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.