Indigo Line to Seaport District

a_tortoise

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Now that we have a new governor, it seems like a good time to revisit the goal of improving the Indigo line. Given the long headways for the existing Fairmount/Indigo line stations, the area could benefit from several improvements which would truly transform the line into a rapid transit line:
  • New DMU or EMU Trains: Replacing the existing commuter rail trains with DMU’s or preferably EMU’s along the entirety of the Indigo Line would greatly improve the frequency of transit service in this corridor.
  • New Convention Center Terminus: Rerouting the Indigo line along the South Boston Bypass Road to terminate at the Convention Center would greatly expand mass transit access to the Seaport district from the south, while relieving some of the overcrowding at South Station. It could be achieved by adding a viaduct that would cross from the existing Indigo Line route to the track running along the South Boston Bypass Road.
  • 3 New Indigo Line Stations: Adding stations at Dorchester Ave, Channel Center, and the Convention Center along the South Boston Bypass Road would greatly improve access to three neighborhoods that are currently experiencing rapid development.
  • New Red Line Transfer Station: A new Red Line transfer station could be added at the Corner of Dorchester Avenue and the South Boston Bypass Road to ensure easy access from the Indigo Line to downtown Boston and beyond, while enabling further high-density development along Dorchester Avenue.
  • DMU/EMU Maintenance Yard: Adding a new DMU/EMU maintenance yard at the recently purchased Widett Circle land could facilitate the reconfiguration of the Indigo Line
The aggregate of these changes would greatly improve mass transit access for many Boston neighborhoods, and the right of way for this transformation already exists.

Indigo Line Routing.JPG
 
I dug up one of @F-Line to Dudley's most concise take-downs of Track 61 proposals. F-Line has spent a great many posts railing (no pun) against Track 61 proposals and this one doesn't cover all of the points but it has many of them, especially why it cannot be dual-mode tracked. I've split it in two because it exceeds the modern character limit. Original Post in context.
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade


I tried responding to Ari's blog post on this about doing a time-separation job on Track 61, but it ate my reply. Here's the killer problem:

Mainline rail and LRT/HRT use different wheel profiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_train_and_tram_tracks. They aren't fully compatible, as you can see from the diagram, because the rails and wheels are ground to a different performance profile. A trolley can run on RR tracks at a rail museum no-foul because any of their cars would only run a few times a day at restricted speed and limited-liability. And Norfolk Southern freights do run on a tiny few-block end section of Newark Light Rail's newest branch where the last couple stops shut down early for the evening once or twice a week so one last freight customer beyond the terminal stop can be served; they turn the overhead off and do a light engine move at 5 MPH. But the escalated derailment and mechanical wear risk from the incompatibility is too high for acceptable quality control on an all-day public transit service, and too high for the 7-night-a-week port freight that CSX will eventually be running to Marine Terminal. There are extremely few examples worldwide where a transit system will even hold its nose and play with that fudge factor, because it just chews up empty-calorie maint costs.


The only ways around this are:

1) Order trolleys with a RR wheel profile, like NJ Transit does with the RiverLINE. Those trolleys would be completely incompatible with Green/Red/Orange/Blue/Mattapan, meaning you would never get thru-running. When the RiverLINE's service growth makes it ripe to graduate to electrification and switchover from piggish DLRV's to regular stock LRV's, NJT will buy Hudson-Bergen/Newark -clone rolling stock for it...but they'll still be fitted with the RR wheel profile and won't be able to pool with the rest of the agency's light rail division.


2) Order or modify stock with dual-profile wheelsets, at additional complexity. This is done in a *few* places worldwide (examples given in the Wikipedia article), and is done in a few places--most notably SEPTA's weird-tech Norristown High Speed Line--that retain legacy design cruft from long gone days where the vehicles used to interline with time-separated freight. But note that very few places bother to do it at all, because past a certain service scale it's more cost-effective to go for full traffic separation and fully orthodox rolling stock. Or they only do the dual-profile wheels as a short-lived transitional era. All it takes is a once-over with a rail grinder to change the profile at the track level from RR to tram/metro, so nobody bothers keeping dual-profile wheel sets for one second longer than they absolutely have to and nearly always gravitate to full-orthodox tram/metro wheels as soon as they can achieve traffic separation. If the RiverLINE's freight ever goes 100% extinct, you can bet your bottom-dollar that NJ Transit's going to immediately re-grind the rails and switch its vehicle to fully orthodox tram-profile wheels so the whole statewide light rail division is under one maximum-scale interchangeable spec.
 
