North-South Rail Link Discussion

That city lot is used for towed cars - incredibly easy to relocate. It is the best long-term option of those analyzed for a new/expanded commuter rail layover yard.

Ummm... They don't run subways and freight through Philadelphia's version of the proposed Boston N/S link...

Take a look at the commuter rail schedules and picture what through service would look like (i.e. a train going from Lowell to Providence)

A significant motivation for running commuter (or S-Bahn, or RER) service through a city is to open up job markets and retail businesses to people who live on the wrong side of the downtown area. Rents downtown are inaccessible for the majority of citizens or businesses. They're much lower 2-5 miles out, but most of that ring is in an access desert as far as anyone non-local is concerned (Charlestown, Somerville, Allston, Roxbury). Even the well-placed sites, like Harvard Sq., Kendall Sq. or the Medical Area are served by a single transit route or highway and rush-hour access from other corridors is awkward to impossible.

I've been employing people in metro Boston for 30 years now; I don't waste time on ads which don't say where the job is. I don't put much effort into recruiting people whose address indicates a hellish commute. I also lived in Boston & Cambridge for 14 years, most of that without a car. I shopped where nearby transit took me, conveniently. If this meant riding the Orange Line from Green St. to Haymarket or Wellington, I did it. Ditto for the 34 bus to Dedham Mall (the Arsenal Mall didn't exist when I could have used the 70 to get there). The Assembly Square Mall has not met expectations because it was isolated from the transit that would have brought it's natural customers.

Leaving aside the Urban Ring, if my employees could conveniently get through town, rather than just to downtown from the 'burbs, I'd have a lot more choice about where I could locate my business and who I could hire. Those who have not done 10- or 15-stop commutes on subways or trolleys with no express service may wax glorious about the convenience, but I have, and I would not ride the hypothetical Blue Line from Lynn unless my hourly rate was too low to justify spending more on the faster Commuter Rail.

From today's Boston Globe:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014 ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Article on how former Governors Dukakis and Weld agree on building the N/S Rail Link

Choo Choo Coleman wrote:From today's Boston Globe:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014 ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Article on how former Governors Dukakis and Weld agree on building the N/S Rail Link

Dukakis is nuts if he thinks the NSRL can be built for less than $900 million.

According to the very old clippings of the Globe story that I put in a notebook back around 1989 or so, they were talking about a $1B price tag BACK THEN that had options of electrification and a "Central Station" betwe South and North Stations (either so that the Blue Line could have a CR connection or that Boston's tunnel would have 3 stations like Philly's)

Fair usage quote:

The average cost of urban tunnel construction is only “$900 million a mile,” according to Dukakis, and this stretch is “less than a mile.”

So it should cost $900M.

Add North Station Way Under and South Station Way Under. Buy some electric locomotives. Add approach ramps with flood doors. Provision for double-stack freight under the wire. While we're at it, let's re-do Back Bay Station with Orange line underneath, and fully build out the South Station Way Under with 13 tracks so capacity can be increased despite the post office refusing to sell.

Even at 2-3B, this project to me makes so much sense and is more than cost-effective. One little tunnel (plus electrifying everything inside Route 128, plus EMU's) buys the T an S-Bahn/RER/Thameslink-style rapid regional transit setup unlike anything else operating in the US in terms of the trans-urban connectivity that it brings. Septa would have to run silverliners down the PATCO speedline before anyone else got anything close to what we'd have.

It adds major capacity for barely more than the cost of SCR, and likely at far, far, far less than what it'd cost to build any truly-new subway in this town. And at the end of the day, who even needs the urban ring if, say, Porter Square is only 3-4 stops away from Kenmore/Yawkey or Upham's.

There's no need for a central station. I'd suggest only the following alternatives for being within reason:

Alternative A1: center "North Station" on Haymarket, with walkways reaching off to North Station and Aquarium.
Alternative A2: center "North Station" between Haymarket and Aquarium (perhaps cheapest).
Alternative B: simply abandon any hope of the Blue Line connection.

Optional addition to Alternative A1 and A2: eliminate the above-grade North Station entirely, provide enough tunnel capacity to through-route all north-side trains (but don't need capacity for all south-side trains), rename the subway station as TD Garden or Bullfinch Triangle, and renaming the new subway-commuter rail station at Haymarket as North Station.

