by newpylong
Scrapping what's there now will only save money if the corridor ever comes back. Every single piece of the physical plant will need to be replaced regardless.
Railroad Forums
Moderator: MEC407
CPF363 wrote:Given that this BOS-MTL route basically has never been spoken of again since the day it appeared on that 1st-term Obama Admin. map...probably not anyone's idea of a priority. It really offers little to no advantage over the current BOS-MTL proposal over the Inland Route and Conn River, so NH's inclusion on that map was little more than a nod to spreading the pork to +1 states. It had poor, poor odds of ever coming to fruition because large parts of the route made no sense given the Northern's craptacular geometry. And this is a state that refuses to spend a penny towards either of its existing Amtrak routes, refuses to spend real awarded fed study money towards its own Cap Corridor service, and figures to continue losing population through 2050 as everywhere outside the cities ages well below replacement-rate...so the structural-political barriers are pretty hopeless.F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:Northern isn't included here because the rail removal pre-dates that corridor's federal designation as a Boston-Montreal candidate, and the official VTrans-NHDOT feasibility study on that route.If the Northern has the federal designation as a Boston-Montreal candidate, one would think that this would be justification to retain any part of the line that rails on to include the Concord to Boscawen section so that if there was an interest to bringing service back, this would be one less section that would have to be completely restored.
b&m 1566 wrote:I'm curious as to why Pan Am didn't seek to abandon Concord to Penacook in 2009 when they took over the Concord operations; they abandoned that last remaining section of the C&C branch at that time. It makes me wonder if there was some business potential at the time. I know in one of my long-ago discussions with Mr. Peter Dearness, he mentioned that interested parties looking for rail service in Penacook, would popup from time to time but nothing ever materialized.Probably playing keep-away with NEGS, since they were clearly in some sort of spite mode with that move to pull the rug out from under them on the mainline. '09 was also the same timeframe the M&B spat on the Hillbilly Branch had gotten real stupid and petty, so they seemed to be in a foul state of mind in general along the Cap Corridor. Always been a fruitless exercise to try to guess the Billericadome's motives when they're in the middle of a snit like that, so file under "old habits die hard". Yeah, there've been rumors about customers before. Most of them didn't have a lot of smoke behind them. And most involved such tiny number of carloads given what insignificant properties abut the ROW that it was hard to see the upside in chasing such rumors.
Rockingham Racer wrote:And here I thought all along that the Northern was the designated high-speed route from Boston to Montreal.Objectively it has zero, nada going for it as a MTL route because the B&A + Conn River "L"-shaped route is near-equal on studied travel time, way less costly to operate because of the bootstrap on pre-existing route demand, and much higher growth ceiling because it travels areas where population is growing (Worcester to Brattleboro) vs. the rapidly depopulating exurban & rural NH.
It is ordered:Is this an atypical STB response to a RR's request to abandon and salvage a long out-of-use line?
1. This proceeding is reopened.
2. Upon reconsideration, the notice served and published in the Federal Register on February 1, 2017, exempting the abandonment of the line described above is subject to the conditions that B&M shall: (1) notify NGS at least 90 days prior to beginning any salvage activities that will disturb or destroy any geodetic station markers to plan for the possible relocation of the geodetic station markers; (2) prior to the commencement of any salvage activities, consult with the Corps regarding the potential impact of salvage activities on waterways and wetlands, and comply with the reasonable recommendations of the Corps; and (3) prior to the commencement of any salvage activities, consult with DES regarding the potential impact of salvage activities on water quality, and comply with the reasonable recommendations of DES.