North-South Rail Link Discussion

Interesting to see all lines stopping at Forest Hills on that 1990s map. They should have provisioned Forest Hills with room for another platform to serve one or both of the tracks that don't now have platforms. What would another ten or fifteen feet of width have cost? Millions, I know, but those millions could have paid dividends one day it they made it easy to use CR to get to Forest Hills from points on north side CR lines and from points on the Providence and Stoughton lines (and maybe the Franklin Line, too, if the T chose to set up coordinated schedules for transfers at Readville).

There are quite a few commuter-rail stops in old downtowns that have some jobs and might get more in the future. A couple has jobs in Quincy, so they buy a house down that way. One of them gets a job in Salem. (Imagine that they are National Park rangers at Adams and Salem Natl Historical Parks, if you want, but they could work in any industry.) They don't want to move, and the one with the new job doesn't want to drive through the city twice a day at rush hour. They see a one-seat, or easy-transfer train ride, and take it as the obvious choice. Another couple gets jobs in downtown Providence and downtown Lynn, and decides to live someplace in between because both of them can easily take the train. Etc. Not a huge stream of people, but worth thinking about if we're deciding how to get hte most use out of an NSRL.

CRail wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:41 am Not necessarily true. Reverse services like the 351, Mishawum station, and the 128 area shuttle services from Waltham and Alewife all being significantly utilized serve to prove people are commuting TO there and aren't hellbent on driving. When Biogen launched their own shuttle service there was an article about it in which people commented that they prefer the extra time to rest, read, or get some work done, and there was something to be said for not being able to take on that one extra task the boss dropped on your desk 4 minutes before quitting time because, "sorry I've got a bus to catch." If you're going to do this thing, you're going to have to take into account people commuting to non-urban business districts if you want to maximize utilization in addition to North Shore to Ruggles type trips.

People will certainly find a way to make things work for them if desired. Mishawum handles a handful of people it was kept open by politicians and should have been closed. If a last-mile connection was offered from Anderson/Woburn serving the area instead and Mishawum was closed it would probably change the numbers because there is simply more service there. My point is the last-mile connection is not available in a lot of the suburbs where it is downtown. The state really needs to invest in last-mile connections if they want to see suburb-to-suburb or reverse-commute ridership.

But it really boils down to individual situation and then the quantity that do end up taking advantage of the service offered. Don't get me wrong, reverse-commuting happens, it's just not in the volume people hoped for. All you have to do is look at the 2018 counts. The availability of parking is a factor in that. I don't see suburb-pairing as being anywhere near as popular as people think it will be without that last mile connection. Clearly in the North Shore to Waltham example Route 128 has been a mess in recent years, but you don't see that same example for people from the Lowell Line. Maybe the schedule didn't work, maybe they don't work in the area, or maybe the train just isn't competitive for their situation because their travel time is that much better to start.

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 6:36 pm Interesting to see all lines stopping at Forest Hills on that 1990s map. They should have provisioned Forest Hills with room for another platform to serve one or both of the tracks that don't now have platforms. What would another ten or fifteen feet of width have cost? Millions, I know, but those millions could have paid dividends one day it they made it easy to use CR to get to Forest Hills from points on north side CR lines and from points on the Providence and Stoughton lines (and maybe the Franklin Line, too, if the T chose to set up coordinated schedules for transfers at Readville).

Forest Hills has never been a stop-every-train hub like Ruggles, Porter, or Malden Center. It was served only by Forest Hills and Dedham/Readville locals from the 1890s to its 1940 closure, and only by Needham Line trains from 1973 onwards. While it is a bus hub, it's in a primarily residential area rather than a city (Malden), an area with lots of jobs (Ruggles), or the most direct transfer to one (Porter). I could be proved wrong, but I just don't see it having the ridership to justify additional CR service even with NSRL. That's especially true given that the Orange Line will eventually have to replace Needham Line service to West Roxbury, which means that you'd be stopping high-ridership Providence or Franklin trains.

Forest Hills has never been a stop-every-train hub like Ruggles, Porter, or Malden Center. It was served only by Forest Hills and Dedham/Readville locals from the 1890s to its 1940 closure, and only by Needham Line trains from 1973 onwards.

I know that. But whoever made that 1990s map thought Forest Hills should be a stop on all the commuter rail lines (maybe not all the trains) that passed through there, which I think is interesting and reasonable. I guess you're right that there aren't too many jobs around Forest Hills Station (basically the big state lab, the court house, the Shattuck Hospital, English High, and some little businesses within walking distance), but I would have thought that it made sense to provision a station that was expected to last 50 or 75 years (or whatever) to potentially have the platforms to serve all the lines (maybe not all the tracks) if demand ever warranted it. And maybe the decision not to put in another platform wasn't just cost: the ten or fifteen feet of width to allow another platform would have had to come out of the lower busway and the parking lot, might not have fit between the piers of the old overpass, and might have been impossible to do without demolishing the El Station first; they were pretty close on the southwestern end of the old station, IIRC.