Part 2 of 2
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
Where does this become lethal for Track 61? Not because it's such a pain to retrofit for dual wheel profiles. That's pretty simple. It's the limited scale that kills it, on account of Track 61 already being a niche prospect before even counting up the whittling-down effects.

  • Dual-profile wheel retrofits are probably too much to ask for on the fragile 75-year-old PCC fleet (per Ari's blog suggestion for fleet reassignment).

  • The Type 7's just came back from rebuild with all-new trucks under parts & service warranty for 10 more years. Going 'off- instruction manual' with new kludges--whether fully feasible or not--is not going to be kosher with the warranty they need to keep those brand new parts serviceable for the 10-15 years those vehicles have to remain a backbone fleet.

  • LOL! on running the Bredas in any situation that could ever make them derail more often than they already do.

  • Setting aside 6 out of 200+ cars to maintain with different wheel sets runs into the same problem as setting aside 10 old-timey PCC's in a modern fleet of 200+ cars. The maint scale is terrible, and an agency with dire staffing problems can't maintain enough people's qualifications for those components to get the Track 61 fleet promptly repaired. If keeping the PCC's long-term at all requires them to be gutted/rebuilt as fully orthodox and modern under the hood, then uncorking another component fragmentmentation instance in an even more niche setting flunks the cost-benefit test even worse than Mattapan.

  • Interlining. Will never ever happen between Track 61 and the Green Line, so all your dreams of planting the flag here as a placeholder first then stringing together something grander are for naught. We already have enough LRV design quirks forced by the 1897 Central Subway that there's no way dual-profile wheels across the whole system are ever going to be thrown in as the cherry on top of all the other quirks that contort fleet design costs. Track 61 is nowhere near value-added enough to do battle with that dragon on a new front. There's a very good reason that Urban Ring Phase II LRT concepts throw trolley tracks in the Haul Road in mixed truck traffic instead of widening the freight reservation. Note also this is the exact reason why any LRT hybridization of the Grand Junction through Cambridge is verboten until you completely remove the branch from the FRA rail network...no can do there from the Central Subway.

  • Freight & freight legalities. CSX still retains freight rights the full length of Track 61, and cannot be pressured or compelled to give them up against its will per about 2 centuries of interstate commerce law. Massport also has fully articulated plans to build out mission-critical port rail service to Marine Terminal after the Harbor is dredged for PanMax ships, with CSX already agreeing to serve it on a daily overnight out of Readville if Massport produces the business. Unlike those 4 blocks of Newark Light Rail trolley track that Norfolk Southern traverses couple times a week to switch one local customer with 3 or 4 cars, 1.5 miles of Track 61 every night handling 20+ car multimodal loads at an international shipping terminal with Customs and insurance processing is not going to be red-tape kosher. There is literally nothing the City or any local biz interest could offer these players in indemnification to make it worth their while for the freights to take on 100% of the maint and derailment risk. They all (but none more than CSX) crap bigger'n City of Boston. Stop any abject fantasies of "Aww, be a friend!" altruism on their part before they even form in one's head, because the whole history of interstate commerce says otherwise.


The scale just doesn't come close to overcoming the hurdles. Casting lonely eyes to Track 61 in the first place is itself in exercise in niche-fitting when you're nearly out of options to begin with, so it's already a narrow and low-odds target to have to thread to find a cost-benefit valuation that doesn't get upended by very small/chintzy things. Wheel profile is not a showstopper at any real-world technical level. Very much not so; it doesn't take some Rube Goldberg device to do that. But it is just enough a showstopper on scale for the microscopic operating margins Track 61 service has to live inside of a very vast rapid transit system to make that sort of spot customization any sort of value-added. Especially when interlining with the Green Line is a forever-impossible.

