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End of an era in Allston
By adamg on Mon, 03/04/2013 - 9:34pm
A completely abandoned Beacon Park railyard, shot from the air. Harvard is now free to just let it moulder for another 50 years.
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Comments
Yep
It's been like that most of the time for the past couple of weeks. It's kind of eerie, but given what a bad neighbor Beacon Park has been for decades, I can't feel all that nostalgic.
Agree
Yes, they were difficult. I remember the fight to get them to stop running their locomotives all night. Finally the EPA forced them to stop.
Running all night
As recently as last summer they were still parking refrigerator cars, with motors that run 24 hours a day, on the tracks closest to the abutting houses - this has been a summertime problem as long as I can remember.
The dream....
A West Station with bona fide high speed rail over the Inland Route to NYC, Springfield, Pittsfield and Albany (with connections from there to Montreal, since NH seems to not want any part of the more direct route) and a major connection for an RER-like train from 128 to West Station (stops along the way), then over the Grand Junction and into Cambridge with connections to the red line, and North Station. Transit-oriented developments and improvements that connect Longwood, BU, MIT, Kendall and Harvard's Cambridge assets. Improvements to the riverfront for recreation.
Oh, what could be....
Give it up
Building stuff is for new countries, like China, not for empires in decline.
Wrong Direction
So sad.
When the whole country, and especially this city should be increasing freight rail connections, they do the opposite. First the old B+O yard went down, now Beacon Park.
Moving operations to Worcester is not helpful, because much of the freight still needs to get to/from Boston. Hope everyone likes hundreds of extra trucks on the road. But I suppose it was inevitable, since Boston is a paltry excuse of the port town it used to be. There used to be freight trains going right to the waterfront, but now it's all lost to history.
The trucks were on the road either way
Beacon Park was an intermodal terminal, so they dispatched trucks from the yard. Whether the trucks are based in Worcester or in Allston doesn't make much of a difference to shipments from thousands of miles away (over land), for which intermodal freight rail shipping is king.
What does make a difference is the 2nd track and plenty of slots opened up for increased service on the Framingham/Worcester line and who knows, maybe even a frequent Newton/Brighton/Downtown shuttle.
It's official! Matthew endorses my RER-like line (see above).
and, dammit, that means something! I now need roadman and a few others, and, dammit again, it might be the RER-revolution massacre with four part harmony (with apologies to Arlo Guthrie)!
Nothing new
That's my main reason for supporting the North/South rail link. But the details do matter ... a lot. So I'd have to see it in depth before endorsing anything specific ;)