Automatic generation and validation of train schedules

Posted on 2021-04-28 by Garrett Wollman

Passenger railroads throughout the world have mechanisms to generate timetables for both service and capital planning purposes. The way I’ve done this in the past is with the Mk. 1 eyeball: you come up with a schedule, maybe draw some stringline diagrams to determine minimum separations, and then shift around the run times to ensure that there are enough resources at each crossing to allow for the desired schedule. Sometimes, of course, this doesn’t work, and it’s painstaking and laborious, and nearly impossible to answer questions like “What’s the minimum investment (in tracks and switches, or in increasing speeds) to allow for the schedule we want?” Actual railroads don’t do it this way, of course — their networks are much more complex, and they have more constraints than are necessarily obvious from aerial photography. They use software to validate their timetables, and in many cases will use linear-programming libraries to find the schedule that maximizes equipment utilization, minimizes capital investment, or optimizes some other criterion.

Last week, the MBTA Fitchburg Line schedules were announced for the spring rating. The Fitchburg Line has been under construction for the entire month of April, so with the majority of the line being bustituted, the MBTA and its contractors chose not to publish the spring schedule at the same time as the other lines. A co-worker of mine lives in West Concord; before COVID-19 regularly took the Fitchburg for her daily commute, and we had an email exchange about how service could be improved over the one-train-per-hour schedule that has been introduced. This line is mostly double-tracked, except for short single-track segments in Fitchburg and Waltham which constrain the schedules that can be operated. I noted to my colleague that I didn’t know much about SAT solvers; I thought it obvious (at least to a computer scientist) that this question could be represented as a satisfiability problem, for which there are lots of known techniques and libraries to perform the computation. (The general boolean satisfiability problem for three or more variables, called “3SAT”, is known to be computationally intractable; someone who found an way to solve it efficiently would instantly win all of the major prizes in computer science and operations research. In the mean time, there’s been a lot of research into making solvers faster even given though there is no categorically efficient algorithm.)

This question was bugging me over the course of the week, so I did a Google search to see if I could come up with some plausible code that might work. I first got distracted into looking at a constraint solver called “kiwi” (which is a reimplementation of an academic solver called “Cassowary” designed for use in responsive user-interface implementations), but found that it was too limited to even figure cycle times, which was my starting point (not even looking at single-track constraints like the Fitchburg or the Old Colony). I went back to Google and added some keywords to suggest that I was interested in how railroads use solvers, and got some different results.

For whatever reason, I landed on Y. Isobe, et al., “Automatic Generation of Train Timetables from Mesoscopic Railway Models by SMT-Solver“, published in IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences in 2019, for which the first author maintains a web page (probably what I first saw in the Google results, rather than the paper itself). The research was a collaboration between a government institute, AIST, and the East Japan Railway Company (better known as “JR-East”). “SMT” is an acronym for “Satisfiability Modulo Theories“, a generalization of the boolean satisfiability problem (plain old “SAT”) to include richer data types, such as sets and arrays, along with integers and real numbers, and relations such as set-inclusion and numerical inequalities. This sounded like not only the exact sort of thing to be looking at, but quite possibly someone had already done the (not inconsiderable) work of proving that it worked on a model of an actual railroad.

After skimming the paper the first time, I realized that I did not understand their railroad infrastructure model, or perhaps I do not understand how JR-East designs railroad infrastructure. I figured I’d work through the examples first, but immediately ran into snags (after first installing the prerequisites). It took an entire evening to figure out that the code was written for an older release of the Z3 SMT solver, and the current version of Z3 has a slightly different output format that needed adjustments in the parser. The code for the paper is written in OCaml, a language I do not know, so I had to figure out enough of the debugger to figure out where the parse was failing, and then learn enough OCaml syntax to figure out what the failing code was looking for and how to make it look for something different.

The examples, as it turns out, didn’t help. Once I fixed the parser, I could run the examples through the solver and it would generate the expected output, looking very much like the solutions shown in the paper. (I should maybe look more closely at the code, because it does a nice job of generating stringlines directly to PDF or SVG using OCaml bindings for the cairo graphics library, and maybe I could steal that even if I can’t make the solver work.) The difficulty was not with the solver itself, but trying to wrap my head around the way it models railroad infrastructure — what the authors call a “mesoscopic model”. (The term isn’t theirs, it’s cited to an earlier paper that I haven’t read.)

In this paper’s version of a “mesoscopic model”, there are two kinds of fixed objects: “links”, which are just given arbitrary unique numbers, and “structures”, which can be stations or interstations. There’s the first loose cobble to trip you up: you’d think a “link” would correspond to the track between stations — i.e., an interstation — but no, that’s a “structure”. Rereading section 2 of the paper doesn’t really clarify matters, but staring at the examples some more makes it clear that a “link” is more like the interlocking at a station throat. The structure model assumes that every track can connect to every other track at such a junction. My first attempt to model the Worcester Line — chosen because it’s the most familiar to me and has capital construction projects that I could model the effects of — foundered on this issue: while there are many universal crossovers on the newer part of the line, not every station has one, no station except Framingham has one at both ends, and when I looked at how train routings were specified, it’s a sequence of “links”, not stations, so I would have to explicitly specify which track each service pattern would use, which is one of the things I had expected the solver to figure out for me.

After looking again at the major worked example in the paper, which deals with sequencing local and Shinkansen trains on the single-track Tazawako Line, I figured that I should start with a single-track MBTA line, and perhaps things would become clearer. Even there I had trouble, because it seemed like, in the example, the trains could only pass each other at stations, and JR had built nearly every station with two or three platform tracks. (In fact, it was only just now, as I am writing this, that I looked at the Wikipedia article and saw that the paper’s authors had modeled two passing sidings on the line as stations! The solver doesn’t distinguish between the two types of “structure”, but the presentation in the paper and in the solver’s graphical output does. And oh, by the way, all of the comments in the example data are written in Japanese, which I can neither read nor display.) I figured the shortest and least complex of those would be the Greenbush Line, so I spent an evening panning through Google Maps using the “measure distance” tool to figure out how long the interstations were and how much of each was single- vs. double-tracked.

That got me into a more fundamental issue, which I freely admit to just fudging as a means of playing with the tool to see if I could get anything interesting out of it. All of the intervals given in the structure model are in units of time, not distance. This makes sense for stations, but when you want to apply it to tracks, you run into the issue that the time is going to depend on the ultimate routing: a train that approaches an interlocking with a green signal is going pass through it faster than a train that has a restrictive signal, and there’s nothing in the model that allows you to tell the solver that. In fact, unless forced to look for a better schedule, the solver would often come up with bizarre delays for no obvious reason, because Z3 isn’t an optimizer — it finds a solution that satisfies the constraints, but not necessarily the best one. The higher-level timetable solver offers some manual knobs that allow you to force this, in particular a max_time parameter, but unfortunately it’s global. The basic assumption is that not only do you already know the route, but you have already modeled the rolling stock’s performance on the route and you know exactly how much time it is expected to take for all phases of the trip. (And probably also that you’re using equipment which has decent acceleration and braking performance in the first place, i.e., EMUs.)

So rather than try to simulate an HSP46 hauling four bilevel coaches, without specific knowledge of track speed limits and minimum separations, I just reverse-engineered times from the published schedules. There is an object in the model which represents a single run of a train, and you can override the times specified in the structure part of the model if you have trains with different performance characteristics or stopping patterns, but I did not explore that aspect — if I did anything more with this solver, it would probably involve creating a higher-level language to describe lines and trains which could then output the enormously redundant input language of the timetable solver. (And at that point, I’d probably be close to ripping apart all of the OCaml bits and interfacing Z3 to my train acceleration model directly. I don’t think I’ll get there, because that’s a full-time job.)

It was then that I learned, rather to my surprise, that the published schedules don’t work. Clearly they must, in reality, since the schedule is what Keolis actually operates, but the solver couldn’t satisfy the schedule as I had reverse-engineered it. Unfortunately, the solver can’t tell you what’s wrong: it just outputs “unsatisfied” and you have to hack away at the model description until you get something that works enough to generate a schedule, and then look at the graphical output to see where delays are being inserted to account for errors in the model. I did finally get my Greenbush Line model to work, although it didn’t end up looking entirely like the MBTA schedule it was based on.

Sometimes it’s not an error in the model; there are some significant limitations in the solver as well. The most important of these is that it can’t handle turning trains, whether on the platform (for a mid-route short turn) or at a stub-end terminal. I was able to make a model of the Fitchburg Line sort of work, by including Westminster Layover as a “station” and making all trains run through to Westminster, where it doesn’t matter if it’s an hour to the next run, rather than turning on the platform at Wachusett, but when I tried to model short turns at Littleton, there was simply no way to tell the solver “no, this specific train has ten minutes to turn around and must immediately head back whence it came, it can’t just sit there blocking the platform while three other trains go by”. I am certain that this requirement (and round trips in general) can be implemented in a solver like this, by adding additional constraints, but again, modifying the solver logic is a job for a professional (and someone who actually knows both OCaml and SMT solvers). The problem is equally significant at the city terminals: the model wants to have all trains arrive at platform 1 and depart from platform 2, and that’s a physical impossibility — just not one that you can encode in the model without explicitly assigning tracks to trains and manually generating separate “inbound 1”, “inbound 2”, etc. — which again is something I wasn’t interested in doing by hand.

One thing that the solver can do is work with “periodic” schedules; i.e., those that are repeated the exact same way throughout the day at a specified interval. It can’t figure the period for you, but if you give it a period, it will add in the modular arithmetic in the SMT problem definition to ensure that multiple trips of the same set of trains don’t conflict with each other. This makes it easy to figure out how “clockface-compatible” a particular service model is: if it is still satisfiable with period = 3600, you can run each train hourly. If it works with period = 1800, you can run two per hour, and so on. (If it only works with period = 4500 then unfortunately you’ve got a service that repeats every 75 minutes, ugh.) This inspired me to look more closely at the Dorchester bottleneck on the Old Colony lines. All trains pass through Quincy Center, and nearly all trains stop at both Quincy Center and JFK/UMass (which was never intended to have a station, but it just barely turned out to be possible to squeeze one in east of the Red Line tracks). I could take my Greenbush model, delete everything south of Quincy Center, and just see directly what the capacity of that bottleneck was.

Stringline diagram showing maximal Old Colony service

This stringline shows a solution for service every 12 minutes between Quincy Center and South Station. Note that the actual trip takes 20 minutes (1200 seconds) in one direction but only 18 minutes the other way.

By fiddling with the period parameter, I was able to get five trains per hour (12-minute headways, which is to say, a 720-second repetition period) to work with the existing model based on slow diesel trains. I then took Alon Levy’s simulation of trip times with a modern EMU instead of antiquated diesel trains, and made an interesting discovery: although modern equipment cuts the travel time in half (to 10 minutes from 20), it doesn’t help with the bottleneck: a repetition period of 600 seconds (10-minute headways, 6 trains per hour) doesn’t work. But, if you could somehow double the Dorchester single-track, then look what’s possible:

Stringline showing 10 trains per hour with Dorchester double-tracking

This stringline shows what happens if you increase frequency to 10 trains per hour by twinning the single-track south of JFK/UMass station.

That (extremely expensive) intervention doubles the capacity of the line, opening the prospect for frequent service as far as Brockton and South Weymouth. At ten trains per hour, you could have service every 15 minutes to Brockton and every half hour to Kingston and Greenbush (assuming other bottlenecks along those lines were relieved — I haven’t checked that the schedule would work because I haven’t actually encoded the other Old Colony branches). This does get into another issue with the railway solver: the period parameter should really be an attribute of the train, not global, because you’d like to jointly solve multiple services with different frequencies that all share a common bottleneck without laboriously open-coding the whole pattern of repetition. (Ideally, you’d like to be able to solve the entire network as a single model!)

Anyway, for those who are interested, you can see my version of the original “RW-Solver” code on my GitHub fork, which includes some of the kluged model files I’ve been playing with.

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It’s budget time again (already?)

Posted on 2021-04-17 by Garrett Wollman

Last week, the House Committee on Ways and Means reported out its version of the state budget for fiscal year 2022, H.4000, and the Mass. House of Representatives gave it second reading. It’s supposed to be taken up again a week from Monday, and of course there’s a huge pile of amendments (nearly 1,200 proposed). I’m not sure if the deadline for filing amendments has passed already — this is announced on the House floor but it’s not on the General Court’s public “budget process” web site. I dug through the budget to see what’s in it this year, and was surprised to find very little of transportation interest; I guess everyone is already worn out from the current year’s budget and the transportation bond bill, both of which passed in the waning hours of the last General Court a little more than four months ago.

I already went through this in a Twitter thread but wanted to set out the story a bit more cohesively here.

The basic transportation provisions of the budget are little changed from last year: the Massachusetts Transportation Trust Fund gets $351 million (down from $401m in the Governor’s request), the Regional Transit Authorities get $94 million (up from $90.5m in the Governor’s request), and the MBTA gets $127 million. The MBTA appropriation, called “additional contract assistance”, is in addition to the $1.2 billion in dedicated sales-tax revenue that the MBTA receives automatically, and in recent years, before COVID-19, has been used to fund capital projects and the salaries of MBTA employees working on them. Because this grant is unrestricted, it could be used for both operating and capital expenses, and has been used in the current fiscal year to help plug the hole in the operating budget caused by the 90% drop-off in commuter-rail ridership. The $127 million appropriation is unchanged from last year. The Ways & Means budget splits the RTA appropriation, with most going to formula funding but a small fraction (about 4%) going to a discretionary incentive grand program administered by MassDOT Rail and Transit.

