I really like the addition of the Cape Flyer. That will potentially lead to more ridership, which could increase pressure to add more service.
MBTA Commuter Rail (Operations, Keolis, & Short Term)
- Thread starter Balerion
- Start date
Replying to comments re the new commuter rail schedules here.
In general, I wonder if we are seeing the influence of Eng's tenure at the LIRR -- I feel like we are seeing more "creative scheduling" than the T has historically been willing to do, in a way that reminds me of LIRR/MNR schedules. This reinforces my theory that Eng has been saying things like "Why are we running trains past platforms at Readville and South Attleboro without stopping?" and "Yes, I know it'll be too difficult to get the first train of the day all the way out to Haverhill, but there's no reason we can't start that trip at Lawrence, is there?". All of which is encouraging to me, as it suggests a willingness (and the needed political clout) to shake the T out of its provincial "we've always done it like this"-ness.
Other random things I noticed
It's hard to tell for sure, but I also think it may be a single set that consistently turns at Fairmount rather than Readville.
(Oh, looking below at the Franklin Line schedule, it looks like there is potentially some correlation between a Franklin train through-running and the previous/subsequent Fairmount train originating at Fairmount instead of Readville?)
I'm still a little more optimistic than I think you are, though. Pre-pandemic, if we look at trains that arrive at South Station between 7am and 9am (i.e. the start of the whitecollar workday), there were five departures from S Attleboro:
In other words, they are restoring two of the three most heavily utilized departures (which alone account for 33% of all boardings all day). If they manage to attract ~half of the riders from the 6:32am, that's 41% of South Attleboro's total all-day boardings... achieved with just two departures (which equals 10% of departures all day -- achieving 41% performance with 10% of the resources is a pretty good ROI).
South Attleboro historically was in the top 12 stations across the whole system; at 41% ridership, it would be comparable to Littleton/495, Wakefield, Canton Center, Roslindale Village, Newburyport, Lawrence, Waltham, and Greenbush. (33% puts us on par with Hanson, Lynn, Needham Junction, Whitman, and Cohasset.) Pretty much all of those are seen as successful stations.
Going outbound, the six highest ridership trains totaled 763 alightings at South Attleboro (70% of overall alightings). The trains departing BOS at 3:55pm and 5:40pm accounted for 273 (25%); adding the 4:53pm train in brings us to 423 (39%). (The spread of ridership on the afternoon departures is more evenly distributed, with the 4:53pm and 5:40pm leading the pack, but not as severely as the morning trains.)
Anecdotally, my experience was that if you were lucky and could leave work early-ish, you'd catch the 4:53, but if someone insisted in running the end-of-day meeting all the way to 5pm, you got stuck on the 5:40. So I'm guessing a fair fraction of the 4:53's ridership would consider the 5:40. So I'd SWAG it that the T's new afternoon departures will capture about 33% of the pre-pandemic ridership. Again, that's not amazing, but it's still solid and would put South Attleboro right in the middle of the pack systemwide.
So, I dunno. It's definitely an anemic schedule for sure, and the lack of flexibility will probably dissuade some riders. On the other hand, South Attleboro is in a lower farezone than Pawtucket/Central Falls, so perhaps that will in turn attract riders. Overall, though, getting between 33% and 41% performance out of 10% of resouces... that seems like a reasonable ROI to me.
In general, I wonder if we are seeing the influence of Eng's tenure at the LIRR -- I feel like we are seeing more "creative scheduling" than the T has historically been willing to do, in a way that reminds me of LIRR/MNR schedules. This reinforces my theory that Eng has been saying things like "Why are we running trains past platforms at Readville and South Attleboro without stopping?" and "Yes, I know it'll be too difficult to get the first train of the day all the way out to Haverhill, but there's no reason we can't start that trip at Lawrence, is there?". All of which is encouraging to me, as it suggests a willingness (and the needed political clout) to shake the T out of its provincial "we've always done it like this"-ness.
Other random things I noticed
Notably, I think this may be the first time that Anderson/Woburn has been listed on an ordinary Haverhill Line schedule (it's been listed on a number of "recovery service" or "severe storm service" or bus diversion schedules).
Yes, I wonder if this is an "art of the possible" decision, perhaps due to trains being turned or staged at Readville Yard? Or are these accommodating freight moves in and out of the Yard? It's also interesting that this practice is also done on weekends -- the "creative scheduling" is mostly weekday-only otherwise.
It's hard to tell for sure, but I also think it may be a single set that consistently turns at Fairmount rather than Readville.
