Red Line Derailment This Morning

When I got off the train at South Station this morning and headed for the Red Line, the signs read "No Red Line; Use Shuttle Bus". A T Customer Service person told me there had been a derailment at Park Street, and there was no Red Line service between Harvard and Broadway.

My question is this: since South Station is such an important transfer point, why turn Red Line trains at Broadway? For that matter, why not turn them at Downtown Crossing?

Update: according to universalhub.com, it was a maintenance vehicle that derailed at Park Street and took out the third rail.

There’s no good place to park buses at DTX, and there are few good places to park buses at South Station — especially during AM rush.

In that part of the Red Line, crossovers are located just south of Broadway, just north of Park Street, and just north of Kendall. Since the derailment happened at Park Street, the crossovers there were likely inaccessible. There's also the question of third rail power sections - it seems like anything that happens in the downtown core affects that entire stretch, so it's likely it's all one power section. If third rail power needs to be shut off anywhere in there, it seems to always involve trains turning at Harvard and Broadway on either end of the trouble.

South station has a bus station. You would think that would be a good place to park & start buses. The old Trailways terminal across the street would have been even better since it was at ground level. Oh well, so much better to have a park.

But South Station, despite what is above, is useless as a subway terminal because the nearest crossover to reverse the direction of trains is almost a mile away and subway signaling is not bi-directional.

The power section issue is the bigger one. The sections are large, and whenever there's an emergency response (not necessarily the case in this incident), responders want adjacent sections de-energized as well to avoid a train bridging the gap and energizing the dead section (whether or not that's actually possible is another discussion). This is why, whenever the Fire Dept is on the ROW in the downtown area, shuttle service runs from from Harvard all the way to JFK.

I should question why the power system has not been brokein into smaller sections by now.

BandA wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2024 3:40 pm South station has a bus station. You would think that would be a good place to park & start buses. The old Trailways terminal across the street would have been even better since it was at ground level. Oh well, so much better to have a park.

It's at least a quarter-mile walk from the South Station Red Line platforms to the South Station bus terminal. And when the Trailways terminal existed, there wouldn't have been enough gates to stage shuttle buses.

The crossover used to be at the south end of South Station. I imagine it was installed when South Station Under was the terminal. When they started to lengthen the platforms to six cars and added flood doors, it was moved to the northbound side.