The budget bill has the usual collection of “outside sections” (non-appropriations language), of which the only notable item is section 9, which provides for transfer of development rights in local zoning codes. The Governor’s budget included outside sections related to data collection by TNCs (Uber and Lyft) and establishing a permanent MBTA board, but these were not included in the House Ways & Means text. (Both provisions could still be reported out as a separate bill.)

With that, we go on to the amendments that have been filed. There were only 10 transit-related amendments that I caught in my scan through the titles as submitted. (Members have the opportunity to amend or withdraw their amendments, but they’re not supposed to change the subject matter, and the House leadership will select the ones they don’t like and “include” them in a “consolidated amendment” that simply omits the language, ensuring they they don’t even get a vote.)

49
Funds a first-/last-mile transportation program in Maynard
183
Funds a “Quiet Zone” study for the Franklin Line (would allow trains to not blow horns at grade crossings if study findings are implemented)
445
Funds renovation of Stoughton Depot
566
Funds part of the Town of Ayer’s Depot Square project
756
Gives priority in RTA funding to those agencies whose current operating assistance accounts for less than half of operating costs, cosponsored by a large number of representatives
757
Strikes the Ways & Means budget’s funding for discretionary RTA performance grants and redirects the appropriation towards formula funding
787
Funds a noise mitigation study for Boston Engine Terminal and the Grand Junction railroad in East Cambridge and Somerville
881
Reinstates the language from the Governor’s budget for a permanent MBTA board
951
Renames Ball Square station on the new Medford branch of the Green Line “Ball Square/South Medford”
1142
Funds a noise abatement study for the Wildcat Branch

I am pretty indifferent to most of these proposed amendments, but I have Opinions about the Governor’s proposed MBTA Board structure:

  • I think the size of the board, seven members, is good, although my preference is for the Secretary not to have a vote.
  • I think the composition of the board is problematic.
  • I think the term limits and the tying of certain members’ terms (other than the Transportation Secretary) to the Governor’s term is bad.
  • I think there should be more local representation.
  • I think there should be more expertise and a requirement for some international experience.
  • I do not think the board should be able to act by written consent in the absence of an emergency.
  • I think the members of the board should be paid for the substantial time commitment involved.

Here is my suggested alternative:

  1. The board shall consist of six voting members, serving staggered three-year terms, subject to reappointment:
    • Four members appointed by the Governor, who shall not be otherwise employed by the Commonwealth
    • One member appointed by the Mayor of Boston
    • One member appointed by the MBTA Advisory Board
  2. Of the members appointed by the Governor:
    • at least one shall be knowledgeable in public authority finance or auditing;
    • at least one shall be knowledgeable in transit operations;
    • at least one shall be knowledgeable in transportation engineering or heavy civil construction;
    • at least one shall be a native speaker of a language other than English;
    • at least one shall have lived as an adult outside the United States for at least twelve months; and
    • at least two shall be riders.
  3. The Secretary of Transportation shall be an ex officio member but shall have a vote only to break ties and to establish quorum.
  4. The board shall elect its own chair and vice-chair.
  5. When first constituted, the board shall draw lots to determine the length of each member’s initial term.
  6. The board shall have standing committees on safety, finance and audit, capital programs, and such other matters as the board determines necessary or convenient.
  7. The board may act by written consent of a quorum of members if it determines that an exigency exists requiring immediate action, and shall publish notice of such exigency expeditiously.
  8. Members of the board, other than the Secretary, shall be entitled to a stipend of $500 for each board meeting they attend.
  9. Chairs of board committees, other than the Secretary, shall be entitled to a stipend of $250 for each day on which they preside over a committee meeting, except days when the full board meets.
  10. The board shall hold a public meeting and take comment at least 18 times per year.
  11. The board shall report, at least annually, on the authority’s financial position, progress on capital programs, greenhouse gas emissions, and safety record.
Posted in Law & Society, Transportation | Tagged , | Comments Off on It’s budget time again (already?)

Weekend excursion: Stations of the Old Colony Railroad (MBTA Kingston and Middleboro Lines)

Posted on 2021-04-14 by Garrett Wollman

Of all the passenger routes bringing commuters from Boston’s suburbs into the city, none were hit quite so hard by the automobile age as those of the former Old Colony Railroad. The construction of the Route 3 and Route 24 freeways in the 1950s saw the bottom drop out of travel demand on the parallel railroads, and the Old Colony’s owner, the New Haven Railroad, ended passenger service in the late 50s; shortly thereafter, the Old Colony bridge over the Neponset River in Dorchester burned down. The New Haven and its successors, Penn Central and Conrail, were able to continue to service their remaining freight customers south of Quincy, running local trains north from a freight yard in Middleboro [I will be using the simplified spelling throughout this post], and back south along the lines to Plymouth and Greenbush. So the situation remained for nearly four decades. In the mean time, the Commonwealth acquired nearly all of the rail lines and abandoned rights of way in Eastern Massachusetts from the railroads, converting some to trails and preserving others as working railroads through rights agreements with various operators (including Conrail’s successor-in-interest, CSX, which retained operating rights on the line from Middleboro to Braintree).

In the 1990s, as a part of mitigation for the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, the state agreed to start up a new commuter-rail service along the three former Old Colony branches that had operated to South Station four decades previously. I’ve already discussed the Greenbush Line, which due to a controversial and unnecessary tunnel through Hingham opened some years later. The other two lines, the former Old Colony main line through Brockton and Middleboro and the former line to Plymouth, were completely reconstructed with all-new stations. The old tail end of the Plymouth line to downtown Plymouth was entirely abandoned, with a new terminal at Cordage Park in North Plymouth, and the state built over a mile of brand-new track, including a tunnel under the interchange of routes 3 and 3A, to serve an enormous park-and-ride in Kingston next to the former town dump. Both lines reopened in 1997, and with Greenbush remain to this day the only fully ADA-compliant, 100% accessible lines in the MBTA mainline rail network. Because both lines shared common design and construction and opened at the same time, and I toured both on the same weekend, I am going to treat them as a single unit. The photo galleries, however, are separate: Middleboro and Kingston/Plymouth.

One issue I should bring up first: the Red Line extension to Braintree was built in the 1970s largely on top of the Old Colony’s trunk line through Dorchester, where it paralleled the existing Red Line tracks and the Southeast Expressway. As a result, a two-mile stretch of the new Old Colony trunk, from roughly Freeport St. to Southampton St. Yard, is limited to a single track. As this single-track section is located right outside the terminal limits of South Station, it represents a serious limit on the capacity of all three Old Colony branches, so much so that various proposals to increase frequency on the Middleboro line invariably involve a forced transfer at either Quincy Center or Braintree for passengers on the other lines. (The Greenbush Line branches off between Quincy Center and Braintree, just to complicate matters, although it is a full wye junction so Greenbush trains could turn south to Braintree and run through to the Kingston line.) This is a more restrictive bottleneck than any of the other single-track sections on the revived Old Colony, since it is shared by all three branches.

One other issue I might as well address here: the T calls the terminal station on the Middleboro Line “Middleborough/Lakeville”, and sometimes calls the whole line that as well. The current terminal is actually in Lakeville, but this station is to be replaced by a new station along the main line as a part of the South Coast Rail project, as all Middleboro trains will be extended to either New Bedford or Fall River in 2024.

Let’s start with some other features common to all of the stations on the Kingston/Plymouth and Middleboro lines:

  • Stations are generally located outside the central business districts of the towns they serve; with one exception, the few Old Colony depots that still stand did not get passenger service restored.
  • As a consequence of the previous, the interstation (distance between stations) is much longer than on legacy commuter lines, which were built to serve pedestrian traffic in town centers.
  • All stations have enormous parking lots, ranging from a few hundred spaces up to the thousand-space mega-lot at Kingston.
  • Since these were completely new-build stations, they were required to fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and thus have full-length high-level platforms, and all the assigned rolling stock is equipped with remote door release. Some still require bridge plates for safe wheelchair boarding.
  • The ends of the platforms are located far enough from grade crossings that trains serving the stations do not foul the crossing.
  • While the right-of-way for both lines is at least two tracks wide throughout, both lines are predominantly single-track with modest passing sidings for timed meets. Even where a double-track section exists adjacent to station limits, the MBTA largely chose to economize on station construction by single-tracking through stations. (There are three exceptions: Halifax and Montello, which have two side platforms, and Brockton, which has a center platform.)
  • Most stations have some landscaping elements, typically raised planter beds with granite curbs for edging. Since I visited in April, there were few plantings visible other than leafless trees.

A particular concern that I noted on the Kingston/Plymouth line, and not the Middleboro line, was poor condition of the platforms, especially tactile edge treatments but also spalling concrete in other areas of the platform. The Middleboro line platforms seemed much better maintained, which is hard to account for given that they are the same age.

When I did this excursion, I started on Saturday in South Weymouth and made my way down to Plymouth, then (having an hour or so of daylight remaining) hopped over to Lakeville and headed up the Middleboro line to Bridgewater. At that point the sun was starting to get quite low in the sky, so I headed home and resumed on Sunday afternoon at Campello, the next station north of Bridgewater and one of three stations serving Brockton. (I finished off that day on the north side, to be published next week.)

Now a few notes on individual stations. We’ll start with South Weymouth, which is the station on the Kingston/Plymouth Line that’s probably the best placed to grow its residential walkshed, thanks to the redevelopment of the former Naval Air Station South Weymouth, and there are several large multifamily projects either open or under construction within a short walk of the station. This station embodies nearly all of the common design features I noted above. The new Abington station is about two miles south of the historic town center; the old North Abington depot (on Railroad Ave.) still stands and is now a restaurant — Regional Rail would allow locations like this, that are accessible to walk-up passengers, to be restored as infill stations. (I didn’t know that the old station still existed when I was doing the trip or I would have stopped there on my way.) The line is double-tracked through most of Abington, but narrows to a single-track north of Abington station. A former branch line from North Abington to Hanover has been abandoned and converted to a trail.

Whitman station has an interesting archaeological exhibit, where the Old Colony’s former roundhouse turntable was excavated, but is otherwise unremarkable. Hanson station was built next to the old South Hanson depot, which still stands (closed and unused, so far as I can tell, not even a tenant); the town of Hanson doesn’t really have much of a center and there’s nothing of significance near the rail line at any point, so I guess it’s as good a station location as any other. A passing siding begins near the Halifax town line and continues through Halifax station, the only double-track station on the entire line.

South of Halifax, the historic line continues to North Plymouth, while a newly built branch runs another mile to the thousand-space parking lot at the former Kingston town dump. Unfortunately, because some idiot signed off on not making the junction a full wye, it is impossible for a train to serve both Plymouth station and Kingston parking lot without two time-consuming train reversals, adding as much as 30 minutes to the schedule — to which the MBTA’s response was to send all peak and half of the off-peak trains only to Kingston, practically stranding the residents of the large new-build apartment complex at Cordage Park next to the station, and in response to disappointing ridership caused by the poor service, Plymouth station has now been closed, possibly for good. This makes me unbelievably angry, because clearly Plymouth is an actual origin and destination, and the Kingston transfer station/solar array/wind farm/layover yard/golf course/car dealership is not. While GATRA operates some buses that serve both Kingston station and downtown Plymouth, it’s hard to overestimate how inconvenient the station location actually is — all because they valued car storage over serving an actual place.

Moving over to the Middleboro line, I stopped first at the soon-to-be-closed Middleboro/Lakeville station (which is entirely in Lakeville): another huge parking lot — not quite as huge as Kingston’s — next to a single platform. The station sits on the Cape Main Line, the only rail route to and from Cape Cod, and I imagine must cause some operational issues for traffic to and from the Cape. (This may be why the Cape Flyer runs such a limited schedule, when there is surely enough weekday traffic in the summer to operate seven days.) The Old Colony Main Line, Cape Main, and Middleboro Secondary have a full wye junction at Pilgrim Junction in Middleboro; the original Middleboro station was located north of the wye on the Main Line (it no longer stands) and that is where the new station will be as well. The infield of the wye is also where the overnight layover yard for this line is located, although that too will become redundant when South Coast Rail opens, as both New Bedford and Fall River will have their own layover facilities.

North of Middleboro is Bridgewater station, and I’m not really sure what to say about it. The station is located on the campus of Bridgewater State University, and isn’t especially convenient to get to if you aren’t already at the school. I’m sure it’s a great boon for students and staff alike, although the 2018 passenger counts show the reverse-commuting ridership to be negligible, and most passengers are riding into the city during peak periods. (It’s possible that there is less park-and-ride mode share on weekends, when residential students would be more free to travel; the data don’t exist to show one way or the other.) Brockton Area Transit Authority (BAT) operates public shuttles in Bridgewater for the university.

I returned the following day to start out at the southernmost of three stations in Brockton, Campello — named after a former “village” and postal district in the city, which itself was formerly known as North Bridgewater. There’s not really anything interesting to say about it, except perhaps that it is located next to one of three recycling companies in Brockton that CSX still serves with freight trains over the line.