(Oh, looking below at the Franklin Line schedule, it looks like there is potentially some correlation between a Franklin train through-running and the previous/subsequent Fairmount train originating at Fairmount instead of Readville?)
This is maybe the most interesting thing about these new schedules. I wonder if this is being done as a "practice run" to test the viability of using a Readville Transfer more broadly. I'm sure Eng has been thinking about LIRR practices at Jamaica, so I wonder if he has theories he wants to test out.
The 4:23am one seems pretty gratuitous, and probably was just the easiest way to add a third inbound departure. It actually looks like there are four outbound departures though, departing Boston at 11:18am, 2:20pm, 3:52pm, and 5:40pm.
I'm still a little more optimistic than I think you are, though. Pre-pandemic, if we look at trains that arrive at South Station between 7am and 9am (i.e. the start of the whitecollar workday), there were five departures from S Attleboro:
- 6:09am
- 6:32am
- [gap for a train that originated at Attleboro]
- 7:23am
- 7:39am
- 8:00am
| Pre-Pandemic Departure | Boardings | Post-Pandemic Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| 5:09 AM | 98 | |
| 5:34 AM | 88 | |
| 6:09 AM | 123 | 6:11 AM |
| 6:32 AM | 185 | |
| 7:23 AM | 251 | 7:21 AM |
| 7:39 AM | 59 | |
| 8:00 AM | 77 |
In other words, they are restoring two of the three most heavily utilized departures (which alone account for 33% of all boardings all day). If they manage to attract ~half of the riders from the 6:32am, that's 41% of South Attleboro's total all-day boardings... achieved with just two departures (which equals 10% of departures all day -- achieving 41% performance with 10% of the resources is a pretty good ROI).
South Attleboro historically was in the top 12 stations across the whole system; at 41% ridership, it would be comparable to Littleton/495, Wakefield, Canton Center, Roslindale Village, Newburyport, Lawrence, Waltham, and Greenbush. (33% puts us on par with Hanson, Lynn, Needham Junction, Whitman, and Cohasset.) Pretty much all of those are seen as successful stations.
Going outbound, the six highest ridership trains totaled 763 alightings at South Attleboro (70% of overall alightings). The trains departing BOS at 3:55pm and 5:40pm accounted for 273 (25%); adding the 4:53pm train in brings us to 423 (39%). (The spread of ridership on the afternoon departures is more evenly distributed, with the 4:53pm and 5:40pm leading the pack, but not as severely as the morning trains.)
Anecdotally, my experience was that if you were lucky and could leave work early-ish, you'd catch the 4:53, but if someone insisted in running the end-of-day meeting all the way to 5pm, you got stuck on the 5:40. So I'm guessing a fair fraction of the 4:53's ridership would consider the 5:40. So I'd SWAG it that the T's new afternoon departures will capture about 33% of the pre-pandemic ridership. Again, that's not amazing, but it's still solid and would put South Attleboro right in the middle of the pack systemwide.
So, I dunno. It's definitely an anemic schedule for sure, and the lack of flexibility will probably dissuade some riders. On the other hand, South Attleboro is in a lower farezone than Pawtucket/Central Falls, so perhaps that will in turn attract riders. Overall, though, getting between 33% and 41% performance out of 10% of resouces... that seems like a reasonable ROI to me.
Other observations:
- Providence/Stoughton
- This continues (I believe) the trend of being almost-but-not-quite clockfacing
- Not much peak service to Readville -- in fact, I think weekends get much more service than weekdays
- Fairmount
- Weekday 30 min headways from 5:30am to 7pm, with half-hourly southbound headways continuing to 9:30pm, with 45 min headways outside of that time (save for one 45 min headway in the 11am hour) -- you love to see it
- The weekend is interesting and seems more sensitive to peak direction:
- Inbound
- 30-min from 8am to 5pm, with one 45-min headway during 11-12:30 gap
- Hourly at other times
- Outbound
- Irregular in the morning, averaging to every 45 min, but varying from 30 to 90 minutes
- 30-min from 11:45am to 5:45pm
- Hourly starting during the 6pm hour
- Inbound
- I wonder what's weird about outbound during weekend mornings?
- Bear in mind how recently we had no weekend service on Fairmount
- Haverhill
- On initial read, I was like, "Wow, I guess midday travelers on Reading and south can just go pound sand?", but then I saw that @nbcroam explained that it's for construction
- Running express via Wildcat seems to shave off about 10 minutes compared to via Reading -- why do they not just do that all the time?
