branches off a branch of a branch without destroying every South Shore commuter's rush hour frequencies forever. Even if they fixed the Dorchester bottleneck with MassDOT's idiotic "build hugely expensive tunnels for Braintree and commuter rail around Savin Hill so we can widen the HOV lanes" asphalt grift. The EIS answered this question in triplicate years ago. The SCR interests just refuse to believe that's a settled issue, because they believe their specialness is worth outright wide-scale transit frequency loss to Plymouth, Middleboro, and Greenbush commuters. "Suck it...I got mine"...nothing more, nothing less. It is not a reality-based conversation, it's navel gazing gone 8 degrees of meta.The proposed South Coast rail project to extend commuter service to New Bedford and Fall River could cost $1 billion more than expected and take at least six years longer than scheduled to construct, state transportation officials revealed on Monday.So now they are looking at cheaper alternatives such as routing the line via Middleborough, which they think coudl be done in 6-8 years or as long as it would take to get the permits for the Stoughton routing.
The long-discussed plan once had a price tag of $2.23 billion and a completion date of 2022. But consultants for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority now estimate it could cost between $3.3 billion and $3.42 billion and be finished between 2028 and 2030.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/0 ... _campaign=
Jon
MBTA F40PH-2C 1050 wrote:my theory is what I posted a few weeks back... the massive tie and ballast project scheduled to come to the Middleboro Subdivision this fall....once completed, it is going to be hard not to go via the OC line....I can see the press release now...."look common folk that don't know sh** about the RR!!! the track is here, new rail, road bed and ties, all finished, just install Cab Signals and it is good to go to FR/NB!!!" Granted the largest problem of said project is the single track from SQAUNT Int. to GREEN Int. in Braintree. Although it is such a short stretch of single track, it a very important stretch of RR. What I propose is make some upgrades to the Middleboro Mainline.....make the Titicut siding near the MCI in the outskirts of Bridgewater a Controlled Siding, obvi with an Interlocking at each end, to free up more space with an extra window of meeting trains on the that stretch of railroad....That! THAT!! may help a wee bit in making this succeedIt's still not going to do the trick. The amount of skip-stopping hacks and painful gaps in the schedule that would have to be laid out like landmines across the entire OC network is still going to have absolutely caustic effects on peak-hour commutes for the existing branches. Enough that the state somehow thinks dropping another billion widening the SE Expressway (and no doubt MA 3 and parts of MA 24 in conjunction) is somehow a necessary complement. The original assessment precluding the Middleboro Alternative was pretty airtight in just how big/bad a whiff it would be. So even if Savin Hill and Quincy Adams-Braintree Yard were fixed (Wollaston-Quincy Adams probably never can be) the only way to stage an SCR schedule that's do-no-harm to the existing OC schedules is make the headways to the South Coast even more useless than the unnecessarily crippled Stoughton single-track build. Plus, it continues the SCR Task Force's petty earth-salting tactics at the Middleboro-Buzzards Bay extension, which it has spent a decade trying to bury out of turf warrage. That one doesn't even require a layover construction or any new trainsets to implement, just uniform 6-car all- bi-levels at peak and redistribution of the Middleboro schedule. But the Task Force keeps trying to launch new F.U.D. campaigns to bury that one; this is just the latest.
highgreen215 wrote:There was a long ago direct connection between Middleborough and Myricks. What is the state of this original ROW? Any chance it could be reactivated or is it gone forever? This would be the only route that would make any sense, not the zig-zag, time wasting route from Middleborough to Taunton and back to Myricks.Gone forever, I think. There's a few places on Google Earth that look like they could be remnants of the route you're thinking of, but much of the ROW has been built over and there's two major highways blocking it as well.