A mile or so north of Campello is the beginning of the four-track Brockton Viaduct, although it has long been limited to just two tracks. The old downtown Brockton depot was located on the viaduct, but was demolished in a fit of “urban renewal” after passenger service ended in the 1950s and was replaced by a rather unattractive central police station. BAT’s central bus hub, the “BAT Centre”, is located across commercial street from the old depot, and was designed to mimic the materials and style of historic Massachusetts railroad depots (some others by the same designer as the former Brockton station still stand to be used as references). Somewhat later, BAT built a parking garage next to the bus station, and this accounts for most of the parking for the train station as well. (There are accessible spaces next to the police station.) Because the viaduct was built for a four-track main line, there was plenty of room for a 20-foot-wide high-level center platform, although the police station still looms over riders. Access to the platform is only from the Commercial St. (east) side of the tracks; a single ungated pedestrian grade crossing over the northbound track is the only egress from the platform.

The viaduct ends north of the Ashland St. overpass, and the two-track line continues north at grade (with overpasses for the cross streets) to Montello, another former village and postal district. Montello station is a two-track side-platform station with parking lots on both sides and a single pedestrian grade crossing at the north end of the platform. It’s also the only station in Brockton served by MBTA buses in addition to BAT; the #230 Quincy Center–Montello bus, which primarily serves Randolph and Holbrook, lays over here. Two BAT routes serve Montello station, but stop outside the Spark St. entrance on the east side of the station rather than entering.

The final station (at least until we get back to Braintree) is Randolph/Holbrook, which was literally built on the border of those towns. The rail line at this point is entirely in Holbrook, as is the platform and the larger of the two parking lots, but Randolph has its “own” parking lot. There is a pedestrian grade crossing at the south end of the single platform, and I had the opportunity to watch a southbound train pass while I was there. The double-track from Braintree Junction ends literally at the north limits of the station; there is clearly enough land for a second platform and a second track, so the T must have decided to economize by not building a two-platform station.

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the B&M Western Route/MBTA Haverhill Line

Posted on 2021-04-08 by Garrett Wollman

It’s been nearly two weeks since I took this trip on a windy Saturday in March, and since that time I’ve seen nearly all of the remaining stations in the MBTA system, so if I’m a little hazy on the details, please forgive me. Meanwhile, enjoy the companion photos by opening the link in another browser tab.

As I was describing in my survey of the parallel Eastern Route last week, the Boston & Maine Railroad’s original route from Boston to Maine went via the industrial cities of the Merrimack Valley — specifically, Lawrence and Haverhill — before heading north into Exeter, Durham, and ultimately Dover, New Hampshire, before crossing the Piscataqua River into Maine. When the B&M acquired the Eastern, the original main line became known as the Western Route, but there was enough local traffic to keep both lines in service. Over time, traffic dwindled, and the B&M had a substantial retrenchment. In the 1950s, most passenger service to the Merrimack Valley and points north was rerouted via the B&M’s New Hampshire Main Line and the “Wildcat” branch through Wilmington. Transportation officials in Boston were looking at the likely end of commuter rail service, as more freeways were built to siphon traffic away from the railroads, and the Western Route was one of their prime targets, since it had a three-track right-of-way through the inner suburbs, making it an attractive alignment for a surface relocation of the old Charlestown Elevated. Plans were drawn up in the 1960s to extend the newly renamed Orange Line through a new tunnel under the Charles all the way up to Reading, with an express track to speed service through Malden, Medford, and Charlestown for riders from more distant suburbs.

When service on the “Haymarket–North” extension opened in the mid-1970s, there was insufficient support to extend the route all the way to Reading, and so the commuter-rail service has remained, largely unchanged, ever since. Even before the Orange Line came, decades of disinvestment had seen the second track lifted along much of the route, resulting in severe limitations on frequency and quality of service to this day. Two tracks remain from Melrose to Wakefield and from just beyond Lawrence to Haverhill, but this only suffices to operate service every 45 minutes — and the northern end must still be shared with slow freight and the Amtrak Downeaster. The Downeaster, like the old B&M intercity service it replicates, runs via the Wildcat Branch, as do a couple of Haverhill commuter trains a day. In the new Spring, 2021, schedule, 23 inbound trains per day serve Reading every 45 minutes, with 11 of those originating in Haverhill, so passengers on the outer end of the line get 90-minute headways. Two inbound trips and one outbound trip run express via the Wildcat Branch, saving about 11 minutes. This does mean that North Wilmington only gets one inbound peak-period trip, but that’s actually not much of a loss — in the pre-COVID schedule, North Wilmington didn’t get any peak-period service.

The new schedules raise an interesting question for many of the municipalities along the line: the parking regulations for many town-owned station lots currently only require payment in the morning. With the T now operating trains every 45 minutes all day long, on the theory that this will attract “non-traditional” passengers, will there be pressure for the towns to extend enforcement later in the day — or, in the alternative, will the lots go back to filling up at 8 AM, restricting use of the off-peak trains to only walk-up riders?

As on previous trips, I did not photograph any of the commuter-rail stations that are also rapid transit stations, so as to avoid other people to the extent possible, so let’s get started with Wyoming Hill, the first station north of the Orange Line terminus at Oak Grove. Like many of the stations on this line, there is municipally-owned parking, in this case a small lot just west of the station. It’s located in a reasonably dense neighborhood, with a mix of retail, dining, apartments, and small-lot single-family residences, and only two short blocks from Melrose’s Main St. It’s also only half a mile from the next station north, Melrose/Cedar Park — much closer than would normally be considered appropriate, but not uncommon for an old commuter line. That said, Wyoming Hill gets about 20% more ridership (or did, in 2018), owing to its somewhat denser surrounding development. The line is still double-tracked here, but both tracks have only inaccessible low-level platforms. (The single-track merge point is just north of Oak Grove station, a mile south; you can just barely see the signal controlling the interlocking from the south end of the platform.) It would be a relatively easy station to make accessible, after removing both the standard MBTA platform canopies and the town-owned enclosed shelter at the north end of the inbound platform, but from the ridership it’s not hard to see why this hasn’t been prioritized.

Melrose/Cedar Park has a bit more parking, but in a less dense neighborhood, and the daily ridership roughly tracks with the parking. Like Wyoming Hill, it’s a two-track station with only inaccessible low-level platforms, and an even lower priority for platform improvements. Melrose Highlands is by far the most popular station in Melrose, with significantly more multifamily and commercial real estate nearby. Melrose Highlands does have mini-high platforms, and would seem to be a good candidate for full high-level platforms (and construction would be relatively simple given the lack of pedestrian grade crossings).

Moving north into Wakefield is the first odd duck on a line full of odd ducks. Greenwood station would appear to serve a bank branch and a small retail district on one side, and a small single-family subdivision on the other, but its 80 passengers a day are mostly using on-street parking which the town has reserved for this purpose north of the business district. Unsurprisingly for a station with such minimal ridership, Greenwood has offset low-level platforms, a pedestrian grade crossing, and no concessions to accessibility. (There is, at least, a bus transfer, although given the cost of commuter rail tickets, many bus riders will take the more affordable transfer to the Orange Line at Malden Center.)

The other station serving Wakefield is a real contrast, although it too is inaccessible. Located west of Wakefield’s main business district, Wakefield station has restaurants on the platform, a classic B&M station building, and is surrounded by low-rise mixed-use development and a church. A nearby industrial zone, once served by the rail line, is being transformed into a higher-density residential neighborhood. In 2018, Wakefield was the second-busiest station on the line, after only Reading, so it’s a real disappointment that it isn’t accessible — it clearly should be, and the outbound platform would be easy to fix. Unfortunately, the buildings abutting the inbound platform are too close, and would have to be relocated or demolished to meet current standards, which is presumably why the MBTA has chosen not to do anything about the problem.

Next stop north from Wakefield is the first “WTF?” moment of this tour: Reading, the busiest station on the entire line. Reading is a two-platform, single-track station! And not in the obvious way, with platforms on both sides of the single track — no, at Reading, the second platform serves the nonexistent second track that was lifted some time before 1969. Yet the MBTA continues to maintain it! It’s obvious that restoring the second track would be key to making the station fully accessible; the current platform (serving what should be the inbound track) is split in half by the old station building (now leased out to a cafe and a mortgage broker), which sits too close to the track to allow for sufficient clearance. There is presently a mini-high on the existing platform, so despite the high passenger volume, improving this station is not a high priority for the T. (With the new schedule turning half of all trains at Reading, dwell times are less of an issue, since the train has to reverse anyway, but restoring the double-track and constructing a full-length high-level platform on the restored eastern rail would still be an operational improvement.) Like Wakefield, Reading station is on the west side of the town’s CBD.

The “WTF?” moments just keep on coming as we try to find the next station, North Wilmington. A limited-service station, North Wilmington sees one peak-period trip each way, but early morning, midday, and late evening trains all stop here, if only we can find where “here” is. After several tries, I eventually found the small, unmarked, town-owned parking lot, separated from the “station” by a vacant lot. What passes for a station here is single-track, of course, and inaccessible, of course — there’s barely even a platform, and the only amenity is a bus shelter. (OK, so that’s still slightly more than Plimptonville ever had.) The prudent thing to do with this station would be to close it, and route all trains on the outer parts of the line via the Wildcat Branch, allowing for more frequent service on all three resulting branches.

Heading north, the double-track resumes with the junction of the Wildcat Branch, only to end across the street from Ballardvale, the next station. In keeping with the B&M’s plan of running all Lawrence service via the New Hampshire Main Line, the Wildcat Branch is the through route at Ballardvale, and it’s the Western Route that ends ignominiously in a bumper block just south of the grade crossing. Ballardvale is the third “WTF?” station on this line, and the oddest of the bunch: the original platform was clearly built to serve the now-disconnected northbound Western Route track, and when that track was lifted, they simply dumped several yards of hot-mix in the trackbed to extend the platform. (Why oh why did they not keep the track that already had a platform?) But it gets worse: 300 feet beyond the end of the new platform, there is a mini-high — yes, this is an “accessible” station — and the mini-high was obviously built to serve the missing Western Route track. That means that it was built that way by the MBTA some time after 1990! Since the track that actually exists is 10½ feet away from the mini-high, the T added a wooden high-level platform extension to the mini-high. But it’s still 300 feet north of the rest of the platform! So either the train serves the regular platform, inches forward 300 feet in a cloud of diesel smoke, and serves the mini-high, or else it just serves the mini-high and half the cars in the train don’t platform at all. Who signed off on this design? Ballardvale is located in a fairly low-density neighborhood, with largely single-family housing and conservation land, although it was once important enough to have its own post office; about 200 people a day used the station in 2018, many of them using the 120 paid parking spaces at the station.

The double-track resumes yet again just north of Ballardvale, but the second track is inaccessible from the south for another mile. It hardly matters for passenger service, though: the second track is freight-only, and cannot platform at either Andover, the next station north, or Lawrence.

Meanwhile, what about Andover? It’s a busy station, with nearly 400 passengers a day in 2018, far more than its 150-space parking lot alone could support. There’s a good amount of development in the vicinity, both multifamily and commercial, and Andover’s downtown business district is a short walk away to the southeast. The station is also served by multiple MVRTA bus routes. As noted above, the second track does not platform at Andover, and the platform for the first track is low-level, with a mini-high at the north end. Upgrading this platform would be a challenge due to commercial abutters.

Our next stop is Lawrence. I did not go to see the old Lawrence station, which was a low-level center-platform station just east of Parker St., and which has apparently been abandoned in place. The new, fully accessible Lawrence station is a single side platform connected to MVRTA’s McGovern Transportation Center, a 400-stall parking garage on Merrimack St. (The station is located across Merrimack St. from the Wood Worsted Mill, once the world’s largest, which has been redeveloped into a variety of residential and commercial uses under the name “Riverwalk”.) An empty trackway separates the passenger track from the freight tracks, providing room for either another through track or an island platform, should future passenger schedules warrant it. (A short, temporary, low-level platform remains on the opposite side of the railbed, attached to an old industrial building; it’s accessed via a pedestrian grade crossing at the east end of the high-level platform but not accessible and not currently served by any passenger trains unless there’s a switch malfunction.) A short distance east of the platform, the passenger siding merges with the main line once again, and has a crossover to access the outbound track, so the final two stations operate as normal two-track stations.

Bradford station doesn’t have any obvious reason to exist — it’s not even half a mile from downtown Haverhill and the end of the line, and there’s not much nearby in the way of either origins or destinations. But there was a station here already (a historic B&M station building, a clone of the one at Swampscott, still abuts the line, although it’s now a cafe), and there was plenty of land available, so it made more sense as an end-of-line layover facility to minimize deadheading — and of course there’s a huge parking lot. MVRTA’s Bradford bus garage is located across the street from the layover facility. The station itself is a pair of disappointing low-level platforms with mini-highs (why could they not build a high-level center platform here, there was plenty of room?) and pedestrians cross both the main line and the yard leads at grade. A walkway north of the outbound mini-high connects to a nearby residential neighborhood off Laurel Ave. on the east side of the tracks (the west side is the Merrimack River). The ocean of parking here is only about half-used: there are more than 300 spaces for a station that saw 170 passengers per day in 2018. Just beyond the station to the north, the remnants of a branch line diverge to the east, running through Groveland and Newbury to connect with the Eastern Route at Newburyport; this line, abandoned decades ago, has largely been rail-trailed and is also an electrical transmission path for much of its length.

