Readville Bridge Construction

From the MBTA website (two weekend project):

<<BOSTON - Construction work begins next weekend, Nov. 4-6 and the following weekend, to replace the Shore Line Bridge along the Fairmount/Franklin Commuter Rail Line, resulting in temporarily altered service for travelers.

The bridge, located in the Readville section of Hyde Park providing service to Franklin, is over the Amtrak Northeast corridor which provides service to Providence station. Bridge replacement work will take place over the weekend of November 4-6, and November 11-13.

At about 11 p.m. on Thursday, November 3, the Fairmount upper Station and the bridge will be taken out of service. The Franklin Branch will be taken out of service around 9:00 p.m. on Friday, November 4. Shuttle service will be provided from Friday night, November 4, through Sunday, November 6, with commuter rail service resuming on Monday, November 7, at 4:00 a.m.

The contractor will be working around the clock starting Thursday, November 3, at 11:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m., Monday, November 7, to demolish the existing bridge and put in place the proposed new bridge. The existing bridge will be removed Friday night into Saturday morning and the new bridge will be placed Saturday night into Sunday morning.

The following weekend, the Franklin Line will again be taken out of service around 9:00 p.m. so that the contractor can perform work on the east approach slab and bring the bridge work to completion. A bus bridge and shuttle service will be provided, with service resuming on Sunday, November 13, at 4:00 p.m.>>

I walked by this morning - it's the first time in months that I haven't seen anyone on the site. They must all be over at Cappy's having a lets-get-started beer before the job begins.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:

highgreen215 wrote:I wonder if Amtrak would run diesel over the Dorchester Branch to avoid the bridge replacement operation - swap diesel for electric further down the line.

On a weekend in early November when nothing special is going on in Boston? Not likely. They'd run double-ended and shuttle-bus it from 128 station or bail out in Providence rather than have to a T engineer board at 128 to escort them over the Fairmount Line where there's no AMTK crews to be had out of D.C. or NYP who are qualified on that track (if anyone is at all it's probably just a couple Southampton Yard homebodies). If it were a weekday, Veteran's Day weekend a week from now, or the weekend before Thanksgiving it might be a different story...but this is a sufficiently dead spot on the calendar with softer-than-usual demand.


There's no service bulletins posted on the Amtrak website, so deck will have to have been cleared from the tracks by daybreak or else they would've announced something by now. Acela hasn't been cancelled either, so that means the wires will be turned on and Regionals also won't need to engine-switch to diesel at New Haven.

The only train that required modification was 178 and the plan was to cap the electric with a diesel and send it along its way up. Amtrak has plenty of BOS crews qualified on the DB so no T pilot would be necessary, WAS crews don't come this far and 178 is BOS crew.

I walked up to the bridge last night at 9:00, and they were just starting to work. When I went back at 11:00 this morning (Saturday), the old bridge was down, and the crane was connected to the new bridge. I could see green re-bar at the bridge location, so they must be pouring concrete before they put the new bridge in place. Its' a poor photo, but the lighting was bad for my laptop.

I stopped by myself. It's so strange seeing Readville without that old trestle, it's like someone missing a front tooth. The Frankln "shuttle" to Boston is parked on the hill awaiting its next bus load from Dedham Corp. The Readville / Fairmount train is using a temp platform well short of the construction zone.

Was just over there taking pictures and talking to one of the work crew. They will be putting the new bridge in at 2AM Sunday Nov. 6. They have to wait until the last Amtrak train goes through so they can shut down the corridor to swing the new bridge over the tracks. The large crane is sitting on the Franklin Line tracks, bolstered by a couple truckloads of stone. The new bridge is already hooked to the crane, waiting for 2AM

The bridge is in:
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And the old one's sitting in the parking lot:
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Great pictures, thanks for sharing. It appears the new bridge won't go "live" until after next weekend as they need to do some approach work etc. The T posted a notice that shuttle busses will be used again the weekend of 11/11-13.

Does that mean all Franklin-Fairmount expresses are using the NEC, and that CSX is backing up onto the NEC to reach the freight yard?

Very good question, and I had the same question myself. I haven't observed either in person yet myself. I rode through this morning on a Franklin train and the track leading from the Franklin Branch to the new bridge was indeed barricaded with construction activity.

F Line, I guess this answers your question:

<<Due to track and a mechanical issue Franklin Train 790 (4:55 am from Forge Park) will not make stops at Fairmount through Newmarket. A shuttle bus will replace service.

Affected stops:
Fairmount
Morton Street
Talbot Avenue
Four Corners
Uphams Cnr
Newmarket

Last updated: Nov 08 2016 05:21 AM >>

Answer to question #2: Last night I saw a CSX freight come East through Canton Junction around 5:30PM (highly unusual to see freight on that section of the NEC). They must be sending that run from Walpole to Mansfield, then on the NEC to Readville.

There's still one extremely small customer on the Stoughton Line off the two back-to-back sidings a couple hundred feet north of Central St. Gets served run-as-directed from Readville as a tack-on to the 3- (4?) afternoons-per-week Home Depot Warehouse job on the Westwood Industrial. Though Canton-Stoughton runs are increasingly infrequent and unpredictable since the other more reliable customer on those Stoughton sidings relocated to Middleboro Yard last year. Unless they were going over Canton Viaduct--which truly is extremely rare mileage for a freight--what you saw was the typical Stoughton local.

No, this was not the Stoughton CSX train (which does indeed run a couple days per week, usually mid-day when there are no Commuter Trains on the Stoughton Branch). This was indeed CSX with two locos and about 15 cars coming east on the NEC mainline from Mansfield via Sharon, over the Canton Viaduct and onto Readville.

Track speed over the new bridge is set at 30 mph