Author Archives: Garrett Wollman

Two months of thinking about buses

Posted on 2019-04-16

You may be wondering why I never followed up on my promise to simulate Regional Rail ridership for the Providence Line. In part that’s because it’s actually really hard — the Providence Line is much more complicated than the Worcester … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Updating my MBTA Commuter Rail modeling for the Worcester Line

Posted on 2019-02-04

On Friday, the MBTA quietly released the results of its 2018 in-person passenger counts. I’ve been waiting for this numbers since I started modeling service on the Framingham/Worcester Line last fall, and apparently everyone else has been waiting for them … Continue reading →

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MBTA Rail Vision’s “Peer Systems Review”: Adding Helsinki to the mix

Posted on 2018-12-06

The day before Thanksgiving, while I was already away and visiting with family, the MBTA Rail Vision team published their Peer Systems Review paper, describing a number of domestic and international commuter rail systems with detailed statistics about their service … Continue reading →

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My comments on Rail Vision

I attended the meeting of the Rail Vision Advisory Committee on Wednesday, and summarized what I saw in an interminable Twitter thread, which I’m not going to repeat here. After writing all that, I spent another few hours composing an … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2018-11-15 | Tagged , , ,

A further examination of the Agricultural Branch for Regional Rail

Posted on 2018-11-12

About a month ago, I posted the most recent of several posts about using the former Agricultural Branch Railroad, the CSX-owned freight line which runs from Framingham to Clinton, for passenger service under Regional Rail. I made a Google Maps … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Three Reasons the Commonwealth Needs to Commit to Regional Rail Now

Posted on 2018-10-27

After writing that very long slide deck, I thought it was worth boiling down my conclusions for policymakers to three important points: 1. There is a large investment of some sort required in commuter rail infrastructure over the next ten … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation, Uncategorized | Tagged , , ,

A comprehensive Regional Rail slide deck

Posted on 2018-10-26

Hard to believe it’s my 400th post on this here blog, but given recent trends it’s not hard to believe that it’s about transportation rather than computer networking, figure skating, sliding sports, travel, or (most of all) cooking. I’ve spent … Continue reading →

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Interlude: Physics of train acceleration

This past week I’ve been working on a slide deck that people can use to present the Regional Rail concept to non-transportation-nerd audiences, and one of the things that I wanted to include, just as an aside, was a couple … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2018-10-20 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Restoring passenger service to the Agricultural Branch

Posted on 2018-10-15

I’ve written here a few times in the past about the prospect, under Regional Rail, of operating passenger service on the former Agricultural Branch Railroad through Framingham. Twitter user @h100gfld convinced me to take another look, and I identified a … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , ,

Next steps for Regional Rail

Posted on 2018-10-04

At the October 1 meeting of the MBTA’s Fiscal & Management Control Board, there was an extended discussion of capital investment planning. The presenter, in the capital projects department, noted that in past years, the MBTA had been unable to … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , | 4 Comments