Centering it under Haymarket would also make sense as far as the northside approach tunnels (IE you could have a single portal serve Lowell/Anderson/Downeaster routings as well as service along the eastern route, with a separate portal for Fitchburg/Waltham trains) At that point, you could add connectivity to the Blue Line and the TD Garden by way of underground moving walkways.

As an added side benefit, the resulting North Station Upper/ North Station GL+OL/North Station (way) Under/ Haymarket GL+OL / Aquarium interconnected station complex would combine 3 rapid transit lines with Indigo, Amtrak, and even CR service and would be the closest thing stateside to Chatalet/Les Halles. So we'd have that to be proud of.

As to the SS/NS "under" stations, has there been any talk as to what sort of layout they'd take on? Two tracks with center or side platforms? Three tracks with two platforms and an express track? Four tracks at the same level with a pair of islands and mezzanine above? Four tracks side-by-side in stacked pairs with a pair of side platforms? Four platformed tracks plus two express tracks?

The possibilities are endless!

BostonUrbEx wrote:There's no need for a central station. I'd suggest only the following alternatives for being within reason:

Alternative A1: center "North Station" on Haymarket, with walkways reaching off to North Station and Aquarium.
Alternative A2: center "North Station" between Haymarket and Aquarium (perhaps cheapest).
Alternative B: simply abandon any hope of the Blue Line connection.

Optional addition to Alternative A1 and A2: eliminate the above-grade North Station entirely, provide enough tunnel capacity to through-route all north-side trains (but don't need capacity for all south-side trains), rename the subway station as TD Garden or Bullfinch Triangle, and renaming the new subway-commuter rail station at Haymarket as North Station.

Can't do either of those "A" options. The tunnel's on a steep rising incline by that point so you don't have a level place to put platforms anywhere. The would-be Central Station was at the very very bottom depth at the only place it goes level. And Central Station is a flawed, cramped traffic clog with short platforms (because that level spot isn't very long), a mismatch in platforms vs. NS and SS Under in which the pinch into fewer platform tracks is going to clog up traffic, elevators/escalators so breathtakingly long it makes Porter look like two steps down your front porch, and generally constipated pedestrian flow because it's so narrow and constrained. You're honestly better with nothing even if it passes up Blue. It compromises way too much to make that reach.



There's nothing wrong with NS Under. Actually...that end is going to be a hell of a lot easier to do than SS Under because the tunnel slips pretty neatly off the I-93 alignment right next to NS, and the Garden was built with the foreknowledge that the Link would slip beside it. It's the trajectory from SS Under threading between other tunnels, swinging out around the Ft. Point Channel, and inserting itself under 93 somewhere around Northern Ave. that's going to be the real bear. You don't save money by not building NS Under...NS Under is on the home stretch after you've done all the brutally hard stuff.


If anything has to be deferred beyond cutting Central Station, it's the 1-mile of Old Colony and Fairmount lead tunnels between the SS Under merge and the portals flanking the east and west sides of the Amtrak facility at Southampton. That's a lot of extra digging for a decided minority of the system ridership. NEC-->Taunton-->Middleboro is an alternate route to the Cape...they're covered. Can you live with just leaving a provisional notch in the wall at the track merge, then a first 10-12 years of Fairmount, Greenbush, Plymouth, and Holbrook/Randolph-to-Bridgewater being shut out with an I.O.U. to fund it in a second wave? In a perfect world we want to be equitable to everyone, but if that's the difference between trimming it to something fundable and waiting a good deal longer to start anything...just circle the wagons and do the base build. Those 3-1/2 lines can get boosted with service increases to tide them over. It's not like the surface terminals are going away or getting significantly less busy.

For one, it's going to take a long time to get enough of the system electrified with EMU's to get the tunnel's cranking along at peak throughput. Big heavy dual-modes hauling rush hour push-pull sets are going to be absolute dogs on the kinds of steep grades this tunnel will have. I really don't think the initial proposal of running mostly dual-modes and having most trains power-switch from E mode to diesel mode at Anderson or some other 128 crossing is going to fly. Some DM's carrying push-pulls...yes, absolutely. But there'll probably have to be a much bigger skew to more nimble EMU's and more end-to-end line electrifications than they'd originally hoped in order to really crank up the tunnel's throughput enough to blend as much a % of the schedules as they'd hoped. That much wire-stringing doesn't happen quickly. Which means you can bank that extra 10 years it takes to Phase II those due-south portals for good use by infilling electrification elsewhere to help up the performance through the tunnel for when you do finally pipe the OC and Midland into there.