And that's in a nutshell the selection-bias problem of chasing niches in the first place, and why Track 61 is such an outsized frustration/obsession for planners. It seems so simple in concept that there MUST be a way to pull it off, therefore we should keep digging in with a new annual proposal that passes the Shirley Leung smell test! But with niche margins like that the chintzy things are the showstoppers that make it operate as an off-scale loss leader no sane person would spend money on over other priorities. Once it's run afoul of its margins with a couple chintzy demerits like wheel profile fragmenting the equipment pool and forever ruling out interlining...building it at all becomes more a battle of "Oh, yeah! I'll show 'em!" spite than solving problems. Maybe that's acceptable in the vacuum of the Crazy Transit Pitches thread, but when the lack of a Silver Line Phase III replacement build is the pants-shitting threat that may level off the Seaport's growth prematurely...in the real world overpaying for limited functionality on the narrowest of niches as distraction to the big problem is going to get deep-pocketed interests out for these distracted pols' and planners' scalps. i.e. "Why aren't we doing the thing that matters most 'to say you can' instead of this???"


Same promise dashed as running a piggish DMU dinky through Amtrak's backyard. Yeah, it works in concept. Yeah, it's semi-useful. No...it's a godawful loss leader and wretched use of fleet resources for what impossibly narrow fare recovery target it takes to make it justify its existence. We probed that already. Now we're just substituting different modes and flailing at things like "maybe there's a thousand riders living under a rock in Hyde Park who can appear out of nowhere." Same blockers hit from different angles.

Unfortunately, we've kind of established the predictive value of trying 10 more new angles for trying to make 61 a 'thing'...and they're all just as unfavorable. We've already taken our best shot at pegging best value proposition for 61, and it's just never better than borderline-leaning-unfavorable. The danger now is simply that the City/BCEC just become ever more obsessive about coming at it again and again and again with the same repackaged pitch until the distraction starts to sideline the rest of the Seaport transpo improvements universe. Like I said last page...it is entirely within the City's own independent means to make some phone calls about a for-cheap private LMA shuttle trial next year using Haul Road on this same alignment, where they can make a case for state aid rooted in actual ridership from the trial. Starts to become hypocritical to obsess about loss-leader 61 proposals that can't be done in this political environment inside this crippled agency in under 7-10 years when that burnt bandwidth leaves more mundane, self-starting options on the table. Can't let niche-chasing run amok or the distorting effects start to become their own form of paralysis. We've seen that happen in some Crazy Transit Pitches grudge matches; we don't need it breaking out inside of Walsh's office.
 
I could maybe see the argument for Track 61 on Red with a small number of Ashmont-Seaport and Braintree-Seaport trains like Kensington/Olympia in London (like 4-6/day or 1/hour per branch) , but the crossing eliminations that would be required for such an infrequent service make it a non-starter.
 
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Converting the Fairmount Line to the Indigo Line relies 90% on one thing: run the trains more often. Other stuff is nice, but ultimately it just comes down to, "run the trains more often."

There are a number of improvements that are required to make that happen (at least with maximal impact). The limiting factor at the moment from an infrastructure perspective, as I understand it, is how quickly you can turn trains around at Readville. It looks like the T currently turns trains in 15 minutes at Readville, which is solid. (It's possible some signal upgrades would also be required to run trains closer together, but I know much less about that.) You get much more flexibility, as well as unlock higher frequencies, if you build a second track at Readville. This would allow trains to overlap during their turning times. This would make it easier to swing sub-15 minute headways (moving into true rapid transit territory).

Today's 45-min headways are a huge improvement over the situation 10 years ago, but even without reaching 15-min headways, more modest targets like 20 or 30-min headways would have a huge impact, and should be set as a near-future goal.

From an ops perspective, running the trains more often almost certainly means "run a greater number of trainsets on the line." By my read of the schedule, the current headways require 2 trainsets. To increase those headways, you need at least 1 more trainset (maybe 2). The most straightforward way to do that would be to divert the hourly Foxboro trains onto Fairmount, but you could look systemwide to see if you can find another locomotive + 4 coaches to reallocate. (IIRC, double-tracking out on the Franklin Line will increase capacity there, allowing diverted Foxboro-Fairmount trains to be supplemented by new via-Back Bay trains. So it's important to look at the whole network.)

Electrification, new stations, full-highs at Readville and Fairmount, closer CharlieCard integration... all of those are great goals and absolutely should be priorities for Gov Healey.

But at the end of the day, the most important thing is to run the trains more often.

