NH2060 wrote:So one way or another the OSB-Kenyon Bypass will be a part of whatever "build" alternative the FRA decides on? Doesn't make any sense at all. The party that would primarily benefit from it would actually be CDOT as it would remove anywhere from 9 to 14 Acela RTs on weekdays allowing those slots to be replaced by Shore Line East trains to/from New London along with any extended service to Westerly, essentially making that segment of the Shore Line a commuter/Regional line. They're definitely not planning on adding any more Regionals before 2030 and after that is anyone's guess depending on New Haven Line slot availability.
Furthermore the first 3 alternatives don't solve the "what do we do about the New Haven Line" problem in any way. And "Alternative 4" would render a SE CT "bypass line" rather redundant if there's also going to be a new NHV/NYP-HFD-PVD dedicated high speed line.
There's no way that's going to be built once a field survey team goes out there for an informal look-see...or they learn how to turn on Terrain View in Google Maps. The first 1-6 miles inland is like a grand tour of every north-south running trap rock seam in New London County. All those rock cuts that craptacularly standards-outdated I-95 was blasted through 60 years ago come into play on that OSB-Shannock bypass. It may not be as brain-meltingly stupid as 10 miles of tunneling straight through the heart of the Metacomet Ridge, but it's got the same real-world probability of happening: absolute zero. Anybody with actual civil engineering experience would tell them they're doing it wrong if they insist on the hardest possible alt-Shoreline routing, and every HSR country with geologically challenging terrain (yes, including the Euro countries who bore straight through the Alps) would take one look at that and exclaim "Why would you do that to yourself???". All the density, the railroad, and the local street grid hug the shore and Route 1 corridor for a reason, and the price tag for add-a-lane'ing such a middling number of I-95 route miles and fixing the geometry to something that half-resembles real Interstate standards is so shockingly high for a reason.
The fact that they're leaning even harder on this build in the new slate of meetings just underscores how much a farce this entire process is. NEC FUTURE isn't living in the real world. It isn't even living in as real a world as Amtrak's own NEC Infrastructure Master Plan. Whatever the next-gen superduper NEC looks like when it actually gets a well-formed funding pitch to Congress and the states, it'll be drawn up by somebody completely different who chucks 80% of the 'unique' creations of NEC FUTURE's body of work in the trash and starts over with a whole new--much more reality-backed--set of assumptions. Which means we have a couple more years of this dog-and-pony show and the dilettantes heading the NEC FUTURE coalition lighting money on fire before that team of idiots gets mercifully disbanded and they start clean. Without all this physics-defying nonsense that can't be civilly engineered and picks the very antithesis of the paths of least resistance that satisfactorily accomplish service goals. Without the pointless turf-warrage with commuter rail that picks more fights with the states than it builds allies. Without the disregard for on-the-ground Ops Practices 101 that leaves such unexplainable disparities in TPH ceilings from state to state and tenant RR to tenant RR.
It's almost like you have to treat NEC FUTURE as the bureaucratically proverbial "ARC" chapter in the saga, where the Fates decree that it must live its tortured little existence and die a messy death as the necessary step before the proverbial "Gateway" replacement team can come in, cut through the B.S., and get down to real business. Like this is the Act I "tragedy" part of the play, and we're gonna have to sit through and suffer in frustration for awhile until Intermission and the Act II "redemption" part of the story begins.
