Green Line Extension Lechmere to Medford

bostontrainguy wrote:

BandA wrote:What is the meaning of "inbound" especially after the GLX opens...

Traditionally anything heading to Park from either direction is considered "inbound". So even with the GLX you still have trains heading inbound although they may be terminating at Government Center. "Westbound" and "Eastbound" are also used especially with any run-through trains which may be the case for at least some trains once the GLX opens.

Look at an MBTA map and find where the Green, Blue, Orange, Red lines each make a side of a (sort of) square. If you are going into the direction of that square, you are going inbound. As soon as you pass the centerline, you are now going outbound. The GLX makes no changes to this.

Example: Park Street to Government Center is inbound. You'd get on the inbound train at Park Street to go to Govt Center. Government Center to Park street is also inbound. You'd get on the inbound train at Gov't Center to go to Park Street.

This is how I have understood it decades ago. I have not paid attention to inbound/outbound signs recently as I have not needed it. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong in my example.

The downtown stations don't actually distinguish "inbound" and "outbound"; the signs simply show the terminal station(s), e.g. "Red Line to Alewife" or "Orange Line to Forest Hills". I have a vague recollection that the "outbound" side of the Green Line at Park Street is signed "westbound to Lechmere...", but that might have changed. And, I know the four junction stations are like this and I'm pretty sure South Station is as well, but I don't remember about the others, e.g. Charles and Haymarket.

PublicTransitUSA wrote:Example: Park Street to Government Center is inbound. You'd get on the inbound train at Park Street to go to Govt Center. Government Center to Park street is also inbound. You'd get on the inbound train at Gov't Center to go to Park Street.

No. There is no inbound or outbound from any of the four "In" stations. State St., Downtown Crossing, Gov't. Center, and Park Street are all the in of inbound. You can't go north from the north pole.

The signage makes matters worse at Government Center by labeling the directions North and West. Green and Blue are east/west (regardless of where on the route you are, Government Center to Lechmere is east!), Orange and Red are north/south.

I'm not sure how we got here in the Type 9 thread...

A good question to pose is whether the Green Line Extension should have its own route letters. But until both branches of the GLX are open, the existing route letters will suffice, where Park St., Government Center, North Station, and College Ave. would be simple termination points of the same physical route. With or without separate route letters for the GLX, route letters will need to be shown when cars leave Park St. for the GLX after both branches are open.

Could the Type 9 signs change to a a different destination mid-route automatically using the same system that activates the voice announcements? Namely coming into Haymarket from North Station or coming into Park St. from Boylston? Suppose that the College Park branch were designated D but a (B) Boston College car was commandeered to go to College Ave. What should its destination sign read coming back in? No route letter with a downtown destination such as Government Center seems best, with a change back to Boston College performed downtown.

The Boeing cars did show the route letter for inbound destinations. Only a few of the different permutations were available since the signs were rollsigns as opposed to electronic signs. An aside, a slash was through the route letter if the destination was short of the destionation(s) usually taken by that route at the time.

As routes were revamped over the years, cars had to show a different route letter when going to a destination for which the combination of route letter and destination was not available.

Type 7 cars had the same limitation until their roll signs were replaced with electronic (hard to read LCD) signs.

PCC cars, Boeings, and (originally) Type 7's showed their western origin (including things like "Riverside via Newton Brookline") in side rollsigns which were not changed at the ends of the line after each trip.

Disney Guy wrote:A good question to pose is whether the Green Line Extension should have its own route letters.

So let's play with the routes a bit. How about:

B - Boston College
C - Cleveland Circle/Coolidge Corner if short turned
R - Riverside/Reservoir if short turned
H - Heath Street
M - Medford or Mystic Valley Parkway (can't have another C for College Avenue)
U - Union Square

So a Riverside train going to Medford would say "M - Medford" but would it be necessary to also say "Via Park/Government Ctr" if the signs had that capability as asked above?

Letters are alphabetical ascending counter clockwise. B being BC and C being Cleveland Circle is a coincidence. Eastern termini don't get letters because they aren't their own routes. That will likely continue to be true after GLX is complete. Sure, you could sign up as whichever letter goes to Medford and whichever goes to Union, but since that will always be subject to change it will only create more confusion.