- Lowell
- Given Lowell's proximity, population, existing ridership, and relative speed, I'm surprised not to see more service
- Based on my read, the non-stop Haverhill expresses seem to have basically the same running time as the stopping Lowell locals; I wonder why the Haverhill trains don't stop, but I guess that, since it's a temporary thing, they don't want to introduce a new service that they will soon need to cut back
- Middleboro/Lakeville
- So are they just gonna go with the original plan to just blindly extend the existing Middleboro trains to Fall River and New Bedford? Because that's gonna suck. Not gonna mince my words. That would suck.
- The combined Old Colony schedules are actually pretty precisely rationalized right now, but I hope that some adjustments will be made so that it's not a matter of telling Fall River to just deal with either arriving in Boston at 8am or 10am
- I do wonder if they will later experiment with doing a cross-platform transfer at Braintree to boost frequencies
- Newburyport/Rockport
- Uses a handful of Beverly short-turns
- Lynn is no longer called "Lynn Interim"
- The current schedule largely accomplishes this, but definitely worth drawing attention to the fact that, like Fairmount, Lynn + Chelsea get peak half-hourly freqs and do pretty well off-peak as well
- I wonder if we're reaching the point where it's worth visually distinguishing the Fairmount Line and the Lynn/Salem/Beverly Line with different visual language on the system map
- Route 128 + Canton Junction (but not Hyde Park) are unusually close to this category, but would need some further rationalizing and potentially slight increases in service levels
Koopzilla24
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It looks like the 30min Fairmount Line service is working well to attract riders. Usually during the morning rush the east side lots at Readville are functionally empty but this morning they were 50% full at 8am
Fairmount improvements are a great step, but what's it freaking take to get clock-facing hourly service all day on the weekends on every line? Just run a god-damn 2 or 4-car single-level train once per hour and set a flat $5 or $10 weekend fare.
Looking at I-93/95/90 traffic every weekend makes it clear that there's plenty of demand for travel. People from the north shore coming in for a Celtics game? City-dwellers wanting to explore Salem/Rockport? College students visiting their parents' house in the burbs who want to just get picked up at their local CR stop? There's a HUGE difference between predictable hourly service and weird 2-2.5 hour gaps. I know it's not the highest priority given all the subway track issues but like come on. Metro North/NJT/LIRR serve basically every stop (that's not on a weird diesel branch) all weekend once an hour and they have excellent weekend ridership.
Looking at I-93/95/90 traffic every weekend makes it clear that there's plenty of demand for travel. People from the north shore coming in for a Celtics game? City-dwellers wanting to explore Salem/Rockport? College students visiting their parents' house in the burbs who want to just get picked up at their local CR stop? There's a HUGE difference between predictable hourly service and weird 2-2.5 hour gaps. I know it's not the highest priority given all the subway track issues but like come on. Metro North/NJT/LIRR serve basically every stop (that's not on a weird diesel branch) all weekend once an hour and they have excellent weekend ridership.
bigeman312
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Heck, even just hourly to Providence and every 1.5 hours to Worcester would be a big improvement and totally 100% warranted.
The EGE
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I fully agree. Weekend service is extremely important, both for all the benefits it provides and to attract riders to weekday service. It should be minimum hourly service on every line. Stoughton doesn't even have any weekend service!
It's wild to me that even the current two-hour weekend headways are the most weekend service we've had during the MBTA era. Needham didn't have Sunday service until 2021, weekend service ended at Attleboro until 2006 and bypassed Ruggles until 2000, and Fairmount didn't have weekend service until 2014. Looking further back, Sunday service to Attleboro (previously dropped 1977) and Forge Park, and weekend service to Framingham, were added in 1992. The only loss has been Saturday Stoughton service, which ended in 1993.
Interestingly, unlike the New Haven, the B&M never dropped weekend service on the northside mainlines. Only the one-a-day rush-hour trips on the Central Mass and Lexington branches didn't have weekend counterparts by 1964.
It's wild to me that even the current two-hour weekend headways are the most weekend service we've had during the MBTA era. Needham didn't have Sunday service until 2021, weekend service ended at Attleboro until 2006 and bypassed Ruggles until 2000, and Fairmount didn't have weekend service until 2014. Looking further back, Sunday service to Attleboro (previously dropped 1977) and Forge Park, and weekend service to Framingham, were added in 1992. The only loss has been Saturday Stoughton service, which ended in 1993.
Interestingly, unlike the New Haven, the B&M never dropped weekend service on the northside mainlines. Only the one-a-day rush-hour trips on the Central Mass and Lexington branches didn't have weekend counterparts by 1964.
