Congressman backs North-South rail link; says expanding South Station would be a 'historic mistake'

The stations won't only serve the subway lines, they'll serve three, high-density downtown areas. Beyond connections to the subway platforms, each station will have multiple entrances. Because of their depth, as the escalators ascend, it's possible create long a "horizontal reach", so the many entrances can be spread out over a wide area, with some of them incorporated directly into new or existing buildings. Being very close or better yet, connected to an entrance would be very valuable to developers and valued by passengers, especially during inclement Boston weather.

Passengers will no longer need to change from commuter rail to subway when commuting to destinations anywhere near the three downtown stations. In addition to making it more attractive to commute by rail, this will free up additional capacity on the subways. This is another great benefit that expanding South Station would only make worse. It's not fun to get there now, can you imagine how awful it would be with thousands of more passengers taking the Red Line to South Station?

Another way to look at it, is that the new stations are essentially creating new real estate. It costs a huge amount of money to purchase right-of-way, and many buildings need to be demolished to build track and stations at street level. Deep underground, the land is free for the taking (sort of). So, if you're passing through with new tunnels, it makes economic sense to use the opportunity to carve out another great station in the heart of the city.

And... as if that weren't enough... this plan means there's no longer the need to purchase the Post Office property, and much of the Widett Circle area can be reclaimed for development without needing to be on top of an expensive platform above the existing rail facilities.

So, yes, the Central/Union/Scollay Station is very important — in addition to providing the absolutely essential connection to the Blue Line.

I'd love to see the day when Boston has a world-class transit system. Thinking about the CR and the T as two separate things, instead of part of the same transit system, is part of the problem. Boston itself is very small geographically, with most of the Boston metro area outside the city itself. The transit system has to take the metro area into consideration.

One important contribution of this project is looking at transport _through_ Boston city centre, not just transport _to_ Boston city centre. The north-south disconnect we have now makes it ridiculous to contemplate using public transit to get from, say, Norwood to Malden, Roslindale to Waltham, or Quincy to Lynn. All of these points are well within the Boston metro area - they'd be inside the city itself if Boston's city limits were more typical. All of these would be much quicker drives, as is.

The number of people living within the commuter rail zone, and working within other parts of the commuter rail zone, is greater than the number of people both living and working inside Boston city limits. A huge portion of city and cross-urban traffic is these folks, and their numbers are growing. No number of extra lanes on 128 will help. If we want to keep growing, we have to do something like this.

The reason the trains are infrequent is the stations are at or near capacity. Just electrifying everything won't change that, but through-running will.

But it all depends on what kind of trains we are talking about.

Our current stock with only two doors at the end of each car takes several minutes to embark and disembark passengers, even longer at a low platform station, and even longer than that for a bi-level car.

If we are talking about Metro North-type trains with high platforms, it will obviously be much quicker. Converting lines to electrification and high platforms isn't cheap, but it's where we need to go.

3 minutes is about the limit for moving trains through. However, say 1,000 people are getting off a peak hour train, and then 200 are getting on. Lets do a little math:

Assuming 1 second per person, and 16 doors (8 bilevels, 2 doors per car), that would take just over a minute to get everyone off, and then another 15 seconds to get people on. So the train has to be stopped for at least a minute and a half. And this is being generous. There might be elderly or disabled people who take longer to get off, there might be a door malfunction, etc.

If you time a train unloading people at a busy stop, it takes several minutes normally. Even with a full high-level platform. Even with many doors open. I noticed it all the time at Salem back when I was commuting on the Newburyport line, even after the new station opened. It took several minutes just because of the sheer volume of people who have to shuffle down the aisles and out the doors. Quarter-point doors would help, but the T doesn't have any plans to buy equipment with those, and I for one would like the NSRL to be as compatible with existing equipment as possible. Those Kawasaki bilevels still have plenty of life in them, and bilevels will always be necessary though, for the longer, busier runs.