I get those concerns about immediate utilization of the tunnel, especially amid the costs of electrifying large swaths of the CR's service area and the logistical issues of dual-modes groaning up the tunnel's inclines.

Which is exactly why, if I were the T, I'd build the N-S rail link as the lynchpin of a separate "indigo" network, rather than try to fill it with large amounts of regular CR trains.

I mean, look at where the bulk of your ridership for cross-city service is. It's that guy from Salem who wants a one-seat ride to his job in the Back Bay, or that lady from Mattapan who wants a two-seat ride to her job in Cambridge, or that kid in Quincy who wants a two-seat ride to his job at a high-tech in Waltham, or even that semi-retired econ professor at Bowdoin who wants a one-seat ride from Brunswick to his bi-weekly board meetings in NYC. My point is that if you look at the real potential for through-tunnel butts-on-seats, it's going to overwhelmingly be made up of people who need to get around everywhere INSIDE the 128 belt.

What it most certainly WON'T be is people riding Brockton <-> Lowell, Foxboro <-> Newburyport, or anything else along those far-fetched lines. Since that's the case, why even worry about tunnel grades that could be handled with any real service frequency by a dual-mode push-pull set.

So the T can save all the money that it might have spent on electrifying anything beyond Salem/Anderson/Westwood/Riverside, not to mention the money saved by building less-steep approach tunnels, and instead spend that money on a Fairmount portal and enough EMU's and crossovers/signaling improvements/widened ROW's w/ passing tracks to run clock-facing schedules with something approaching 10 minute on-peak headways on the "indigo-ized" lines. The only time a dual-mode would EVER come chugging through the tunnel would be when an Amtrak Charger (most likely rocking the same captain insano HP numbers as the ACS64) drags a 5-6 flat consist on Brunswick (and maybe one day Concord?) <-> NYP through service.

That way the CR can keep the outer CR lines running diesel power, with all push-pull service terminating at the NS and SS surface terminals, while filling the N-S rail link with near rapid-transit train frequencies because now you have the Salem/Waltham and Fairmount/Riverside lines all feeding a train every 10-30 minutes in each direction.

On the Oigawa Railway in Japan, reservoir construction required a section be rerouted. The new route is so steep in one part that a cog-equipped electric locomotive is attached to bring the conventional train up (or down) that section. Assuming that the headways on a North-South Rail Link would be sufficient to add/delete an cog-equipped electric locomotive, would such a system reduce the costs by allowing much shorter (although steeper) tunnels? [Let the comments begin ]

ThinkNarrow wrote:On the Oigawa Railway in Japan, reservoir construction required a section be rerouted. The new route is so steep in one part that a cog-equipped electric locomotive is attached to bring the conventional train up (or down) that section. Assuming that the headways on a North-South Rail Link would be sufficient to add/delete an cog-equipped electric locomotive, would such a system reduce the costs by allowing much shorter (although steeper) tunnels? [Let the comments begin ]

I doubt the time it would take to add an engine, even without having to do a brake test, would ever be worth it. Neat idea though.

--

And Bramdeisroberts, no, not that many people would ride CR lines end-to-end, but I'm sure they'd like to be able to make use of the NSRL, for things like Newburyport-Ruggles. If we partition it into a separate thing for Indigo only, what's the point? The NSRL is supposed to benefit commuter rail riders, otherwise just shelve it and do the subway extensions they've been putting off forever (blue line to Lynn, orange to Needham, maybe Anderson, proper rapid transit-ification of Fairmount) since those would serve the same purpose.

Bramdeisroberts wrote:I get those concerns about immediate utilization of the tunnel, especially amid the costs of electrifying large swaths of the CR's service area and the logistical issues of dual-modes groaning up the tunnel's inclines.

Which is exactly why, if I were the T, I'd build the N-S rail link as the lynchpin of a separate "indigo" network, rather than try to fill it with large amounts of regular CR trains.