What should where trains stopped in the 1930s make a difference in planning for the 2030s or later?

My point is that Forest Hills has never had the demand to justify stopping Providence or Franklin trains, and that demand isn't likely to appear even if you do start stopping those trains.

At present, if a second platform ever is justified, it won't be difficult to do. Like Ruggles, you just hollow out a platform space from the east wall of the cut. There's plenty of room north of the main station building, across from the existing CR platform.

The EGE wrote: ↑Sun Aug 22, 2021 12:44 am There was one map published in the 90s, but I don't know whether it was the official proposal:

The current proposals have the Old Colony and Greenbush lines not going through NSRL, but the Fairmount Line would. Of course proposals could change.

The majority of NSRL ridership is not going to be suburb to suburb - there aren't many jobs near the suburban stations, and few people are going to commute from the opposite side of Boston.

You're correct, but Boston never annexed parts of the urban core, which include the legally separate but functionally part of Boston Cambridge and Somerville, and you combine that with actually-Boston that extends significantly south of the urban core, and getting people from the right suburb to the right part of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville would be somewhat helpful. True suburb to suburb commutation would become possible, but would be a relatively small part of it's market. More connectivity within the metro area is certainly not a bad thing, however. The core function of NSRL, however, is to get people to the right part of the downtown core without having to transfer, take longer, and clog up the subways, opening up more capacity for others to commute within the city, or to points on the subway that won't be reached by NSRL.

Trinnau wrote: ↑Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:22 pmIt will be hard to pair suburb-to-suburb trips. Last mile connections are a challenge and have been a challenge in the pre-COVID push for "reverse commute" options. That last mile connection exists in the city and a lot of locations are walkable. Plus parking is typically less of an issue in the suburbs as most employers have room at their office buildings for a sizable parking lot with free parking.

100% agree with your basic premise, BUT as a helpful side-effect of NSRL's actual goal, a couple people here and a couple there to oddball station pairings, especially for occasional travel, does start to add up when you have literally hundreds or thousands of station pairings that start to make sense.

For true reverse commutation, where possible bike facilities or parking passes to keep their car (or a second beater) at the station when they're not at work are things that should be looked at on all major transit systems. Probably not something that's going to be super common, but it could be quite helpful as a niche, and every little bit helps.

artman wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:33 amThe whole idea of a Central Station, while admirable, is what will kill any N-S proposal. Yeah, if we could turn back time and start from scratch, that would make perfect sense (and North and South stations would never be built,) but the vast majority of the $$$ in such a proposal could be cut if just a simple way to get rail from here to there was proposed.

The station is a core part of the service to get more people closer to where they are going and get them to use the train in the first place.

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 6:36 pmNot a huge stream of people, but worth thinking about if we're deciding how to get hte most use out of an NSRL.

I think NSRL and frequent electrified service on all lines would change where people live and work over time, so that ridership and general mobility in the region would increase significantly in the decade after it is opened.

It will be a super-duper windfall for some lucky developers...

Two more thoughts about Forest Hills CR service:
1. The thing I was thinking about when I saw that map with all lines stopping at Forest Hills, which I've thought about often before, was that xxxxxxzthere are probably people in Attleboro, Stoughton, Providence, Franklin, etc., who want to go to Forest Hills, and making them change at Ruggles and take the Orange Line back makes their trip a lot less convenient. This idea has nothing to do with whether there's enough demand for more trains between FH and So Sta., but it does depend on whether there are enough jobs or attractions near FH Station to attract passengers.

2. The thing I wasn't thinking about before is that there are a lot of people who live near Forest Hills Station and who might want to get to work someplace on the north side that's not a reasonable subway+bus trip but that they could easily get to in one or two seats if the NSRL were built.

Question: how easy or difficult would it be to set up a pilot of some Stoughton, Franklin, or Providence trains stopping at FH with the current trackwork and signals? Outbound CR trains often run right next to the Forest Hills CR platform anyway. I assume having some inbounds cross over to stop would snarl up the whole railroad, but could they run all the morning trains on the opposite tracks so that some could stop at Forest Hills? If that were a simple thing to do, it might be worth it as a pilot some day.

Adding stops to trains slows them down, with the way the corridor operates right now it makes sense to keep it to the Needham branch which can make the stop on track 5 most of the time instead of track 3. One thing about the corridor is that track 1 operates outbound full-time, track 2 inbound full-time, and track 3 operates in the rush hour direction (inbound in the morning, outbound in the evening) to handle the volume. You can't run all the trains in the peak direction on the same track.

A similar crossover was done for Ruggles until just this year when the track 2 platform finally opened. Select Providence/Stoughton trains crossed over from track 2 across track 1 to track 3 to make an inbound stop in the morning rush hour. The crossovers used are just west of the platform at Forest Hills so it's doable, but the operating group breathed a huge sigh of relief once the platform opened and those crossover moves were eliminated. It also allowed additional stops at Ruggles that were previously limited to certain crossover slots.