The final station on our tour is also the terminus for MBTA service on the Western Route, although Amtrak Downeaster service continues through New Hampshire to Maine, and Pan Am freight service continues through Maine to interchange with various Canadian railways. The city of Haverhill extends all the way to the New Hampshire state line, but there’s no obviously useful place for a third Haverhill station, and New Hampshire refuses to subsidize rail service, so there’s nothing north of downtown Haverhill that the MBTA might serve. (Amtrak’s next stop is Exeter.) MVRTA recently built a 315-stall garage and pedestrian overpass to supplement the MBTA’s 150-space surface parking lot, but the station as a whole is a bit of a disappointment, and you’d think with all the residential development nearby in downtown Haverhill this station could manage more than a paltry 290 boardings. Of course, it has low-level platforms with mini-highs, and multiple pedestrian grade crossings make it more challenging to upgrade, especially since the overpass to the garage connects to the middle of the outbound platform. (MVRTA charges $4 a day, whereas the MBTA’s surface lot is only $2 a day, so you’d have to imagine the RTA is losing a lot of money on its brand-new garage right now, with pandemic-suppressed ridership.) On the current schedule, the whole trip from Haverhill to Boston is scheduled to take 55 minutes for the once-daily Wildcat Branch express, or 66 minutes on the local train via North Wilmington, which is likely still faster than driving during rush hour — but a fully modernized electric service could make the Wildcat route in just 38 minutes, a substantial savings.

Three more lines to go: Plymouth/Kingston, Middleborough, and Lowell!

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the Eastern Route/MBTA Newburyport Line

Posted on 2021-03-31 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: another 3,000 words about an MBTA commuter rail line and its stations, which could easily have been 5,000 words if I hadn’t gotten tired of writing and skimped on the exposition towards the end. Already more photos to edit and text to write from subsequent travels.

Once upon a time, there was a railroad called the Eastern Railroad. Its main line ran from Boston to Salem, where it intersected numerous other railroads, and was not long thereafter extended across the Danvers River to Beverly, Newburyport, and ultimately Portsmouth, N.H. Another branch connected the main line to the fishing ports of Gloucester and Rockport on Cape Ann.

Then the Eastern came under control of the Boston & Maine. The B&M already had a route to New Hampshire and ultimately Portland, Maine, by way of Durham and Dover, N.H., and Sanford, Maine. For many years, there was enough traffic to support two parallel mainline railroads, and the B&M’s original route via Dover became known, quite logically, as the Western Route, while the Eastern Railroad’s old mainline remained the Eastern Route. The Eastern served important industrial and port cities like Chelsea, Lynn, Salem, Beverly, and Newburyport, while the Western served two of the mill cities of the Merrimack Valley, Lawrence and Haverhill, before heading up into New Hampshire a few miles inland of the Eastern. The Western proved to have more staying power as a freight route; when passenger service on the Eastern was discontinued north of Newburyport, there were not enough freight customers to keep the Eastern Route in service, and the line north of the Merrimack River was abandoned. Parts of it are now a rail-trail, and elsewhere the land was simply sold for development.

Two Sundays ago, I went to have a look at the stations of the Eastern Route. I didn’t make it all the way to Newburyport — the daylight ran out when I was in Ipswich — but I did go to the end of the Rockport Branch. The photographs I took can be viewed on my SmugMug gallery, and you might want to middle-click that link to open another tab so it’s easier to switch back and forth between my narrative and the photos.

A few overall comments on the line. This line is one of three identified by the MBTA board in its December, 2019, resolution on rail transformation for priority to receive frequent, all-day, electrified service. (TransitMatters recently released a report on this, which I have deliberately avoided reading before writing this piece in order to form my own impressions.) The board resolution identified an “Environmental Justice Corridor” from Boston to Lynn, but because of the physical constraints of the line, it would almost certainly extend at least to Beverly Depot, where there is room to turn trains without fouling the main line (and in fact some trains already turn there). This section of the whole line is relatively up-to-standard, with only two partially-accessible stations — Swampscott and Beverly Depot, both of which have historic structures on the platform that make full accessibility an engineering challenge — not counting Chelsea which is already being replaced. Beyond Salem, all of the stations I visited have only partial accessibility, if any. (I expect Rowley and Newburyport, which I did not see, to have been built recently enough to be fully accessible, but wasn’t able to verify this in person — when I manage to get out there, I will update the photo gallery with pictures of those stations.)

Overall, the condition of the stations reinforces my impression that the MBTA is pursuing a policy of deliberate neglect of commuter-rail stations, allowing them to deteriorate until they are closed for emergency repairs, in preference to actual ongoing maintenance which might trigger an obligation to make the stations fully accessible under ADA and state regulations. Nearly every station I visited had spalling concrete, rusting steel, splintered timbers, and buckled asphalt. Some of them were actually in quite disturbing condition, even if the structural engineers aver that they are still sound.

Three of the stations have huge downtown parking garages, and it’s no surprise that two of them (Salem and Beverly Depot) are the two busiest on the entire line according to the 2018 manual ridership counts. The third huge parking garage, at Lynn Central Square, is reported to be significantly underutilized, and the ridership counts would seem to bear that out, with less than a quarter of Beverly’s and a fifth of Salem’s — this is largely due to the fact that Lynn has frequent, affordable bus service, whereas the train is infrequent, extremely expensive ($7.00 vs. $2.40 for the bus with a transfer to the subway) and in pre-COVID times arrived in Lynn packed to the gills, with no room for additional passengers to board. The MBTA has experimented with discounted fares for Lynn and Chelsea in the past, but nothing short of full fare equalization with comparable bus-subway journeys is likely to fix this.

Now on to the tour. We start in Chelsea, at Mystic Mall (known better to many as “the Chelsea Market Basket”). There isn’t a train station here, but there will be soon: the MBTA is relocating the existing Chelsea station at 6th & Arlington, which was already partially demolished to make way for the SL3, a quarter-mile to the west, where the current terminus of the SL3 is already located. The new station will of course be fully accessible, but riders who were previously within walking distance of Bellingham Square will now have to transfer to the bus. On the other hand, it makes the retail, service, and hospitality businesses clustered around Everett Ave. significantly more accessible by train. Overall, the station move is probably a wash; either location favors some people and disfavors others. The station relocation project was bundled with a bunch of other grade-crossing and signal improvements that are supposed to reduce the impact of the train on traffic in Chelsea.

Our next stop is that existing Chelsea station, which is right next to the SL3’s “Bellingham Square” stop, although it’s still about a quarter-mile walk from the station to the actual Bellingham Square. There’s not a lot of employment in this area, but there is a good amount of housing, including public housing; the area is cut off by the viaduct of the Northeast Expressway (US 1) from the auto-oriented business district along Everett Ave. Chelsea station originally had a platform for both tracks, but when the SL3 came through, on the former right-of-way of the Grand Junction Railroad which ran parallel to the Eastern here, the outbound platform was demolished and a lot of hot-mix was dumped between the tracks as a replacement. (This was legal because the old station was inaccessible already and the new station was in the capital program.) In the 2018 counts, an average of just over 200 passengers a day used Chelsea station (as contrasted with 11,000 passengers a day on the 111 bus).

There’s a long gap between Chelsea and River Works, the next station; the state legislature included funding in the Transportation Bond Bill to construct a new station in Revere, at the former Wonderland dog track (after which the terminus of the Blue Line is also named). River Works is a private station for employees of GE Aircraft Engines in Lynn; there is no public access so I didn’t go see it. A developer has made a deal with GE to redevelop part of the site which includes an easement for public access to the station; I don’t expect to see the station before the new development is built (and probably built a new station as well).

That brings us to the aforementioned Lynn Central Square. Lynn, as they say, used to be an important place, but it has fallen on hard times, and many of its residents cannot afford $7 each way to take the train into Boston — $9.40 if they need to take the subway to their actual destination, because these are people who also cannot afford the $232 monthly pass that would include subway rides. What the powers that be thought they were accomplishing by erecting a thousand-stall parking garage in the middle of a working-class city like Lynn is beyond me. But they did, and then of course they failed to maintain it properly, and it shows.

Lynn station itself is interesting: it’s built on an old viaduct, remnant of an abandoned plan by the Eastern to widen its mainline to four tracks and eliminate grade crossings for faster service, which was largely obviated by the purchase of the Eastern by the B&M. Only the section in Lynn was ever built, and the line’s capacity through Salem remains limited to this day by the single-track tunnel, so it matters little that the line has been reduced to just two tracks through Lynn now. The extra-wide viaduct did make it possible for the station to be upgraded to a full-high center-platform configuration, although the inbound and outbound sides are oddly offset for reasons which are unclear to me. At least that means there are no significant freight clearance problems that would prevent building full platforms everywhere else on the line: freight trains must access the line from the south, since the route to Portsmouth has been abandoned.

The two-track viaduct continues north from Lynn into Swampscott, where there’s a cute little station building in a classic B&M style. I only saw the inbound side, where there is a large parking lot; the station building is on the outbound side, along with another lot. The two lots together hold only 127 stalls, which is far fewer than the reported 825 passengers a day this station served in 2018, so the majority of those passengers must be walk-ups or walking transfers from the buses on nearby Essex St. I was at the station while an outbound train to Newburyport made a stop, and even with limited service on a Sunday afternoon there were some passengers both boarding and alighting.

It’s another long interstation between Swampscott and Salem. An infill station at South Salem has been proposed, which would serve more people and destinations, such as Salem State University, but would also help to buffer traffic through the single-track Salem downtown tunnel, one of the oldest cut-and-cover railroad tunnels in the country. Before the the old Danvers River drawbridge burned down, the previous Salem station was located in the open cut south of the tunnel; after the fire, a temporary station was constructed north of the tunnel portal, and the previous station was abandoned as being too difficult to make accessible. (Remnants of the old single-platform station can be seen in aerial photos, including an abandoned stairway down from Mill St., but I did not make any attempt to go there.)

The Salem tunnel is unusual for another reason, which is that part of a wye was located inside it. The Danvers Branch diverged from the main line inside the tunnel, and it was on this wye lead that the temporary station (now the city-owned “Crescent” surface parking lot) was located. These tracks were lifted after construction of the new station and replacement drawbridge, so the Danvers Branch today is accessible only from Beverly, if it has any remaining traffic at all. Both portals remain today, and the abandoned branch is used to store sand and salt for treating icy surfaces.

The modern Salem station has a 728-stall parking garage, and is by far the busiest station on the line, nearly twice as busy as Beverly Depot, the next-busiest. There is a full-length high-level platform immediately north of the tunnel portal, an indoor waiting room, and a secure bike storage cage. The garage and full-high platform were built in the 2010s, opening in 2014, but the platform was relocated to the current location as soon as the drawbridge was replaced and service north to Ipswich and Rockport resumed. Because the station is so new, everything about it is in excellent condition, which is just about the only station I saw on the entire line about which one could say that.

On the other side of the Danvers River is the city of Beverly. Other than Boston, no city or town in Massachusetts has more commuter-tail stations than Beverly, even after one of them has had its service suspended, leaving four active stations: Beverly Depot, North Beverly, Montserrat, and Beverly Farms. (Needham also has four; Newton and Brockton have three each, as I believe does Melrose.) The latter two stations are located on the Rockport Branch, and are currently bustituted while the Annisquam River drawbridge in Gloucester is replaced; rail service is planned to return by the end of July. In the 2018 counts, Beverly Depot served more passengers than all other Beverly stations combined, by a factor of two, despite its 500-space off-site parking garage.

Downtown Beverly is pretty impressive for an old industrial city (the old local industry was shoe manufacturing, as well as shoe-factory equipment); Beverly Depot is located on the western edge of the downtown, but it’s easily walkable from a substantial old mixed commercial-residential neighborhood, and CATA, the local RTA, operates a low-fare circulator bus that serves the station (although not every train). The station itself has been converted into a restaurant but it maintains its historic features including a large wooden-roofed canopy on the inbound platform. A private lot on the inbound side augments the MBTA-owned garage and the city’s short-term meter parking. North of the station, there’s a universal crossover and a layover siding, allowing trains to short-turn, although the new two-trains-per-hour schedule only calls for two short-turn trains a day. I saw a southbound train serve the station while I was on the platform.

I followed the Rockport Branch from downtown Beverly all the way out to the end. During the Gloucester drawbridge replacement project, the MBTA had originally planned to maintain single-track service to Cape Ann, but after construction began, it was determined that the existing bridge was unsafe. As it was the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and passenger volumes were very light, the T decided to accelerate the demolition of the drawbridge rather than making temporary repairs to a structure that was in the process of being replaced. The change in schedule also meant that the Positive Train Control installation east of the bridge did not need to be completed before the federally imposed December, 2020, deadline (since the bridge was out of service and the rest of the line was thus disconnected from the rail network). In addition, numerous other maintenance-of-way activities, including tie and ballast replacement, were rescheduled to take advantage of the full shutdown of rail service. During weekdays, service remains active as far east as West Gloucester — the easternmost stop west of the drawbridge — but on weekends, the entire branch is bustituted, so all of the stations I visited were deserted of both passengers and trains (although there were walkers and bikers).

Of particular note along the Rockport Branch is Prides Crossing station, to which service is now suspended. While the 140-year-old station building now houses a confectioner’s shop, there are only three commuter parking spaces, and only a handful of local residents used the station, which was a flag stop on a small number of weekday peak trains. The station never got enough use to even have a proper inbound platform; instead, it’s got the MBTA-standard “dump some asphalt between the tracks” walkway for the inbound passengers to board, assuming the engineer stops the train in exactly the right place. Beverly Farms station is less than a mile away, and has nearly an order of magnitude more daily passengers, so hopefully this service suspension really is permanent.