Koopzilla24
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Boils down to money. 2 hours service while offering the $10 weekend pass allows them to maintain a low operations cost while attracting enough riders to maximize rider loads on those low costs because "its the weekend nobody's in a rush." Bi-hourly is also the minimum they can run each line with only 1 or 2 trainsets each which halves the resources in-use from weekdays. They also really like to keep their weekday trains in their consists over the weekend to avoid paying yard engineers the time it'd take to rearrange the trains at the start and ends of every weekend. What they see as the most efficient way to run weekend service isn't at all efficient for the actual usefulness of a transportation service. If they actually ran major corridors to connect populations centers like on the Worcester, Providence, Franklin, Lowell(/Haverhill via Wildcat), and Middleboro/Lakeville hourly on weekends there'd be large ridership gains from the added utility to riders. This would also make the train a more useable alternative to weekend workers.
Theres also various coordination with freight in place to give them a lot more room to take up on the lines on weekends for daytime switching and other moves but thats a pretty minor thing that hourly service on most lines wouldn't effect much.
Heck, since the pandemic schedule changes, the Fitchburg line barely has hourly weekday service, there are >60min gaps even at rush hour.
I absolutely agree on the need for better weekend service. As for running shorter sets, I don't think that actually would change much:
- With limited doors opening, a short set doesn't require fewer staff than a full set (I think)
- As @Koopzilla24 mentioned, short sets require staging on Friday nights and Sunday nights to put things back together
- I have a vague recollection that, due to their role in providing braking power, there's actually a minimum number of coaches you need on an MBTA consist, and I think it's something like 4 or 5 cars
F-Line to Dudley
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4 cars. And, correct, it's a braking spec about providing enough braking power at full speed. 1-3 car sets would only be able to run at restricted speed.
F-Line to Dudley
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https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...rd HRU Option Presentation_05172024_FINAL.pdf
T seeking permission from the Board to exercise a $175M 41-car option on the Hyundai-Rotem bi-level car order so they can retire some more flats rolling ruins (unclear which...probably a bunch of Bombardiers). The 41 cars would be entirely restroom-equipped trailers, since the cab cars are entirely renewed by the main order.
T seeking permission from the Board to exercise a $175M 41-car option on the Hyundai-Rotem bi-level car order so they can retire some more flats rolling ruins (unclear which...probably a bunch of Bombardiers). The 41 cars would be entirely restroom-equipped trailers, since the cab cars are entirely renewed by the main order.
I'm intrigued by this statement buried deep in that slide deck - by the first slide, before this option order, they projected having 173 remaining flats, and buying just 80 bilevels would enable elimination of the flats completely? Pre COVID I believe that the T was planning on a 100 -200 car RFP, in addition to the 80 Korean built Rotems, in order to fully replace the flats? If this was always an option why bother with the second RFP?
The CapeFlyer apparently will have an upgraded First Class car this summer, with... a TV and kitchenette?:
I have so many questions.
I have so many questions.
kingofsheeba
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I noticed that nugget as well. The flats are all over thirty-five years old.
Badusername
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This is seemingly going to lock them into not using EMU flats for electrification right? I’m sure they’ll argue they have all these bi-levels so they have to get a battery electric locomotive for them. I can’t stand how old feeling and uncomfortable the “new” bi-levels are.
TheRatmeister
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Electric locomotives and traditional passenger carriages could still have a place on the system. Express services to Worcester, Providence, or Fall River/New Bedford for example wouldn't make many stops and therefore the not having the acceleration benefit from EMUs is not as big of a deal.
F-Line to Dudley
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Not really. The first batch of Kawasaki bi-levels (1991) hit end-of-life from their most recent rebuild around 2035 at the latest, so EMU adoption will probably expedite retirement of those. They also haven't rebuilt the 900-series K-cars ordered in 2005, with a decision due on that ASAP lest they start becoming rolling ruins too. Ultimately it's a walk-and-chew-gum thing. The Pullman, Bombardier, and MBB flats are decrepit and have to go like 10 years ago, and the K-cars are nearing major retire-or-rebuild decisions much sooner than you might've thought.
Given that the T is anticipating publishing an RFP in June for "Engineering and Program management services in support of Commuter Rail Multi-Mode Locomotive Procurement", I'm going to say that this is actually still the plan for the time being. *If* it's a plan where they'll support the transition by starting out on Providence and the moving to the other lines as steady catenary installations happen, fine. But I still don't think that this is the right way of doing it.