I tried to address this in the Signs thread. It is true, but silly, that the termini don't have letters today, when near-every official map shows that the *tracks* between Park and Lechmere all have letters (with the Lechmere viaduct being an "E", even if its terminus is not, and "C" tracks ending at North Station, even if we can't admit out loud that it is the C terminus) and each Western/Southern/Suburban letter having a default, paired Eastern/Northern/Downtown terminus as written in the rapid transit pdf. They may have avoided officially proclaiming Lechmere to be an "E terminus" but they've done everything to reinforce that if an E got you there, an E going in the other direction will get you home.

Standard operating procedures for where eastbound trains terminate have changed several times in only a couple decades. Currently there is a ton of inaccurate signage indicating Gov't Ctr is where B trains end. We aren't dealing with an inability to "admit" something, we're not committing to something we cannot and should not deem as permanent. Where trains typically end up is something that can be understood by regulars, but it is inappropriate to encourage people to assume that the same thing is always going to happen, especially people who don't inherently know where they are. Branches are irrelevant to eastbound cars, it doesn't matter where it came from.

GLX will likely not change this. Medford is just an extension of the stem formed by the central subway, and Union Square is a single stop off the beaten path. When the union square branch is extended to Porter Square, that might change.

CRail wrote:No. There is no inbound or outbound from any of the four "In" stations. State St., Downtown Crossing, Gov't. Center, and Park Street are all the in of inbound. You can't go north from the north pole.

But there could be, and it would still make sense. From each of the 4 stops, there's still an "inbound" (to the next adjacent corner of the square) and an "outbound" (away from the square). There would never be two "inbound" directions from any stop, and every route would have an "inbound" and an "outbound" at every station (except the termini).

If Park to Govy is inbound, and Govy to Park is inbound, that does not make sense.

I've been getting interested in this project lately and I have some questions. I readily admit that I have not read all 11 years worth of posts to this thread, so it's quite possible all of this was already discussed but discussion is the point of a forum so....

1) Does the mini branch to union square seem like a waste of effort/money to anyone else but me? Not that I have anything against Union Square, but it's not SO far from the main extension. If the union extension was going to keep going, that might make more sense but having all the expensive of building a short little stub just for a square that you could walk to from the main extension, seems not-ideal. Using those funds to extend the main extension a little further seems to make more sense.

2) One of the plans I saw showed a small maintenance facility being built near BET as part of this project. I ask this from a railroad operations point of view, is that really necessary? Aren't there already two good sized green line facilities? Do you need that many for one subway line? Don't all the other lines have just one? And the entire commuter rail system has just one also.

3) This is kind of a general question, although it's very applicable to this situation. They main extension is going up the Lowell line. So it's going from double track to quad-tracked. If they were planning on going all the way to 128, they would have to rebuild all of the double-tracked overpasses. I'm wondering how practical it would be to have both the CR line and the 'subway' line merge down to 1 track each, just for the bridges, so you would have one track that is for heavy rail and one for light rail. I'm sure the answer to whether this is practical depends on the details of every line you would want to set up like this. But even though you'd be spraying these lines with bottlenecks, they'd be short enough that I imagine it not being that huge of a problem. And that would be a cheaper way to get an extension like this much further, and then you can deal with major bridge rebuilding and de-bottle-necking down the road.

19) Will any stations along the green line extensions be getting any meaningful amount of parking? Driving to Wellington gets old fast, I'd love to get usable subway access further nooorrrrrthhhhhhh.

324) Have any decisions been made about routing? Are these two branches going to be extensions of existing branches, or their own dedicated branches? Hows all that going to work?

2490) This may not be related to the green line, but theres a little abandoned section of track going from the Wye under 93 (at the ramps to nowhere), that goes parallel to the Lowell line for a bit, then connects to it. I was down there on my bike recently and it looks like they are rebuilding that stretch? What's this all about? Green line related? Or are they redoing it for something else?

1) Not a waste. Union Square is a big redevelopment area and the station is key to being able to support a lot of new housing. A station directly at the square has always been a major priority for the city. Plus there is long-term potential to extend the branch.

2) Absolutely necessary. The Green Line needs a northside maintenance facility - otherwise disabled trains have to be towed through the entire subway to reach a yard. Operationally, it means that northside trains can be started from the yard rather than the southside yards, which means a much longer maintenance window in the Central Subway.

