Scrapping what's there now will only save money if the corridor ever comes back. Every single piece of the physical plant will need to be replaced regardless.
CPF363 wrote:Given that this BOS-MTL route basically has never been spoken of again since the day it appeared on that 1st-term Obama Admin. map...probably not anyone's idea of a priority. It really offers little to no advantage over the current BOS-MTL proposal over the Inland Route and Conn River, so NH's inclusion on that map was little more than a nod to spreading the pork to +1 states. It had poor, poor odds of ever coming to fruition because large parts of the route made no sense given the Northern's craptacular geometry. And this is a state that refuses to spend a penny towards either of its existing Amtrak routes, refuses to spend real awarded fed study money towards its own Cap Corridor service, and figures to continue losing population through 2050 as everywhere outside the cities ages well below replacement-rate...so the structural-political barriers are pretty hopeless.F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:Northern isn't included here because the rail removal pre-dates that corridor's federal designation as a Boston-Montreal candidate, and the official VTrans-NHDOT feasibility study on that route.If the Northern has the federal designation as a Boston-Montreal candidate, one would think that this would be justification to retain any part of the line that rails on to include the Concord to Boscawen section so that if there was an interest to bringing service back, this would be one less section that would have to be completely restored.
Right now the ongoing NNIRI study for Boston-Montreal on the Boston-Springfield-WRJ alignment, preferred alternative with Class 4 full-signalized track (subject to what speeds the Worcester Hills & Green Mountains will bear), projects a travel time of 9:03...less any savings on the Canadian side of the border for Quebec-funded track improvements out-of-scope for the study. The VTrans-NHDOT joint study on the Northern came out to 8:55 BOS-MTL on the North Station-Concord-WRJ alignment on Class 4 "low-speed case" track...less any out-of-scope Quebec improvements.
The Northern study then benchmarked "mid speed" Class 6 (w/ curve restrictions) schedules of best-case 6 hours and "high speed" Class 6 (w/ tilt and perfect ROW geometry) of 4:30, but did not go into any milepost-by-milepost detail on where you would find such pristine running conditions. Let alone how they'd ever be applicable to the twisty and crossing cluster-prone Northern ROW (probably have to chuck 95% of the Northern alignment and go with cleanrooming along I-89 for laws of physics to net anything close to ≤ 6 hrs.). And they didn't explain how these schedules would ever stay in balance running really really fast in NH then running really slow on the same old Central VT after crossing the VT state line. NNIRI did ballpark a Class 5 max-build scenario that would've done 90 MPH on the Palmer-Springfield, Northampton-Greenfield, and Allburgh-Cantic straightaways...right down to the mileposts in question. But they ruled it surplus-to-requirement for starter service; working with Quebec on speed upgrades other side of the border was more outright schedule-meaningful, and the latter two segments weren't nearly as important a future consideration as PAL-SPG co-used by the Inlands.
NNIRI cited a pot of ~450K annual boardings on the slate of schedules poking north-of-Springfield (i.e. excludes the Inlands), divvied up between the traditional Montrealer, BOS-MTL, and the third proposed frequency of a short-turn from New Haven to St. Albans or MTL. Revenues further bolstered by cross-ticketing transfers from regular Inlands or Shuttles at SPG to/from a north-of-SPG schedule.
The NHDOT-VTrans study projected 213K annual boardings on the BOS-CON-MTL corridor...more than the one BOS-SPG-MTL service pattern in isolation but bereft of all the "tinker toy" layering and economies of scale that lets the Inlands carry the water for all the north-of-SPG fun and games. Concerningly, the NH study only projected an anemic 13.5K annual end-to-end BOS-MTL boardings, suggesting that most of their 213K total riders were going to be intra-corridor only...most likely big turnovers between BOS-CON, CON-WRJ, and the WRJ-MTL overlap with the Vermonter. Well, OK...that puts a giant exclamation point on building Cap Corridor commuter rail yesterday, and shows that trips originating inside NH to VT/MTL can give Concord Coach buses a run for their money. But it hints that 'true' BOS-MTL city-to-city demand may well be a mirage, and that nonspecific region-wide demand may be the stronger force...weighted towards a more diverse pooling of routes like the "tinker toys" @ Springfield hub. There's not a lot of such pooling to be had in NH. And it also underscores what exurban depopulation is going to keep doing to interior NH for another generation or two...on-line ridership between Concord and WRJ where most of the build $$$ has to be spent is a virtual nil.
Not sure how anyone could reasonably consider the Northern when you get the same exact thing out of Boston on the NNIRI plan AND have the same track work facilitate the Inland Route and more conventional Vermonter/Montrealer revenue boosts. Especially if the devil in the details says the real ridership demand from New England to Montreal is large...but not very pair-specific favoring one killshot end-to-end route over another. That Northern line on the map looked like a real reach when it first appeared. Now the ridership and cost math is being drilled down to at very detailed levels and it's beginning to look like no amount of pay-to-play enthusiasm on NH's part could've ever justified a further look. Let's get the North-South Rail Link built and give the Cap Corridor some Lynchburger-style NE Regionals to chew on; that's intercity service they can really make hay with.