Basically, I estimated you need 5-6 minutes between scheduled train times because you need to include 3-4 minutes to unload/load at the platform, and probably one minute on either side of that for the train to enter and then clear the block. This is consistent with examples elsewhere. Look at SEPTA, for example. Their 4-track Center City Commuter Connection, which is the exact same idea as our NSRL, handles at its peak 9 tph, spread between two tracks, or 4.5 tph per track. I'm suggesting we handle more than twice that.

You can't realistically think about it like a subway, because a subway is not normally going to be letting 1,000 people off at a time (even downtown, the load is spread between 3-4 stations), does not have as much seating to work around as commuter rail, and is always going to have more, wider doors. Also, subway trains are shorter and lighter than commuter trains, with faster acceleration and braking, and shorter blocks. If we replaced the entire fleet with EMUs we could theoretically design the signal system with shorter blocks, but I don't think we really want commuter trains flooring it, then braking hard repeatedly. That's just asking for people to fall and hurt themselves. That also ignores Amtrak trains, which would be sharing the tunnel.

3 minute headways like you propose (20 tph per track) are only really possible on subway lines with high-density signalling. They're never going to work on commuter rail.

Where things could easily get deferred is with the whole Old Colony + Fairmount lead tunnel.

...which is what I said.

Amtrak will never vacate Southampton; they are hard-up on yard space and the NEC FUTURE studies shine a harsh light on how much more space they're going to need to run those kinds of HSR service levels to Boston. Most likely what you're going to see is that Northeast Regionals all run to Anderson where they can build a yard there big enough to serve those schedules. Southampton then splits the load by handling Acelas, Inland Route trains from Springfield, and Boston-terminating Downeasters so all services have room to grow. Amtrak can't just reverse on the platform without an adjacent yard; they change crews, restock food service, empty the toilets, etc. at the end of each run and there isn't a single slab of land big enough to do that for every single schedule they'll be running here in 2040.

I could definitely see them vacating SHSY. It's constrained and the city would LOVE to have that land for development. There's also plenty of cheap available land right around Anderson/Woburn, where they could build a nice, new, spacious maintenance facility. Take, for example, the northern end of the underutilized parking lot, and the adjacent empty brownfield parcels. That's a much larger space than they have available at SHSY.
And if they do intend to keep servicing Acelas at SHSY, they're going to need to expand it anyway, because the current HST buildings aren't long enough for the new trains being procured. That's part of the reason they decided against expanding the existing Acela sets a few years ago - they'd have to expand the HST maintenance buildings at Sunnyside, Ivy City, and SHSY. So if you have to expand the facility anyway, why not resite it at the same time?

Fairmount can never be rapid transited because it is the last open freight route into Port of South Boston that has the vertical clearances to handle 17 ft. tall industry-standard freight cars. Not only does the state not want to screw over 50-year economic considerations at the ports with a short-sighted decision, but interstate commerce law protects CSX from being involuntarily forced to give up its trackage rights to Southie. Pike tunnel on the Worcester Line and Southwest Corridor tunnel on the NEC are too short for the freights, and the Old Colony will be too short inbound of Braintree when it's electrified. Franklin/Fairmount only need minor clearance touch-up to run freight under wires, so they're it for those overnight freights to the Seaport. Tart up the line with EMU's and nice fat service levels to adequately serve Dorchester and Hyde Park, but it has to stay RR tracks forever and not subway tracks. There's no other way, and not enough land to run both modes side-by-side a la Somerville and the Green Line Extension.

Lets be realistic.. Track 61 is never going to see freight service. There's never going to be enough container volume at Conley to justify it instead of draying to Ayer or Worcester, and there are so many better locations for anything else that requires rail service. CSX could easily be bought out on the state. They clearly don't have any long-term interest in serving Boston proper.
Also - are clearances compromised on the Old Colony main? Because a theoretical routing of anything from Southie could go via Middleborough (daytime slots might be an issue, but they likely wouldn't need to run during the day anyway).