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Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New England

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 #1383381  by theseaandalifesaver
 
Sorry in advance if a thread for this already exists.

I recently started a job in the Seaport District near the IDB and was curious what the extent of the "active" portion of the track 61 is. From the looks of it from Google Maps the portion of the active tracks runs parallel directly next to the IDB and is in the process of being redeveloped and clearly without future rail service in mind.

Is this in fact not the ROW that will possibly become the Indigo Line?
 #1383425  by BostonUrbEx
 
None of Track 61 is envisioned as being part of the Indigo Line. The Indigo Line is just a marketing name for high[er] frequency Fairmount Line service. Track 61 is under MassPort's oversight up to Tide St -- beyond that, MassPort has no interest nor care what happens to the line. The do, however, have interest in running the line up Tide St to Fid Kennedy Ave for a marine/warehouse terminal of some sort.

Of note, one rail was removed from the Cypher St crossing at some time during this past winter. Nothing can get past Cypher St, now. I don't believe CSX uses the yard over by Alger St (Neponset Yard?) anymore, though the MBTA was/is briefly using it to store unwanted equipment. I believe Screamers that were set for retirement.
 #1383434  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
Cypher St. crossing was paved over as a temp measure to fix the potholes in advance of the IndyCar event (now cancelled) that was supposed to happen in the Seaport this summer. They're scheduled to redo the crossing at some point. Cypher St. yard that runs along the entire west side of the Convention Center was used for awhile as a staging area for the MBTA to assemble track panels, so it saw occasional hi-rail activity. That seems to have stopped; the discarded panels littering the yard haven't moved on Google in close to 5 years.


Massport has plans to build rail access to Marine Terminal (a nearly empty slab of land at the northeast corner of the Seaport) to handle bulk cargo and cold storage shipments. Dependent on them first finishing the Harbor dredging project for Panmax ships, so probably will be no action on prelim design of the facility for another 3-5 years or construction starts for 5-8 years. Track 61 would get re-routed from the current end of Massport ownership and brought 2 blocks north and 2 blocks east. Probably with some combination of street reconfiguration for a single-track reservation and some street-running. There was an outdated concept plan circulating online several years ago from some engineering study firm that had a potential track schematic and bullet list of terminal operations plan sketched out, but it's long gone now.


The current street-running section of Track 61 down Drydock Ave. has no business potential. World Trade Center/Boston Design Center has flipped to mainly high-end office space and retail to serve the expanded cruise ship terminal there, so what scraps of shippers are left there are being quickly forced out. The environmental remediation and re-zoning of empty Marine Terminal to open that land for business is part of the long-range plan (dating back 20+ years) to reorganize the port. Reserve Channel down the street from the Convention Center has the cruise ships, the Silver Line bus, and the 'hip' stuff...Main Channel at the end of the trucking haul road has all the fresh-catch seafood warehouses and the 'ugly' stuff. So the tracks that run through all the Drydock Ave. parking lots are probably going to get paved over.


No rail access is planned...yet...for Conley container terminal on the south end of Reserve Channel. They haven't had rail access since Conrail stopped running 25+ years ago on a mile's worth of street-running track spurred off of Cypher St. running down E. 1st St. That terminal has a large expansion project underway and a new haul road under construction to shorten travel times to the main truck haul road north of the channel and keep the trucks off city streets. The haul road is being built with enough of a side median to provision for a single track into the terminal if it's ever needed in the future. In which case they'd split Track 61 at the point where the current alignment curves onto Drydock Ave. and the new Marine Terminal alignment turns north...send the Conley spur onto a trestle across Reserve Channel next to the Summer St. bridge, and curve it immediately upon touchdown onto the new haul road. No imminent business demand has been identified for container rail access since the goods coming into Conley are skewed much more appropriately to trucking drayage distance. But they have the option to introduce rail if market conditions change in the future.
 #1383553  by Sir Ray
 