I don’t have a lot to say about the other stations along the branch; they are all quite similar, with low-level platforms and mini-highs. West Gloucester is weird because the inbound platform is much shorter than the outbound, for no obvious reason; it’s currently being used as a laydown area for the drawbridge construction as well as the first stop for weekday inbound trains for the duration of the bustitution. (Manchester is the last stop for weekday outbound trains; I’m not sure why outbound trains are unable to serve West Gloucester.) The line is single-tracked from the Annisquam River all the way to Rockport; although the drawbridge was double-tracked and will be replaced with two separate single-track bascules, the tracks merge just on the east side of the draw in any case, so I’m not sure what is gained.

Returning to the main line, there are five remaining stations: North Beverly, Hamilton/Wenham, Ipswich, Rowley, and Newburyport. The Merrimack River bridge north of Newburyport is no longer in service, and the line beyond it has been rail-trailed, so Newburyport is the end of the line for the foreseeable future.

North Beverly is our first stop, and it’s an odd location, wedged in behind a Route 1A strip mall. It has the usual low-level platforms with pedestrian grade crossings, and the mini-highs are in poor condition. There seems to be no topographical barrier to building full-length high platforms here, other than the need for crossing the tracks, which could easily be accommodated by adding a grade crossing and ramps just north of the platforms, which could connect to the back of the Stop & Shop supermarket north of the strip mall — there is already a vehicular grade crossing, Dodge St., at the south limits of the station. North Beverly is about 2½ miles north of Beverly Depot, which is an entirely reasonable interstation for the population density.

Hamilton/Wenham continues the theme of low-level platforms with mini-highs, although there is only one platform since the line is single-tracked north of North Beverly. The towns of Hamilton and Wenham share quite a few things, including a library and a school district; the station is also split between the two towns, being built right on the town line.

Ipswich was for much of the MBTA’s existence the northern terminus of passenger service on the line, and there are likely still outdated system maps showing it as the “Ipswich/Rockport Line” floating around. Newburyport and Rowley did have service under the B&M, and at times under the MBTA, but disputes over subsidies and service levels made the operation an on-again-off-again proposition. Because Ipswich was the terminus for so many years, there is a small layover yard just south of Ipswich station, where trains were formerly idled overnight waiting for the next morning’s service to resume. As at Hamilton/Wenham, the station itself is a single low-level platform and a large surface parking lot on the west side of the single track, with a mini-high platform at the north end.

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the Franklin Line

Posted on 2021-03-23 by Garrett Wollman

It’s getting on nine days since I actually did most of this travel, and in the mean time I’ve also seen stations on three other lines (although one of them has historic connections to this one), so I’ll at least try to be a bit brief. (So, um, only 3,000 words.) As always, you can follow along with my photo gallery on SmugMug.

The Franklin Line is a disappointingly underutilized transportation facility. Originally constructed as a mainline railroad, one of several competing for business between Boston and New York, like the others it came under the control of the New York, New Haven and Hartford system. For the New Haven, the line became the Midland Route, providing an alternative to the heavily-used Shore Line (today’s Northeast Corridor) into Connecticut. Nearly all of today’s Franklin Line was originally double- or even triple-tracked, but in the years of railroad decline, culminating in the New Haven’s insolvency and inclusion in the government rescue program that created Conrail, the second track was lifted and overpasses were removed to reduce maintenance costs, resulting in a largely single-tracked line with some passing sidings. In its current configuration, the Franklin Line is unable to support frequent service. In the past few years, the MBTA and its rail operations contractor Keolis began a program to restore the double track to large segments of the line, a few miles at a time, with the stated goal of improving headways to as short as 35 minutes, but this project was put on hold during 2020.

It’s a huge disappointment because over the past decade and a half, more than a thousand housing units have been added within walking distance of the Franklin Line, and likewise tens of thousands of square feet of retail and office space. A more frequent service, with improved, more accessible stations and faster trip times, would be a real boon to the people who chose to move to new apartment buildings in Franklin, Walpole, Norwood, and Dedham. (Even Norfolk is getting into the act, albeit with a small detached-single-family condo development rather than a 200-unit apartment complex.) The MBTA and Keolis should be commended for the new April, 2021, schedule on the line, which will provide 15 hourly trains from South Station to at least Walpole, with most continuing on to Franklin, as well as additional peak-period service. The T really should resume the double-track program and take whatever additional measures are necessary to crank the headways down to 30 minutes rather than 35 — some of which probably involves improving stations to eliminate bottlenecks at inadequate and inaccessible platforms. Closing Plimptonville station, as has been done on a temporary basis, is a step in that direction, but needs to be made permanent, however much I’d hate to strand all 12 people who used the one round-trip a day that stopped there, and is probably a requirement for finishing the restoration of the double track there. In a Regional Rail future where the whole trip from Boston to Forge Park takes only 42 minutes rather than 67 minutes as currently timetabled, it’s conceivable that the long-talked-about restoration of passenger service to Milford might finally make sense.

I started my trip in Franklin at Forge Park/495 station, the current outer end of the line. Unlike most recent MBTA extensions, there’s no overnight layover facility here; constrained layover capacity has apparently been an issue for the MBTA’s Railroad Operations department for many years, going back at least as far as the original extension of the line (which was paid for by National Development, the developer of the nearby industrial park, which also built Dedham Corporate Center/128 station). Like all newer commuter-rail stations, it’s an ocean of parking surrounding a small station building with full-length platforms, although it’s old enough to have those be low-level platforms on both sides of the track, with a single mini-high on the same side as the station house. (The two huge parking lots are on opposite sides of the track, and several pedestrian grade crossings permit crossing the track in case a passenger should forget in which ocean of parking their SUV happens to be sitting.) Just west of the station, the former West Central St. vehicular overpass has been rebuilt as a pedestrian bridge; automatic signal territory ends immediately west of the overpass.

Franklin station, sometimes called “Franklin/Dean” after the local four-year college, is a real frustration. It’s nestled into Franklin’s cute little downtown, within walking distance of Dean College, shops and services, and a new 200-unit apartment complex — but it’s wholly inaccessible. The 2018 manual passenger counts, which were conducted before the apartment complex opened, showed a daily traffic of 630 passengers each way (including a handful who went the short distance between Forge Park and downtown Franklin). Yet, this station was single-tracked in recent memory, as the platform makes painfully obvious: it was clearly extended by removing the outbound track and dumping several yards of hot-mix onto the trackway where that second track used to be. This does mean that it would be ludicrously easy to make the station fully accessible, because the current platform is well away from the station building, and so all the more frustrating that the MBTA has chosen not to do so, given the fact that it serves a significant ridership and an educational institution. Immediately south of the station, the line divides: the old freight mainline was not acquired by the state when purchasing the line from CSX due to environmental cleanup liabilities the state was unwilling to assume after performing due diligence, which held up the sale for a decade, and a single-track branch line to Milford serves the current commuter-rail service. (The remaining freight customers on the branch are served by the Grafton & Upton out of Westborough; the mainline is abandoned about two miles south of the station and has become the Southern New England Trunkline Trail.)

Just north of Franklin station is “FRANK” interlocking and the MBTA’s very limited two-track layover facility, built on a formerly three-track section of the right of way; phase 2 of the double-track project involves extending the double-track from the north end of the layover facility to Norfolk, about 3½ miles. (The theory behind this is that, once the trains have left the layover for the day, the layover tracks can be used for through-running trains.) This is the phase of the project that began in early 2020 and was paused for the pandemic; it’s unknown when work will resume. (The third phase of the project, which was in design when work was halted, will restore the second track between Norwood Central and Walpole, likely with a few gaps, as I’ll note below.)

At Norfolk, we can actually see lots of evidence of the double-track project having gotten started with grubbing and grading on the right-of-way, although no track placement. It’s not clear whether the plans included construction of a proper second platform at the station, although the trackbed is certainly wide enough to support it. The parking situation at Norfolk is a little odd, with most of the parking a very long walk south of the station and up a long set of stairs — I didn’t see the main lot during my trip and was only able to figure out what the long walkway was for by examining the aerial photographs closely. (And at least for now don’t expect to learn much about the double-track project from the aerials, nor likewise about the various recently built apartment buildings — the public aerials are a couple of years out of date.) At the north end of the station is a grade crossing over Rockwood Road, and the completed double-track from phase 1 of the project runs from just north of there to the “WALPOLE WEST” interlocking, at the south end of the former passing siding south of Walpole station.

Walpole itself is a bit of a mess — a historic mess, but a mess nonetheless. The station was built at the diamond crossing of what are now the Franklin Line and the CSX Framingham Secondary, and CSX has a small marshalling yard on the Framingham side of the station to switch trains for industrial customers on the Framingham Secondary and on the Northeast Corridor, some of which are served via the northern Franklin Line from Readville due to access restrictions on the NEC. While the crossing was built as a full diamond, at least one of the wye legs has been lifted, and in a 2010 report, it was reported that the MBTA was operating game-days-only Foxboro special-event service using a backup move because the switch from the southbound Franklin line to Foxboro and Mansfield was not reliable. (This must have been fixed in preparation for the pilot all-day service to Foxboro, because when that service was introduced it was called out specifically as not serving Walpole station.) The station was built on the diamond crossing proper, to serve passengers on both lines, which came under the same Old Colony umbrella in the late 19th century, but passenger service on what is now the Framingham Secondary ended before World War II and is no longer a particular concern. For operational simplicity, Alon Levy suggests moving the station northeast, past Elm Street and closer to downtown Walpole, which would allow for construction of full-length platforms and would not be a significantly more difficult walk for most passengers; this short section of the line is already double-tracked.

Next stop, Plimptonville! Or actually not, since the single daily round-trip that called at the ten-foot asphalt “platform” has been discontinued — hopefully for good. As I mentioned above, in 2018, this sorry excuse for a station, with gravel parking lot the size of two SUVs, served a dozen passengers, which most have been mostly people who lived within walking distance. With the station out of the way, there’s nothing preventing busting up the platform to restore the second track, and once that’s done it can never be reopened because this station can never be made accessible in its present location. Wikipedia says the current platform is ten feet long, which means it doesn’t take much of a braking error on the part of the engineer to entirely miss the mark.

Windsor Gardens, like Plimptonville, is problematic for future service on a double-tracked line. Also like Plimptonville, it serves only local residents — it’s practically a private station, with no formal public access except by train. It was the last stations built before the MBTA took ownership of the line, and serves only the residents of the apartment complex formerly known as Windsor Gardens. (Now called “The Commons at Windsor Gardens” because landlords can’t help but change the names of their properties when they change hands.) Despite the somewhat limited service, more than 250 people used this station in the 2018 counts, and it’s definitely one that is worth keeping, both for the MBTA and as a valuable and exclusive amenity for the landlord. The challenge is how — if it is even possible — to extend the double-track through this section, as the platform (again, like Plimptonville) sits on top of the old southbound trackway, in a fairly narrow section of the right of way. Even making the station accessible is likely to be challenging, although it’s a challenge that absolutely should be taken up — but who is going to pay for it? It seems likely that, in the short term at least, this will remain a single-track station, with a neckdown between two otherwise double-track segments.

Norwood Central brings us back to the “ocean of parking” that’s such a theme of the MBTA Commuter Rail network — although at least there is more high-density residential construction immediately adjacent to the line. The closest large employer, Norwood Hospital, has been closed since a flood in June, 2020, and is not expected to reopen before the end of 2021. At least there’s a solar canopy over part of the parking lot. South of Norwood Central, a couple of apparently active (but very poor condition) freight sidings persist, one of which appears to still be getting freight deliveries, which may help to explain why such a busy station (more than a thousand passengers a day in 2018) has only mini-high platforms; constructing full-length high platforms should be a priority, but the station has the usual problem of requiring expensive vertical circulation structures to allow for full closure of the pedestrian grade crossings (which are incompatible with high-level platforms).

There’s no sign of a depot at Norwood Depot, nor even a junction, but there is more recently-built housing and another very large parking lot. A light-industrial building at the far north end of the platform does show signs of having had boxcar doors at one time, although no other evidence of a historic freight siding remains. The footfall at Norwood Depot is surprisingly low compared to its sibling to the south, under 300 a day in 2018, which is presumably a consequence of its smaller (but still substantial) sea of surrounding parking. Perhaps if the MBTA sold some of that parking to another new residential development, there might be more traffic here. There are very long low-level platforms with mini-highs at the south end, although the mini-highs seem somewhat longer than at many other stations, and surprisingly, have a wood deck rather than concrete. The inbound platform is width-constrained, which will make construction of any vertical circulation difficult; in the mean time, the station limps along with limited pedestrian grade crossings.

Islington is one of two stations in Westwood — the other being the far larger and more accessible Route 128/University Ave. station. Although it’s wedged between Routes 1 and 1A, the station is in a single-family-residential neighborhood, has relatively limited parking, and is likely convenient only to its immediate neighbors. (The parking lot is also in poor condition.) Nonetheless, it did manage to attract more than a hundred daily riders in the 2018 counts despite being skipped by a number of the AM peak trains. (I tried to count the number of different service patterns operated on this line in the 2018 passenger data, and gave up when I got to ten.) Islington is also very close to Dedham Corporate Center, on the other side of Route 128 (the freeway, not the station), which has much more parking, denser neighboring residential development, and easier access, so it’s not surprising that it gets relatively low ridership compared to its nearest “competitors”.