Except you don't have to do that. And, honestly, we shouldn't be doing that...because that's SEPTA. SEPTA Regional Rail wastes its over-capacity Center City Connection by just running inside the "128"-equivalent portion of Philadelphia because they intentionally excluded all the "495"-equivalent lines when designing the thing by whacking all their diesel routes. SEPTA is not a role model for how to run a blended commuter rail system. Their whole "integrity of concept" thing was one of the very worst decisions in the history of publicly-owned U.S. commuter rail. It is why their "495"-equivalent commuters have to deal with such paralysis on the roads being unable to get to their employment destinations spread around greater Philly and southern NJ...a somewhat less-bullseye commuter target area than Boston is relative to its inner and outer beltways. SEPTA is not at all what the T proposed doing for the Link. It is neither a reserved space for Indigo project nor a run-everywhere-to-everywhere project that outright replaces the surface terminals. It's for prioritizing contiguous ridership patterns on the select schedules that have the most demand, and to shape-shift to demand instead of locking everything into fixed (or limitedly varied) routes like SEPTA does.

-- Intercity trunk like Providence-Lowell or Worcester-North Shore and other similar combinations are probably going to have a significant demand. Just follow the interstates. How hard is it to get between Providence and New Hampshire on I-95?...brutal! How hard is it to get from Worcester to Salem?...you'd never figure those two places were in the same state.
-- Reverse commutes. See above...for non-Boston jobs more people are going to be going to Providence and Worcester as those areas grow. Or have to get to a 128 office park in Burlington via a shuttle bus in Anderson from their house in Sharon. It's further flung at rush hour than just the Indigos...which is SEPTA's crippling problem with their dumb decisions 3 decades ago.
-- The local travelers...the Indigos. Although some more than others because this is a crowd that transfers in the CBD a lot more, so the routes that follow compass points--south-southwest Fairmount to north-northeast Reading, for instance--are going to have way more demand than oddly-shaped stuff like Needham-Waltham (128's way faster than that) or Reading-Riverside (right-angle routing?).
-- Amtrak. Because obviously some of these intercity travelers need to punch to the other side of 128 when visiting the office parks from the NYC home office. And obviously their (likely pre-existing) dual-modes make Portland and Concord Regionals 100% viable as a subset of the NEC schedule just like Virginia and Springfield Regionals are today.
-- Time-of-day demand. Off-peaks's going to tilt more to the Indigos. Commute hours are going to tilt more to the trunks that penetrate both sides of 128 and the reverse-commute lines (Lowell, Worcester, Providence). There's weekender routes. And they're not all the same.


So it can't be just limited to the Indigos. And a pared-back base build doesn't prevent that. The NEC portal would feed Worcester, Providence, Needham, Franklin/Foxboro, Stoughton/South Coast, and Cape-via-Taunton/Middleboro right from the get-go, and the main northside portal would cover Lowell, Western Route, and Eastern Route right from the get-go. Assume that Worcester will join Providence as fully electrified much sooner than the Link will be built, and that Lowell/(Nashua) is the first end-to-end candidate on the northside that won't cost an extreme because it's only one line and doesn't branch like, say, the Eastern Route. Assume Amtrak is already running pantograph dual-modes...they'll probably be replacing the 3rd rail shoed P32's with overhead units in the next 5-8 years. So right off the bat you've got EMU's on the Top 3 ridership regional routes hosting a blend of service patterns. You can mix in some judicious push-pull DM's from some of the branches (like a Haverhill fork off Wilmington, since the freight clearances up there will probably prevent electrification). You just want to hurry up and start wiring the Eastern Route as quickly as possible after Lowell's done so you aren't over-reliant on slow duals. They're fine for a minority of the service when the whole-shebang thing opens...you just don't want that being > 40 or 50% of the traffic or be hauling those monster 7-9 car Worcester rush hours through that tunnel because it'll start to slow things down. But nothing is absolute.

And then you prioritize the high-demand schedules during the day...shape-shifting the route selection to track with demand. Everything else goes to the surface terminals...in higher quantities than before. It's way, way better and more flexible that way than the straightjacket SEPTA put itself in. SEPTA built its Link infrastructure just fine...it implemented it horribly wrong.