3) No way you can single-track the Green Line - it runs high and (due to reality) irregular headways. Light rail that has single-track sections is always 15+ minute headways on relatively simple systems with highly regular headways. And keeping the Lowell Line double-tracked is key to it becoming the primarily northside intercity mainline.

19) Hell no. This is an urban rapid transit project, not a parkway giveaway to suburbanites, and a major reason for it is to remove auto emissions from Somerville.

324) D to Tufts, E to Union Square is what's long been said. My thesis research indicated you'll need the C to Tufts soon too.

Good questions all, and I hardly blame you for not reviewing this entire decade-old thread.

1) Service to Union Square was one of the major priorities of the project, as it's one of the biggest commercial centers in Somerville and has no transit access other than buses. One of the early proposals was a single line that went to Union Square and then tunnelled under Prospect Hill to join the Lowell Line; that was rejected due to cost.

2) The maintenance facility is there because with the additional cars needed for the extension, the T is going to need more maintenance capacity, and they don't want to have to drag dead trains all the way through the system to Riverside. They also need to be able to store cars on the north side for start of service each morning. Originally it was going to be in "Yard 8", right next to the Brickbottom Artists' Cooperative, but they hated this plan and had enough clout with the City of Somerville to get them to hate it too.

3) I don't think anyone's even suggested extending to 128. The original planned terminus was West Medford, but Medford hated that idea, plus the Mystic River crossing was going to be stupid expensive. Single-tracking under the bridges would be a gigantic operational pain in the ass, and the bridges through Somerville are close enough together that it'd effectively be single-track for the entire distance, with the occasional passing siding (and not even that for the commuter rail with its much longer trains). And the track and signaling work required for multiple single-track sections probably wouldn't be significantly less expensive than replacing the bridges. (And I speak as someone who is going to be hugely inconvenienced by the upcoming year-long closure of the Broadway bridge at Ball Square.)

19) Nope, not even the terminus at Mystic Valley Parkway if that gets built. Ya want further-north transit parking, go to Anderson. The GLX is intended to serve neighborhoods.

324) Yes, the College Ave and Union Square branches will be extensions of existing routes, but I don't know which ones or if that's been decided.

2490) (nice numbering scheme there, dude) That's the old Yard 10 lead, which is being rebuilt as the route for Pan Am Railways freight trains coming down the Lowell Line. Currently they continue past where the Lowell Line splits left, almost to where the bridge over the Fitchburg Line used to be, then down the "Willey Track" into the "Valley tracks" behind the commuter rail maintenance facility. That connection is being severed by the GLX; specifically, by the leads to the new Green Line maintenance facility. F-line will tell you that PAR is up in arms about this and all kinds of doom and horror will result; it is unclear to me what the big deal is.

ceo wrote:That connection is being severed by the GLX; specifically, by the leads to the new Green Line maintenance facility. F-line will tell you that PAR is up in arms about this and all kinds of doom and horror will result; it is unclear to me what the big deal is.

Losing freight yards in the area should upset PAN AM more but the reality is that there is so little freight in and out of Boston that it sadly doesn't matter at this point. If business ever picks up, such as on the Mystic Piers branch, it's going to be a challenge.

That maintenance facility should have been put behind Brickbottom but the squeaky wheels there caused a lot of additional expense by moving it to an inconvenient, more expensive, and oddly-shaped location that also eliminated one of the last PAR customers in the area.

The only plus I can see is that PAR can now run more easily through the area if desired. Straight down the Lowell Line and out the Fitchburg line or maybe even the Grand Junction if ever necessary. There was a similar reroute done a few years ago due to a service disruption on their regular route. Don't recall the details right now. Also they will still be able to also run directly to the Reading and Salem lines. So it does actually create a bit more flexibility through the Inner Belt area. Don't know if this new routing is going to be much of an advantage but it is now going to be a possibility.

And I'd like to add as far as the Greenline Extension is concerned: Remember the Transcontinental Railroad was built in six years with picks and shovels!

Nope, not even the terminus at Mystic Valley Parkway if that gets built. Ya want further-north transit parking, go to Anderson. The GLX is intended to serve neighborhoods.

If they do go to Mystic Valley Parkway, it would amazing if some of the bus routes in the area (i.e. those serving West Medford or even Medford Square) served the station or provided reasonable access to it.