(And yes -- the crayon map maker in me would absolutely love to see transit on Track 61 to the Seaport, but it does not make sense, for a number of reasons. Increasing frequencies into South Station should be the top priority.)
 
Track 61 can't run the frequencies to make it Urban Rail (definitionally :15 bi-directional frequencies). It's single-track, and the crossing of the Old Colony + Amtrak yard tracks means there's going to be too many conflicts per hour to sustain 15-minute bi-directional service. Like...it whiffs by a LOT and isn't a fixable problem. They found that out when they tried to traffic-model Gov. Patrick's stupid plan for a BCEC-Back Bay dinky. So nothing you crayon up for Track 61 is ever going to meet the frequency definition of Urban Rail, and at less than that it's arguably not useful service.

Conjoining Fairmount with it was also once proposed, and was loudly rejected by Dorchester and Hyde Park over the loss of the South Station one-seat. That one is definitely not happening, as BCEC isn't at all hard to get to from the Silver Line at South Station for anyone from the neighborhoods who has to work a Seaport job.
 
Anything that goes to South Station - Red and CR - already has decent access to the Seaport. The Silver Line sucks, but the combined tunnel frequency is good and it's a fairly short ride. What's missing is good access from points past South Station: North Station, Back Bay, LMA, and Roxbury/Dorchester. The T7 and T12 routes in the bus network redesign will go a long way towards fixing that - they will provide one-seat rides from Sullivan, North Station, GC area (including a second Blue Line connection), Andrew, BMC, Nubian, Roxbury Crossing, LMA, and Brookline Village. Improved CR frequency, fare integration, and all trains stopping at Ruggles means better two-seat rides from Back Bay and Ruggles.

Despite what a lot of planners seem to have though, Fairmount isn't just a dangling end to connect to whatever is trendy. Taking it away from the South Station hub, and eventual further connections via the NSRL, simply doesn't make sense.
 
Has Track 61 as a freight terminal ever been seriously studied? I'm thinking a daily train of goods for the many stores and restaurants downtown coming in by rail to be distributed by small delivery trucks (heck, maybe even cargo trikes) to reduce truck traffic on I-93 and the Pike.

An extension to Conley doesn't seem that impossible if the freight traffic existed to justify it.
 
Has Track 61 as a freight terminal ever been seriously studied? I'm thinking a daily train of goods for the many stores and restaurants downtown coming in by rail to be distributed by small delivery trucks (heck, maybe even cargo trikes) to reduce truck traffic on I-93 and the Pike.

An extension to Conley doesn't seem that impossible if the freight traffic existed to justify it.
Massport has studied a spur to Marine Terminal that would primarily serve perishables warehousing. Nothing much has moved on that proposal in the last 12 years, but they projected enough business to support it. Additionally, the last Seaport customer Coastal Cement might see enough reason if the track were reactivated to Marine T. to start shipping outbound cement again off their spur (they get inbound mix by barge). Coastal has lots of locations on CSX, and CSX's new reach into Northern New England would give them opportunities to expand business.

Extension to Conley is spatially provisioned next to the haul road, but container traffic would not do nearly enough rail volume out of Port of Southie to justify its existence. The port is just too small and too laser-focused on local truck intermodal to achieve the distance distribution far enough out to ever be profitable on rail. That's similarly why you'll never see any general freight transloading in Southie except for time-sensitive stuff like perishables; it's too cheap and easy to truck out of a suburban warehouse fed from an I-495 situated freight job than to run the extra ops legs for connecting to the Seaport. Even Readville, which has generous room for business expansion, does hardly any local transloading.
 
Echoing F-Line's comments, the final version of the study for the Ray Flynn Marine park notes that reactivating the full track 61 is problematic near the Design Center, and acknowledges the more likely need for freight will be from the Massport Marine Terminal to the north. Here's a 2001 study with alternatives for connecting that area: https://www.massport.com/media/2875/mmt-rail-access-feasibility-tkdyer-2001.pdf

In more recent news, Eastern Salt Company is apparently planning to restore North Jetty to a functional deep water berth suitable for bulk cargo. I'm sure it'll all be shipped by truck, but one can dream: https://www.massport.com/massport/m...-to-develop-combined-parcels-in-south-boston/

Regardless, any potential rail traffic would be limited to night hours where interference with CR and Amtrak would be minimal.
 

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