Speaking of which, a sudden snow squall interrupted my tour of the line. When I got out of the car at Dedham Corporate, I found the weather to be unconducive for photography, and went home (after taking a few pictures of the swirling snow in the parking lot). I went back the following Saturday afternoon to finish off the Franklin Line with the two remaining stations. Dedham Corporate of course has the usual ocean of parking, accessed from the East St. exit off Route 128, but on the other side of the tracks, two large chain apartment complexes (an “Avalon” and a “Jefferson”) front the station from across Rustcraft Road. Dedham Corporate Center, the industrial park, is located on the former site of the Rust Craft Greeting Card Company’s factory, once the world’s largest, and had its own station to serve employees; the station was closed due to low traffic in the early MBTA era, and the new station was built in the late 1980s by the developers of the industrial park. The apartment complexes came much later, and the Legacy Place lifestyle center, which is on the other side of the apartment buildings, even later still. When the station was originally built, there was no access from the Rustcraft Road side, and in fact a chain-link fence still blocks access to the platforms, but there is now a “kiss and ride” (signed as such!) and a small opening in the fence about 400 feet south of the drop-off area. (So you can drop someone off at the drop-off but they still have to walk most of the way down the platform before they can actually get into the station.) As at other stations of this age, there are full-length low-level platforms with no tactile warning, with a pair of mini-high platforms at the south end of the station, and pedestrian grade crossings make full-length high platforms difficult to implement, although there is at least plenty of room in the right-of-way to add ramps or elevators at either end of the platforms.

The final stop on our tour of the Franklin Line is Endicott. It’s a very small station, inaccessible, in a low-density residential neighborhood with parking restricted to Dedham residents. Between the parking (which is small but not trivial) and the local residents, this station seems to attract a decent amount of patronage — 250 passengers a day in 2018. It’s also used as a cut-through by the local neighborhood: I saw a family on bicycles use the ramp and grade crossing while I was there taking pictures. Yes, even though the station is not accessible as a station, it still has a ramp to get from street level up to the platform, and even some HP/V restricted parking. What the town of Dedham expects one to do once a wheelchair user gets up onto the platform is unclear, but at least they made the effort. Like with other stations on this line, vertical circulation is the biggest challenge for making the station fully accessible, especially in the middle of a residential neighborhood as it is — neighbors would undoubtedly show up and filibuster any public meeting that proposed making the station properly accessible.

That’s the end of this tour. The next stop on the line is Readville, which is … a thing. I haven’t revisited Readville since my 2019 tour of the low-platform Providence Line stations, and nearly all Franklin Line trips join the Southwest Corridor at Readville, while the historic Midland Route follows the Dorchester Branch, today’s Fairmount Line, into South Station. I did stop by Fairmount station itself, but haven’t seen any of the newly constructed Fairmount Line stations and will delay that until after the pandemic when I can more comfortably do so by transit.

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Weekend mini-excursion: Stations of various south-side lines

Posted on 2021-03-21 by Garrett Wollman

I had hoped to publish my thoughts about the Franklin Line by now, but photo editing took a bit longer than usual, and I wanted to wait anyway for a sunny day when I could go out and get pictures of the remaining stations on the line from my snow-squall-interrupted trip last weekend. Anyway, as the journalists say, “tk” on that one.

In order to dovetail with the Franklin Line discussion, I did get around to publishing some cell-phone photos from the Providence Line which I took in August, 2019 — before the closure of rusted-out deathtrap South Attleboro and before the completion of the new platforms at Mansfield. Notably, this contains the pictures of Readville station which complete my treatment of the Franklin Line. That earlier trip was made primarily to investigate the barriers to high-platform construction (although the primary barrier was always Stephanie Pollack) and some of the photos were subsequently deleted, so it is far from a thorough treatment of current station conditions.

While I was in the neighborhood, although I skipped a revisit of Readville and Hyde Park on the Providence Line, I did go to Fairmount station on the eponymous line; since all of the other Fairmount stations are in denser parts of the city with more people around and less parking, and there’s still a pandemic going on, I am putting them off until later when I am able to get there by transit. (They’re also all new-construction high-platform stations and so much less interesting.)

Since I was posting the Providence Line photos, I figured I might as well take a look at the two-station Stoughton Branch, which has one historic station, a lot of questions about its future, and lots and lots of parking. I’m not going to be writing a separate profile of the Stoughton Branch for some time, certainly not until some movement is made on electrification, South Coast Rail phase 2, or other significant investments.

Next stop, Franklin, followed by the Eastern Route.

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the Greenbush line

Posted on 2021-03-16 by Garrett Wollman

Well, after two very opinionated posts about the two next-nearest MBTA rail lines to me, what could I say about the Greenbush Line? Turns out, there isn’t very much to say. The Greenbush Line is, strictly speaking, the newest MBTA Commuter Rail line to open, as a part of the state’s Central Artery/Tunnel Project mitigation commitments. It was delayed by NIMBYs in the tony South Shore communities it passes through, especially Hingham, which insisted on construction of an unnecessary tunnel where the line had passed through the historic downtown at grade. Cohasset demanded a rail-trail conversion for a former branch line to the Hingham Naval Ammunition Depot Annex. I’m not sure what if anything Braintree or Weymouth got, other than some enormous parking lots and brand-new rail stations.

Because the Greenbush Line is so new, and none of the original Old Colony Railroad stations still existed or were in the right place for an auto-oriented, 9-to-5-commuter park-and-ride service, all of the stations are entirely new construction and fully accessible, with a single full-length high-level platform. Other than East Braintree/Weymouth Landing, the stations are far from any significant residential or commercial development, just an ocean of parking in the middle of the woods by the side of the tracks. (Greenbush, the terminus, is instead in a commercial/industrial area; the station and overnight layover facility are co-located.) East Braintree, by contrast, has a significant amount of transit-oriented development, although it too has an ocean of parking. A couple of the larger parking lots at least have solar canopies — why doesn’t the MBTA develop these at every parking lot with a southerly exposure?

You can see the pictures at my SmugMug gallery.

Usually at this point I would have a few thousand words about “what is to be done”. But because the Greenbush (and the other Old Colony lines) is so new, there isn’t a whole lot on the agenda in terms of maintenance, and the stations are already fully accessible. The three branches are unquestionably last on the list for any sort of major capital investments, especially after South Coast Rail Phase 1 extends the Middleborough Line to New Bedford and Fall River. So that’s the end of it, right?

Hold on.

The Greenbush Line and its Old Colony sisters (Kingston and Middleborough/South Coast) do not need any capital investment, but the MBTA’s rolling stock does. Right now, the Old Colony lines require a significant amount of the MBTA’s most modern rolling stock, because the line is operated with remote door release — the only lines where that’s practical because they are the only lines where every single station has a full-length high-level platform. That means that their productivity is higher (conductors are not required to open doors or operate traps for low-platform stops), but it also means that they are already prepared for modern rolling stock, once the T finally manages to buy some.

I go back and forth on diesel multiple units (DMUs). Yes, they still burn diesel, and they don’t have the power or acceleration of an electric multiple unit (EMU), even from the same manufacturer and product family. (Compare the Fort Worth diesel FLIRT, at 1050 kW, with the nearly-identical Helsinki class Sm5 electric FLIRT at 2200 kW.) But if your alternative is buying more locomotive-hauled coaches, and locomotives, because you can’t install electrification before your current rolling stock reaches the end of its service life, then DMUs look more attractive — especially if you can buy DMUs and EMUs from the same family, with an option to convert diesel to electric during the normal midlife overhaul.

Since the Greenbush and Kingston lines are probably the last to be electrified in any plausible scenario, that suggests a plan of action: order DMUs and EMUs together, with the DMUs to be delivered first, and put them into service on the Old Colony. Take the coaches that were ordered for South Coast Rail along with all the coaches and locomotives heretofore being used on Old Colony service and shift them to the rest of the system, retiring the poorest-condition locomotives and coaches. This gets you productivity improvements on the rest of the system as you install high platforms, and further reduces the number of conductors required. By the time the DMUs are fifteen years old, electrification work should have progressed far enough to retire the last of the locomotive-hauled coach fleet and consider converting the DMUs to EMUs or finding another agency to buy and overhaul them.

(Longer term, the electrification probably needs to be paired with resolving the Dorchester bottleneck — a single-track section of the line parallel to I-93 and the Red Line which limits the possibility for future frequency improvements. Rail Vision assumed that the Greenbush and Kingston lines would terminate in Quincy or Braintree for most scenarios due to the cost involved, if 15-minute headways were to be provided.)

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the Needham Line

Posted on 2021-03-15 by Garrett Wollman

This is the first of three posts about MBTA commuter-rail stations I went to see on the weekend of March 13–14: on Saturday I saw all of the Needham and Greenbush lines, and then on Sunday I saw nearly all of the Franklin Line. (My travels Sunday were interrupted by an unexpected snow squall that made photography of the last two stations untenable; I’ll get back to them at some point.) As with previous Weekend Excursions, I am deliberately avoiding the inner “zone 1A” stations, which are generally associated with busy subway stations, until the pandemic is over, so on the Needham Line I did not go all the way to Forest Hills, but I did see all of the other stations, and my photos are once again on my SmugMug site, which you might want to open in another tab to flip back and forth with this essay.

The Needham Line is actually a combination of fragments of two older lines, the nineteenth-century Charles River Branch Railroad, which ran from Newton Highlands to Medway and points west, and the early-1900s Needham Cut-off, which connected Forest Hills with the modern-day Needham Junction. The Cut-off reduced the travel time on the Charles River Railroad, which had used trackage rights over the Boston & Albany’s Highland Branch to reach Boston, by substituting a straighter and flatter route connecting to Boston over the New Haven Railroad’s Shore Line. A full wye junction at Needham Junction allowed commuter service in Needham to be provided via Cut-off, and passenger service was eliminated north of Needham Heights. The connection to the Highland Branch was severed when the MTA (as was) took over the Highland Branch from the B&A and made it the Riverside Line, and the section of line in Newton was eventually abandoned after losing its last freight customers; more recently, the Newton section has been rail-trailed as the Upper Falls Greenway. The remaining section in Needham is still intact, but the original Charles River Branch Railroad was always a single-track line there and in Newton. (I can remember when I moved to Boston in the 1990s the Newton section still had freight sidings connected, although the grade crossings were exempt and I never saw any evidence of traffic on the rails. The bridge over Route 128 connecting the Newton and Needham sections was demolished in the 2010s as a part of widening the highway.)

East of Needham Junction, the line was historically double-tracked, except for the bridge over the Charles River and associated wetlands, and a few narrow gaps in West Roxbury. (See Vansnhookenraggen’s track map.) The second track was lifted at some point, long enough ago that all of the stations and most of the overpasses are single-track-only; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when this happened. It’s clear that some of the stations were extended out onto the trackbed of the old second track, either to provide additional platform length (as I wrote about the Fitchburg Line, the T has been relatively inflexible about requiring 800-foot platforms so they can run infrequent 8-coach trains) or clearance for a mini-high platform. Unlike the Worcester and Fitchburg lines, all of the stations on the Needham Line have a mini-high for accessibility, although because of station layouts it is frequently very far up the platform from the actual station location.

Southwest of Needham Junction, the MBTA owned but never operated the remaining branch line to Millis and beyond, and this has now been rail-trailed through Dover and Needham to a point just south of the switch controlling that branch; although the wye proper is still in place it’s clearly not long for this world. There is a private business (a tree service) in the infield of the wye, but it does not receive rail freight, nor do any other businesses along the line; and freight sidings have been taken up in places where they once existed, except just south of Needham Heights, which the MBTA uses as a layover facility for the line. North of Needham Heights, track remains but grade crossings have been removed as far as Gould St., where the line used to pass north of the WCVB-TV (channel 5) studios before crossing Route 128.

The question then arises: what should be done with this line? The platforms are in terrible shape (except for the mini-highs), and will require some capital investment soon. The platforms are also much longer than would be necessary for operating frequent service with self-propelled vehicles of some kind. The single-tracking limits the frequencies that the line can support, and the grade crossings and station sites in Needham limit the choice of mode. There’s a substantial desire for better service, and regular subway fares, in West Roxbury and Roslindale, and people have batted around various options for as long as I can remember. A significant challenge is that all of the possible options require very similar, but incompatible, capital investments; doing any one of them would preclude any other type of service for thirty years or more. Most of these options would also involve closing the line for several years in order to construct new stations, signals, and power, as well as rebuild the trackbed. The most popular option would require full grade-crossing elimination in Needham, as well as significant construction of vertical circulation, which I believe to be a non-starter for both political and cost reasons. Any option that involves significant construction in the Charles River wetlands or adjacent parkland is likely to run into significant environmental objections, although it’s my hope that electrification alone, if done sensitively, would not.

So what are the options? I assume that doing nothing is not a real option, because the platforms are deteriorating and we can’t keep on burning diesel fuel, but people in Needham are rich and politically powerful, as well as attached to “their” train service. The Regional Rail model is appealing: frequent service every 15 minutes is feasible with electric propulsion, and the full implementation would put at least all of the West Roxbury stops into the subway fare zone, because they are no farther away from downtown Boston than Riverside or Braintree. Many activists in Boston have been asking for an Orange Line extension, which would provide a single-fare ride to most of the MBTA network as well as a single-seat ride to downtown Boston, but has a bunch of baggage that would mean this option likely ends service in Needham entirely. Other people have advocated for extending the Green Line along the now-abandoned segment through Newton to serve Needham; I myself have advocated all three of these options at various times. Sticking with mainline-rail technologies, but modernizing the equipment to allow faster and more frequent trips is an option, too, but has some of the same issues. And this is a line that serves 3,300 people a day — even being optimistic and assuming that a more frequent service could serve 10,000 people a day, mostly in West Roxbury, how much spending is that really worth? The interstation distance on this line is relatively short (most of the stations are within ¾ mile of at least one of their neighbors), as is the line itself, so even modern fast-accelerating trains can’t shave much time off the schedule. (In my simulations, the long interstation between Hersey and West Roxbury is the only place where a train even gets to 50 mi/h, and you would really like to have another station or two in that stretch. Having all level boarding helps much more by reducing dwell times, although this is complicated by the need to wait for signal clearance on the largely single-track parts of the line.)

