sicariis wrote:NHPR's Exchange did another episode on NH Commuter Rail, including a short segment with Patricia Quinn from NNEPRA (in the last 10 minutes or so). This got me thinking about would it be possible to contract with NNEPRA to run the service? New Hampshire is part of Northern New England. This would be from Concord, NH to Boston North with intermediate stops in (Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, and could Discharge/Receive at Woburn) instead of just resigning to the fact that service would be through MBTA. Lack of Amtrak rolling stock comes to mind, and you're going to need a storage facility in Concord,NH but Im guessing MBTA would also be looking for something similar as well.
http://nhpr.org/post/new-hampshire-cons ... n#stream/0
No dice, because the MBTA already secured perpetual trackage rights to Concord in the Pan Am land swap deal for the Green Line Extension and Northpoint redevelopment properties in Cambridge. Somewhere on board search is the linky to the exact text & legalese of that STB docket on the motherlode of properties and rights exchanged...which included perpetual rights for the Wachusett extension of the Fitchburg Line, perpetual rights for the now-cancelled Plaistow extension of the Haverhill Line, and perpetual passenger rights on the Worcester Main between Ayer and Barbers (for functional purpose of gaining a backup route for north-south equipment swaps). Other passenger carriers are only allowed if the T waives its right of first refusal on a new service start or sub-contracts intrastate service out to another operator. Neither case extinguishes the T's perpetual rights and primacy, so they can evict any waived or sub-contracted operator at-will. The T is also pre-approved for its own service starts by Pan Am and doesn't have to ask new permission; any third wheels are going to need both the T's blessing to sub-lease and a whole fresh round of PAR rights.
Note this well when Boston Surface Rwy. makes another round of big promises to excite uninformed local lawmakers. Not only do they have to somehow secure T permission on the T-owned portion of the NH Main south of the border, and T + LRTA permission for access to T-operated/LRTA-owned Lowell Station...but they are equally subservient to the T for all running miles in NH. They can get blocked everywhere if the T doesn't like the cut of their jib...and it won't matter how much PAR
likes the cut of their jib. For NNEPRA...the charter prerequisites of tying NH into them for funding and governance on a route that doesn't touch Maine all come first before you can pose any what-if's. That agency really isn't set up to "Pilgrim Agreement" somebody else for straight-up mercenary cash; it took the magic cloak of Amtrak membership to muscle all the Downeaster agreements that spliced MA and ME together into a perpetual-rights corridor with an NH participation opt-out.
The T also
needs Nashua. Lowell is the only line on the system longer than ~15 miles that lacks its own layover yard, so it is the #1 loss leader on the entire system in no-revenue and low-revenue equipment miles because of all the deadheads and near-empty revenue extras that have to be run every day to balance equipment. By a wide margin over the next-worst line. There's no space for a layover yard in Lowell; PAR already dumped all the old freight yards as redevelopment property holds. So the only place to go is Nashua, where the downtown freight yard is only half-used and PAR has already given verbal commitment to leasing the T space in the yard. Former T GM Rich Davey once said on-record that Lowell-Nashua is the one CR extension he would build full-speed-ahead even if the agency found its finances in such a long-term crunch that all other extensions had to be curtailed. It does that much good at keeping northside ops costs--already way too high--from continuing to fly off-scale.
So you'll probably get an enthusiastic T reception if NH or City of Nashua can get
anything moving on any permutation of a border poke. It doesn't have to be the full-build option of pair of stations at the Mall/South Nashua + the property the City purchased for the Crown St. downtown stop. Put anything barebones on that side of the state line so there's a mechanism for enacting Nashua layover (which the T can't legally pay for without an NH gov't partner to launder through), commit to it for-real without getting gun-shy one election day later, and MA will be game for it. MassDOT will be spending a bunch anyway this coming decade on the 2 miles of NH Main between Lowell Station and N. Chelmsford Jct. to upgrade freight clearances for Ayer-Portland double-stack, so one-third of the MA route miles between Lowell and the border are going to get a major makeover with or without passenger service. And it's not
that expensive a total price tag for getting to the border to begin with since this is all present-day Class 3 signalized track, so they'd crave an opportunity to lump some freight grant funding streams into a wad with the passenger proposal to crest their purchasing power on this shared-use corridor.
