Newburyport Branch

How come it takes YEARS to do studies, consulting, and politicking on EVERYTHING train-related these days?

5 to 10 years to do a rail-trail? They built the entire (Eastern/Boston and Maine) rail line from Boston to Portland, back in the 1840s, by hand, with shovels, pickaxes, hand derricks, mules and horses, etc. in something like two years. Why does it take 10 years, 160 years later, to build a bike path on a rail line on which all of the hard work...surveying, grading, etc. has already been done?

140 years ago the Transcontinental Railroad was built in less time than it will take to make an existing rail line into a bike path from Wakefield to Lynnfield? Huh?? Helllllllooooo???????

>>Why does it take 10 years, 160 years later, to build a bike path ...

Because there is no profit to be made from a bike path.

Taxpayers are understandably reluctant to pay, year after year, for a recreation trail through a swamp so the beautiful people can spend Sunday afternoons communing with nature, but the towns involved receive no direct benefit at all, only the expense of maintenance. The proposed trail begins in an old industrial area and ends in a swamp near the town line. There are other ways to waste the taxpayers' money.

PBM

The towns of Bedford, Lexington, and Arlington consider their bike path to be an asset that brings people into the towns to spend money. Why would it be any different in Wakefield or Lynnfield?

I always thought it would be a good idea to extend commuter rail from Wakefield junction over to Rt.1 area in Peabody to catch people coming down rt 95 from the north. Why aren't more stations built right off the highway like the new one in Woburn near the rt. 93/ rt. 128/95 junction?

>>Why would it be any different in Wakefield or Lynnfield?

Ron,

As they say in the real estate business, it's a matter of location, location, and location. Wakefield has a very picturesque town center, town common, and public park bordering Lake Quannapowitt, with broad lawns, a bandstand, a beach, a boat launching ramp, ball fields, a yacht club, and a perimeter walking path around the lake that is so busy on weekends you need turn signals, and all this only ten miles from Boston (no, I don't live there). The proposed bike path is at the opposite end of town, about as far removed from these public recreation facilities as possible. It begins at a gas station, passes through an industrial area, and ends in a swamp.

Understand, I'm not opposed to bike paths - I'm opposed to this bike path.

PBM

Well the rail trail in Wakefield/Lynnfield might be slow in coming, but per Boston Globe article, not in Topsfield where Selectmen approved creation of a town account to accept private donations for development of a planned 4.5-mile recreational trail.


http://www.boston.com/news/local/articl ... nal_trail/

This past week, the Wakefield Board of Selectmen on a 6-1 vote, approved the signing of a “feasibility study” regarding the conversion of the abandoned tracks from Wakefield Junction to the Reedy Meadow in Lynnfield to a pike path. The cost of the study will be $30,000 and reimbursed by the State and will be conducted by the engineering and planning firm Fay, Spofford and Thorndike, Boston MA.

May 2007 Railpace News Magazine reports that B&M Corp and ST filed to abandon and ST to discontinue service over an approximately 9.69 miles of the line from milepost 9.38 to milepost 19.07. This would be from Wakefield Junction to Danvers MA. A more detailed report about the abandonment can be found a the following webpage:


http://www.stb.dot.gov/decisions/Readin ... /37776.pdf

that line shouldnt have to be abandoned. guilford forced the customers to stop getting rail service.


MA is so anti-rail.

tom18287 wrote:that line shouldnt have to be abandoned. guilford forced the customers to stop getting rail service.


MA is so anti-rail.

Well, Mass. may be anti FREIGHT rail, but certainly is gung-ho for commuter rail, unfortunately at the expense of freight rail in some cases. The proposed exansion of commuter rail to New Bedford makes no mention whatsoever of freight service, for example. In the case of the Newburyport Branch, the remaining customer, Smurfit-Stone, was embargoed by ST because of track conditions, meaning that ST didn't want to spend the money to fix the remaining portion of the branch. The other factor here is that the branch is owned by the MBTA. Had they ever expanded commuter service on it, ST might still be serving Smurfit-Stone. ST would dearly love to embargo Watertown too, again because the track is so decrepit, but since their customer is only accessible over secondary roads (unlike Smurfit Stone which is right off of Rote 128), they face a broader range of opposition if they were to go to the STB.

yes and no.

it seems like MBTA is trying to convert alot of things to bus. i dont agree with it. it's still just a bus.


there would be commuter rail service on it had it not been for the other newburyport line. they probably chose the most convenient track.

tom18287 wrote:yes and no.

it seems like MBTA is trying to convert alot of things to bus. i dont agree with it. it's still just a bus.


there would be commuter rail service on it had it not been for the other newburyport line. they probably chose the most convenient track.

I think we're talking about some different things here. If you're saying that the MBTA hasn't expanded "heavy rail" transit, or "light rail transit" and instead created new bus routes (Silver Line) or continues to use buses where light rail used to be (Arborway trolley in Jamaica Plain), then I'd say you're correct. However I think the topic here is commuter rail and rail freight service, and in those departments, I can't see how a 500 million dollar expansion of commuter rail to Greenbush and a proposed 1.2 billion dollar expansion to Fall River and New Bedford would indicate that Mass. is dropping rail in favor of buses. Actually a number of commuter bus operations have fell victim to commuter rail expansion over the years.
To get back to Guilford's abandonment of the branch, as I said, it was economics for them. They didn't want to fix the remaining track. They went through all the proper regulatory channels to embargo the customer and abandon the service. Read the petition and you'll see it satisfies all regulatory requirements. Yea, I think they should still be serving them, and maybe the customer does too, but that's the system. And yes, it's true the T had no good reason to use the branch, considering it lay very close to both the Haverhill and Newburyport lines.

i suppose you are correct about this one. MA is anti freight. we were talking about separate things i suppose.


it's so stupid. it seems to me that rail should be utilized whenever it can be. i understand if there isnt rails there already its a different story. but if they are there then they should have customers. i cant imagine how much congestion would be off the streets if they just had more rail than truck.


why is MA so anti freight? it makes no sense at all.

While driving down Rt.1 in Peabody yesterday, I noticed that the brush had been cut along the line heading west towards Wakefield. It looked like it was mostly the brush between the rails and not a full cutback of the ROW. This was done in the past week.

interesting. why would they do that?