A summary of the benefits and impediments for each of these alternatives:

Status quo
Station conditions will have to be addressed, do not want to throw good money after bad. Current service is much worse than it could be. Diesel locomotives and locomotive-hauled coaches are obsolete. Maintains existing direct service to Back Bay and South Station, at a very large cost in capacity on the Providence Line due to crossing movements for inbound trains at Forest Hills. High fares keep people from driving and parking in Needham just to use the commuter rail.
Regional Rail
Requires high-level platforms and substantial structures for vertical circulation. Some station locations will require substantial property takings if double-tracking is to be restored in West Roxbury. Frequent all-day service with integrated fares reduces need for parallel bus services. Environmental processing for 25-kV electrification infrastructure in Needham and crossing the Charles River likely to be difficult. Same issues with Providence Line capacity unless trains terminate at Forest Hills, as has been proposed by Rail Vision and others.
Orange Line extension
Requires complete grade separation (due to third-rail electrification) and fare control, which may necessitate relocating stations and is definitely the most expensive option. Extremely unpopular in Needham and would require substantial property takings north of Needham Junction to double-track and grade-separate the line, likely resulting in ending service to the town, or else an expensive bored tunnel with stations in different locations. Line would be closed for several years for construction.
Green Line extension
Requires a politically unpopular retaking of the Upper Falls Greenway and likely property on either side, and an expensive new viaduct over Route 128. While this preserves a one-seat ride to Longwood and the Back Bay, it is a much slower trip (why the Needham Cut-off was built in the first place). Capacity of the Green Line’s Central Tunnel is limited, and addition of a fifth branch would worsen schedule adherence significantly, unless frequencies were dropped on the outer Riverside to compensate. On the plus side, no new vehicles or maintenance facilities would be required (other than the Type 10 LRVs that have not been ordered yet), and additional stops could be added in Newton serving the Needham St. area, which is rapidly transforming. Probably only makes sense in conjunction with an Orange Line extension to West Roxbury, making that option even more expensive, but preserves some service to Needham. Only modest platform raising, no grade separations and only limited additional vertical circulation (12-foot ramps vs. 45-foot ramps for Orange Line or 48-foot ramps for high-platform mainline rail).
Regional Rail model with low-floor DMU/EMU
This would be my preferred option — requiring only modest platform raising, much less obtrusive vertical circulation, and largely compatible with the existing infrastructure (signals, grade crossings, PTC/ATC, maintenance facilities) — but there’s one huge drawback, though: the MBTA doesn’t operate any of this sort of equipment and never has. (The Budd RDCs are closest but not low-floor and they’ve been gone from the fleet for decades now, so there are no parts and no maintenance expertise.) Otherwise, I would be telling the T to call up Trinity Metro and ask if they can lease one or two of the TEXRail DMUs (a diesel version of my favorite Regional Rail train, the Stadler FLIRT) for a pilot. This still has the issues with building 25-kV electrification infrastructure through Needham Center, once you ultimately get EMUs rather than DMUs, but the issue of maintaining a tiny fleet of low-floor EMUs in addition to the larger fleet of high-floor EMUs remains. A new low-platform stop would have to be constructed at Forest Hills. (Note that low-floor mainline trains are still higher-platform than LRVs, 600 mm above the rail rather than 300 mm, so the ramps required would be roughly twice as long.)

So now that I’ve dismissed all of the alternatives as inadequate, too expensive for the possible audience, politically impractical, or too different an equipment type in too small a fleet for the T to effectively maintain, have I left any other options on the table?

Yes. Yes I have.

After looking at all of the stations in context, staring at aerial photos and track maps, and thinking about land use, I am convinced that the right option is in fact light rail. But not a Green Line extension, which is impractical for the reasons I described above; rather, a direct substitution of light rail for the existing mainline rail service between Forest Hills and Needham Heights, with added stops at Baker St./VFW Parkway, Millennium Park, and Gould St. This offers all of the advantages of the Regional Rail solution, with the same service pattern, but uses equipment the T already is planning to buy and maintain, is incrementally constructable, and is much cheaper to build — commensurate to the expected ridership. It would require building slightly raised platforms, but these platforms would be compatible with the existing legacy service, allowing for incremental construction before the new vehicles are delivered, and the low platforms require only short ramps for accessibility. Existing pedestrian and vehicular grade crossings could largely be maintained, and platforms shortened to only 250 feet, greatly reducing the distance patrons (especially wheelchair users) are required to walk to board and alight. (Why extend all the way to Gould St.? First, to preserve future options for extending into Newton. Second, and more importantly, because there is a big assisted-living facility/nursing home on Gould St. next to the right-of-way and it would be well served by a station.)

This does still require installation of overhead power, but the structures for light-rail catenary, designed for low voltages and a maximum speed of 50 mi/h, are much less obtrusive and require less clearance than what you have to build for mainline electrification at 25 kilovolts AC. Even crossing Cutler Park and the Charles River is not likely to be a problem for 750-volt DC catenary, and it would be actually practical through Needham Center, without requiring significant land takings. It does require construction of a new platform at Forest Hills with internal vertical circulation to access the Orange Line, and it also requires a separate maintenance facility, like the Mattapan Line has, because the line won’t have a track connection to the Green Line — I would put this either in the Rivermoor Industrial Park, south of Millennium Park and near the existing terminus of the 36 bus, or beyond the proposed Gould Street station, next to the WCVB-TV studios and Muzi Motors. (The latter’s oceans of asphalt and low-rise buildings should be a high-priority target for redevelopment anyway.)

You might ask whether this is an actual improvement. The MBTA hasn’t chosen a proposal yet for the new Type 10 Green Line vehicle, so we don’t know what their performance characteristics are, but I picked a random LRV that’s already used in North America (the Siemens S200 used in Calgary) and plugged its parameters into my simulator. With the two infill stops, at Millennium Park and VFW/Baker, Needham LRT still beats the existing diesel train between Forest Hills and Needham Heights by a whole eight minutes (20 minutes vs. 31), meaning that even with the forced transfer to the Orange Line, someone going to Longwood or Back Bay would not end up any worse off (and they’d pay a lot less). Without any investment in double-tracking, this schedule works for 5 trains per hour (12-minute headways), with a cycle time of exactly an hour, so it would require 6 trains:
A stringline diagram showing an hour's service at 5tph

If the second track is restored through West Roxbury to Millennium Park, you could double frequency on the Boston segment, which would be nearly equal to Orange Line service, cost far less, and be constructible incrementally, without cutting off the Needham end of the line.

This is yet another example of how deciding what service model you want to operate then determines what your capital program should look like. Here’s my vision for the incremental capital improvements to make this a reality:

  1. Acquire purchase options on Prime Auto Body and Muzi Motors properties.
  2. Start environmental review process, including alternatives analysis for maintenance facility location and infill stations.
  3. Add eight cars to Type 10 order.
  4. Start design and permitting on overhead electrification, infill stations, and maintenance facilities.
  5. Start platform reconstruction, raising platforms to 360 mm and making sure that pedestrian grade crossings are at least 275 feet apart (250-foot platform plus 12-foot ramp on either side); add ramps as required.
  6. (All of the above are no-/low-regrets investments; the platform work needs to be done anyway and you might as well only do it once.)
  7. Design new Green Line-compatible signal system, or else figure out how to fit mainline cab signals and ACSES to a Type 10 LRV.
  8. Assuming positive environmental review, start construction of maintenance facilities, infill stations, signals, and catenary.
  9. Close the line for the summer to test vehicles and signals (the only step that requires a full line closure, because the new platforms and catenary are geometrically compatible with existing rolling stock).
  10. Open the converted line to passengers.

That’s what you do with the Needham Line to get from 3,300 to 10,000 passengers a day.

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Weekend excursion: Stations of the Fitchburg Line

Posted on 2021-03-10 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: 3,900 words about passenger stations on a railroad you probably don’t ride in a city where you don’t live, with embedded rants about the conservatism of railroaders and the necessity of integrating service planning with capital construction and vehicle procurement.

I continued my series of visits to MBTA commuter rail stations the weekend of March 6–7 with the Fitchburg Line. I chose this line for a couple of reasons: first, it’s the second-closest to me, after the Worcester Line which runs only a mile from my home; second, the MBTA decided to close the inner part of the line completely for two months, “while passenger volume is light due to the pandemic”, in order to accelerate installation of Automatic Train Control equipment, which is required by federal regulations. (The T was able to meet the December 31, 2020, federal deadline for installing Positive Train Control by getting a waiver from the FRA allowing it to operate PTC without ATC on the North Side commuter lines for two years.) Additionally, two of the line’s nineteen stations had service suspended due to low ridership and lack of disabled access as a part of pandemic-related service cuts, and I wanted to see what those stations actually looked like while they were still reasonably intact. (We’ll see what “intact” turned out to mean in a little bit.)

As with last weekend’s tour of the Worcester Line, I did not go into The City to photograph the Zone 1A stations, and as with last weekend, I am publishing the photographs separately in a gallery on my SmugMug site. Feel free to middle-click that link to see what I’m talking about in the rest of the commentary.

The Fitchburg Line is a very strange bird and I Have Thoughts. It serves some of the wealthiest suburbs of Boston, including the tony suburbs of Belmont, Weston, and Lincoln, along with working-class cities like Fitchburg and Leominster at the very far end of the line. Before the pandemic, a number of distinct service patterns were operated, including short-turn local trains between Boston and Littleton, express trains that ran non-stop between South Acton and Porter Square, and local trains that skipped neither, one, or both of the now-closed low-patronage stops in Weston. The regular local train making all stops was scheduled to take 104 minutes between North Station and Wachusett. The line includes both the absolute newest MBTA station of any kind (the aforementioned Wachusett), as well as one of the oldest (Silver Hill, in existence since 1844). Of the nineteen stops, nine are completely inaccessible (100% low platforms or indeed no platforms at all), six more have low-level platforms with short “mini-high” platforms to make them nominally accessible (although not acceptable by current standards), and the four recently-built (or reconstructed) stations have actual full-length high-level platforms.

The two stations in Belmont, “Belmont” and “Waverley”, have surprisingly low passenger counts (based on the 2018 CTPS manual counts). Both of these stations have extensive local bus service, but the stations are assigned to the extremely expensive “zone 1”, which costs $6.50 a trip, as compared with the $2.40 “zone 1A” fare (same as the subway). In a rational fare structure, these fares would be equal, and some subset of passengers would shift from the bus to the train to get into Boston. This is one example among several illustrating the need for an integrated planning approach: these stations are currently entirely inaccessible, and the investments required to bring them up to compliance are substantial, but when they only serve 200 round-trips a day, it’s very difficult to justify the expense. But as a part of a Regional Rail approach, with frequent service and fare integration, these could be among the busiest stations on the Fitchburg Line, and would easily justify the capital investments required to make them fully part of the rail network. Waverley station itself is in deteriorating condition and will require investment soon to stabilize the concrete stairs, which should be viewed as an opportunity to make the station accessible and move it to zone 1A.

Waltham is the next community outbound from Belmont. It used to have four stations, of which two survive (and only one of which is located in the same place, sort of). Waltham has the last significant stretch of (non-station) single-track on the line, and from looking at the aerials and the two ends on the ground, I have no clear idea why — it seems to be a two-track railbed that is just running single-track to make frequent service impossible. Perhaps they found that there were dynamic envelope constraints such that running a single track in the middle of the railbed would allow trains to maintain somewhat higher speeds? The eastern end of the single-track section is in a relatively dense mixed-use neighborhood which includes many residences, the Waltham District Court, and some big-box stores, as well as a lumberyard; it’s located under the US 20 overpass, which carries the busy and slow #70 bus. Waltham Lumber sits on both sides of the interlocking, and stores some of its inventory on the platform of the former Beaver Brook station, which was closed in 1978. Again, under a Regional Rail model with fare integration and frequent service, this station would make all the sense in the world to restore (with full-length high platforms and elevators to new bus stops on the overpass) if for no other reason than to improve conditions for riders of the #70 in Waltham and Watertown. It’s also a sensible place to put a station to queue traffic for the single-track section: if you’re going to have frequent service, you’re going to end up with trains waiting at the interlocking, and you might as well have a station there. (A similar logic applies to the proposed South Salem station on the Eastern Route: having stations on either side of a single-track bottleneck helps regulate the traffic flow and maintain the published schedule.)

The west end of the single-track is actually within the limits of Waltham station, and I totally don’t understand why it was built the way it was. Waltham is the third-busiest suburban station on the line, after only South Acton and Littleton. The inbound side of the station is located on the single-track section, between Moody and and Elm Streets, which it crosses at grade; the outbound side of the station is located west of Moody Street, along and on the same side of the single track, and the interlocking where the line resumes double-track is within the outbound station limits. West of the outbound station, the right-of-way is four tracks wide, of which three tracks partially remain. The section of track where the inbound station is located used to be double-tracked, and there is still an old interlocking tower that used to control the old Watertown Branch (abandoned in 2007 and since demolished), so it’s not at all clear to me why the neckdown is located west of Moody and not east of Elm Street, where there is clearly enough R-o-W.