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:That terminal has a large expansion project underway and a new haul road under construction to shorten travel times to the main truck haul road north of the channel and keep the trucks off city streets. The haul road is being built with enough of a side median to provision for a single track into the terminal if it's ever needed in the future. In which case they'd split Track 61 at the point where the current alignment curves onto Drydock Ave. and the new Marine Terminal alignment turns north...send the Conley spur onto a trestle across Reserve Channel next to the Summer St. bridge, and curve it immediately upon touchdown onto the new haul road.
This diagram of the Conley Terminal improvements and Dedicated Freight Corridor is from 2013, but it doesn't seem to have any median reserved for future rail ROW noted on the map. Has this plan been updated since?
 #1383562  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
Sir Ray wrote:
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:That terminal has a large expansion project underway and a new haul road under construction to shorten travel times to the main truck haul road north of the channel and keep the trucks off city streets. The haul road is being built with enough of a side median to provision for a single track into the terminal if it's ever needed in the future. In which case they'd split Track 61 at the point where the current alignment curves onto Drydock Ave. and the new Marine Terminal alignment turns north...send the Conley spur onto a trestle across Reserve Channel next to the Summer St. bridge, and curve it immediately upon touchdown onto the new haul road.
This diagram of the Conley Terminal improvements and Dedicated Freight Corridor is from 2013, but it doesn't seem to have any median reserved for future rail ROW noted on the map. Has this plan been updated since?
Massport owns the lobersterman's co-op parcel, and has an I.O.U. to relocate them to other digs when it wants to use that land. Then NStar finally put the power plant up for sale 2 months ago after nearly a decade of dropping hints. Massport's seeking to purchase the Channel-facing slice of the NStar land with oil tanks on it, since that's now bisected into an irregular shape behind the haul road and has access issues for any private redev. The remainder of the 18 acres facing E. 1st St. and Summer are all going up for mixed use redevelopment once the Boston Redevelopment Authority has its say, and that "buffer open space" will be extended all the way west along the haul road to where the substation currently is. The extended buffer is the reservation, and that leaves just the small trestle along the haul road and larger trestle along Summer St. to complete the link to Track 61.

The NStar site is going to take a looooooong time to redevelop because of the site remediation considerations. It was given extensive decade-long cleanup and a clean bill of heath from the EPA...but only for continued power plant use. Not the mixed commercial/residential that all of the interested developers and BRA want as a max-value investment, and that South Boston is demanding as a complement to a very much mixed part of the neighborhood. The EPA has to rule on what parts of the site are clean for what use and what level of additional remediation is needed on the rest of it...and only then is it going to transact and start the planning process between the new developers and the BRA. Odds are overwhelming that Massport will have quietly pocketed that back slice months if not a year-plus before there's an announcement on the rest, and odds are even more overwhelming that it'll be sitting vacant for 10-12 years while landowner and city stare at each other over who's going to pay what for what amount of residential environmental remediation. It'll make some of the Seaport parcels that have been languishing as parking lots for 15 years seem positively brisk at sprouting new buildings.


So by the time they finally start clearing out the crabgrass to erect something all feel-goody and mixed-usey, Massport will probably have a good read on whether our brave new PANMAX world has moved the needle at all on future rail demand prospects for Conley. The last time they studied it in 2005 CSX was still 4 years away from even agreeing to leave Beacon Park. Whether the prospects will have improved much, the second full decade of real intermodal rail in Massachusetts and first full decade of PANMAX ships in Massachusetts is probably a good enough time to re-study and see if there's enough there-there to spring for 2 squat trestles over the Channel and hook 'er up.
 #1387934  by Trainman101
 
Any numbers on how many containers are trucked from Conley to Worcester to be sent by train? I would imagine it's only a handful if any. I'm guessing that most of the Conley containers are pretty much for new England area. Without a double stack route out of boston it's hard to see any chance of Conley grabbing any of the containers from say the bigger ports on the east coast.