Of course neither station has a full-length high platform, or indeed a full-length platform of any kind; both sides have mini-high platforms, and both are considerably shorter than the MBTA’s standard of 800 feet. (More words about that below.) The sensible thing to do, from my perspective, would be to shift the interlocking east of Elm St., double-track through the current inbound station, and build a new center platform west of Moody with a direct ramp down to street level for access. This might require shifting the outbound track north a few feet to avoid taking 121 Moody, but would provide full accessibility and would eliminate the current situation where trains stopping at the station foul the grade crossing. (The line has published clearances of AAR Plate E all the way from Boston to Littleton, so even if there were any freight customers left — and there appear not to be — they wouldn’t be any worse off.)

Brandeis/Roberts station, the second active station in Waltham, serves its namesake university, as well as a suburban office park and an apartment complex. It has a significant parking lot, and served 370 daily boardings back in 2018 — most inbound but a significant minority outbound. It is perhaps the most “normal” station on the line: two parallel, full-length, low-level, side platforms with mini-highs for accessibility. It is built on a curve, like many of the Fitchburg Line stations, but there is no obvious constraint here other than cost why this couldn’t be a full high-platform station with safe crossings.

Next come the three stations in Weston, and I use the word “stations” advisedly. As I mentioned at the beginning, two of these stations — Hastings, with 18 daily boardings, and Silver Hill, with 11 — have been closed since January as a part of the MBTA’s COVID-19 service cutbacks. Hastings isn’t even a station at all: it’s just a grade crossing where some trains can be flagged down, and passengers board and alight in the middle of the street between the crossing gates. Silver Hill is a cute old station built into an open cut, with an under-length low-level platform accessed by a single wooden stair. Both of the closed stations are served by only a fraction of local trains, are entirely inaccessible, cannot practically be made accessible, would not be worth making accessible, and any honest equity analysis that considered solely the increased trip times resulting from having even a flag stop at these stations for passengers from farther out, as balanced against making two dozen rich people drive an extra mile to Kendal Green, would favor permanent closure of these stations — and so I said in written testimony to the MBTA board, to encourage them to resist calls for “complete restoration” of the old service in response to the next federal bailout. Once closed, they can never be opened again, since the multi-million-dollar capital investment required to make them accessible will never be justified.

Kendal Green itself is an interesting story. It has a single, short, low-level platform with a tiny asphalt pad for inbound passengers to cross the active outbound track and board. In fact, a number of the stations from here out to Shirley require inbound riders to stand between tracks on asphalt pads to board, which is both dangerous and slow, although at least Lincoln has multiple boarding pads for riders. Kendal Green had the highest pre-pandemic ridership of the three Weston stations, which makes sense considering that it also has the most parking: 110 passengers, nearly all of them inbound. (There is a surprising number of inbound alightings in the 2018 data; this station is the closest of the three to the office park in Weston but not that close.) The parking for the station is town-owned and permitted; it’s located east of and across the street from the historic station building, along a road that ultimately leads to the a landscaping supply company and the town dump transfer station.

Kendal Green, despite its low current ridership and location in a rich suburb with anti-housing zoning laws, has potential that I believe justifies additional capital investment, as I explained in additional comments to the MBTA board. Specifically, the station should be relocated east of the Church St. grade crossing onto the property of the landscape supply company, with full-length high platforms and a ramp connecting to the Mass Central Rail Trail. The MCRT connects to a senior living facility just a quarter mile away, two office parks within half a mile, and the Bear Hill section of Waltham with its numerous residential and commercial developments is within a mile, a reasonable distance for station-centered bikeshare. The existing bridge over the line is in unsafe condition and closed to foot traffic; since it needs to be replaced anyway, the same project could also provide vertical circulation for the relocated station to avoid unsafe at-grade track crossings.

This issue of substandard platforms keeps on coming up on this line, and I used the occasion of my board comments to suggest that railroad management (both the MBTA’s and everywhere else in the US) is extremely conservative, and will make up nonsense excuses in order to avoid changing anything ever. In particular, they will often cite “operational flexibility” as a reason for certain design standards that have the effect of making station improvements impossibly expensive, when they can’t fall back on NFPA 130 to justify overbuilding. The MBTA’s standard for new station construction requires 800-foot platforms, which only make sense in the context of infrequent locomotive-hauled trains that have to be nine coaches long because when trains are infrequent you get 1,200 people squeezing on to a single train. But if the MBTA is serious about Regional Rail, then their standards should be adapted to that service model, which means you’re running 250- or 300-foot EMUs or DMUs for your base level of service, and in peak periods you just add more trains — and when you can’t add more trains, then you’re coupling two 250-foot vehicles together. There are a lot more places you can fit a 500-foot platform than an 800-foot platform! (Like between Moody and Elm Streets in Waltham Center.) Just making that one decision about the type of vehicle you’re going to run suddenly makes all of your station construction cheaper, because you don’t need to acquire more land or modify bridge abutments to serve all your passengers. That in turn drives up productivity, because once you commit to shorter trains and a single platform height for an entire line, you no longer need conductors and can redeploy those people as train operators or fare inspectors.

Another “flexibility” excuse is related to the MBTA’s continued foot-dragging on retiring its functionally obsolete locomotive-hauled coach fleet. Again, the “flexibility” is a false excuse; the real flexibility, as well as substantial savings in operating costs, would be to standardize on articulated multiple-unit vehicles, as I have emphasized repeatedly in these pages and in comments to the FMCB over the past three years. In particular, since there is real doubt as to the T’s ability to execute an electrification program in the time required, the agency should move now to procure a combination of EMUs and DMUs from the same manufacturer and family, with DMUs to be delivered first and an option to convert the DMUs to EMUs at their mid-life overhaul. All of the major carbuilders have such families — if you’ve been reading this for any time at all, you’ll know that I’m partial to the Stadler FLIRT series — and can build them in the US for “Buy America” compliance. Making this move now has numerous benefits:

  • It makes an early commitment to a particular vehicle type and capacity, which allows stations and maintenance facilities to be upgraded to meet a specific requirement for a specific service model, and not some abstract future need.
  • It ensures commonality of maintenance procedures, operator training, and spare parts supplies.
  • It allows the T to procure a single engineering services contract to oversee the production, delivery, and testing of both diesel and electric trains.
  • It allows the T to immediately (upon delivery of the first DMUs) redeploy the trainsets currently in use on the Old Colony lines and the coaches ordered for South Coast Rail onto other parts of the network, providing for timely retirement of obsolete equipment even before the system is fully electrified.
  • With the conversion option, it ensures that the T is not investing in diesel equipment that will have to be retired before its economic end-of-life to meet the Commonwealth’s and the nation’s climate commitments.

Now with that not-really-a-digression out of the way, let’s continue onward to Lincoln. The Lincoln station, like Waltham, has staggered platforms separated by a grade crossing — in the case, Lincoln Road. It’s located in the town’s commercial district, and is connected to a sizeable town-owned parking lot. Unlike Waltham, Lincoln station is totally inaccessible, without even mini-highs, and even worse, both platforms serve only the outbound track, with inbound riders (some 270 of them, mostly in the AM peak) required to stand in the middle of the outbound track on asphalt pads to board. I do not believe there is any real barrier to fixing this station: the outbound platform should be relocated to the west side of the grade crossing, with a ramp down to street level, and the length of the outbound platform extended to whatever is ultimately determined appropriate for the service model.

Concord and West Concord are both challenges. West Concord at least has mini-highs, but eliminating the mid-platform grade crossings at either station would greatly interfere with pedestrian circulation or require obtrusive vertical circulation structures in the middle of a popular, historic business district. In both cases there is also a concern that the station buildings are too close to the tracks and would require a narrow high platform that would not meet safety or accessibility requirements. My best alternative would be to add mini-highs at Concord, settle on a new multiple-unit train design, and then pin precast steps atop the existing platforms to match the door openings on the cars.

South Acton and Littleton, as I mentioned above, are the two busiest stations on the line, and both are modern stations with full-length high-level platforms surrounded by oceans of parking and without any walkable local destinations. (The Assabet River Rail Trail does not redeem the otherwise intensely car-oriented nature of South Acton.) In a frequent Regional Rail service model, with four or more trains per hour, I would advocate restoring service to West Acton, which is a pedestrian-compatible business district about halfway between South Acton and Littleton/495. (Less frequent trains from the outer end of the line could skip the stop.) There is already a universal crossover just east of Littleton/495 specifically to allow for short-turn operations, and given the distribution of potential rail destinations along the line, and the absence of freight service, it makes sense for the “frequent service” territory to extend to Littleton but not farther out where conflicts would arise with Pan Am operations. Littleton/495 was where I ended my travels on Saturday, as the sun was setting and I needed to get back home.

On Sunday afternoon, I started out at the historic B&M station in Littleton, a familiar site to the many bicyclists who ride the “Harvard to Harvard” and similar intermediate-distance road-bike routes. The old station is now occupied by an antique stove restorer, and it is just beyond the easternmost freight siding remaining on the entire line (although by all accounts that customer no longer receives any regular rail freight). My first current station stop was at Ayer, which is smack in the middle of the wye junction between the east-west Pan Am Southern freight main line and Pan Am’s north-south Worcester Main Line. The Fitchburg Line branches from the PAS freight main at Willows, two miles to the east, and everywhere from Willows west, passenger trains must share the tracks with freight even on the MBTA-owned sections of the railroad from Ayer to downtown Fitchburg.

As you might imagine, Ayer station is pretty dreadful. The local economic development commission and the regional transit authority are working to make the general surroundings of the station a bit more pleasant for passengers (and for connections to the nearby Nashua River Rail Trail). It has only low-level platforms and requires passengers to cross the active freight main line at grade. It’s not unfixable: there’s enough room between Depot Square (the actual depot is long gone) and the tracks to shift passenger service north, closer to the station, and add a high-level platform, although not nearly a full-length one, with some changes to a freight branch interlocking just west of the current platforms. There was some funding for this (albeit expressed more vaguely) in the Transportation Bond Bill that passed back in January. Only 275 passengers a day used the station in 2018.

After Ayer comes Shirley, which barely has a platform, although there’s plenty of room to add two; the line runs on a low berm between two parallel roads, with a parking lot on the south side east of the cute little shelter. It looks as if the platform used to be longer, but then a ramp was added to get to the shelter blocking part of it (although if you need the ramp there’s no way you would be able to board the train anyway). Because this part of the line is advertised as AAR “Plate F+” clearance, there are issues with the freight railroads (Pan Am and Norfolk Southern) in terms of providing high platforms without causing clearance problems. I think the only way out here is some sort of extendable gap fillers at the platform that would be triggered by passenger trains, which is a pretty tough investment to justify for 150 passengers a day. (The other alternative would be a gauntlet track, which would make the line effectively single-track for freight.)

The last three stations on the line, North Leominster, Fitchburg, and Wachusett, were all substantially expanded or constructed new since 2010 and largely funded under the 2009 Recovery Act. North Leominster is on a tall berm, surrounded by development on both sides, and immediately east of an overpass; construction here included a large parking garage adjacent to the inbound platform. Because the station was substantially modified, mini-high platforms were added, but because it sits on the two-track freight main line, even the mini-highs are apparently regularly hit and damaged by passing trains — making full-length high platforms a serious challenge. As with Shirley, the only options here appear to be movable gap fillers or a capacity-sapping gauntlet track. North Leominster has the additional issue of requiring more vertical circulation to provide access to a high outbound platform, as the current design requires passengers to cross the active tracks at grade. (This could most easily be provided via the top floor of the parking garage, which already has elevators and stairs, so it’s much less of an expense than if an entirely new crossover had to be constructed.)

Fitchburg station, which was the western terminus of the line until 2016, has its own separate, bidirectional passenger track, but despite this, has only a mini-high for accessibility. The remainder of the full-length platform is low. Fitchburg has a very large parking garage, which it shares with a MART bus hub and Fitchburg State University, all part of a complex of buildings fronting Main Street on the eastern end of downtown Fitchburg. Despite this apparently favorable location, Fitchburg only served 290 passengers a day in the 2018 study — some of whom were parking at Wachusett and taking the train one stop. It seems likely that a faster and more frequent train with more competitive pricing would attract more ridership. (Current pricing is $4.00 for parking and $12.25 for the zone 8 fare to Porter or North Station, as compared to $3.00 to park at Alewife and $2.40 for subway fare, and outside of rush hours, driving is almost certainly faster as well.)

Finally, we come to Wachusett. As befits the very newest station on the entire MBTA system, it is enormous, is completely accessible, and has a single full-length high platform. It’s also surrounded by an ocean of parking and far from any meaningful local destinations; it’s in the far southwest corner of the city of Fitchburg on the border with Westminster, just off the Route 2 freeway. The 2018 manual counts — conducted just two years after the station opened — found only 132 daily riders. Like at Fitchburg, trains platform at Wachusett by way of a single-track bidirectional siding, so passenger trains do not foul the freight main (which west of Fitchburg station is owned and dispatched by Pan Am Southern). There is a separate layover facility in Westminster, about ¾ mile west of the station siding, with six tracks to store all of a typical AM peak’s inbound consists.

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