Is wynn casino getting a commuter rail stop?

[Trainman101]

Also would be cool if they could send commuter trains over the grand junction so the casino could be served from Western mass.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Not going to happen. The casino's located on the grade climbing up to the Mystic bridge. Putting a stop there would result in too steep a slope on the platforms to pass muster with the ADA and Mass Architectural Board accessibility standards. Everett Jct. is immediately next with security fence for Everett Shops preventing egress, so next available spot ends up too far away to serve the casino.

There's no solve for this. The law is abundantly clear on slope limits for a platform, and this location is an absolute no-go.

[RenegadeMonster]

Never going to happen, but couldn't they make a platform and back a few trains in a day through the siding that exists today. I would see it more as for trains with a destination of the Casino than passing Newburyport / Rockport trains.

[rethcir]

An aerial tramway from Assembly would be cool.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Never going to happen, but couldn't they make a platform and back a few trains in a day through the siding that exists today. I would see it more as for trains with a destination of the Casino than passing Newburyport / Rockport trains.

They can't do that and be close enough to the casino for it to matter. North of the switch is already overshooting the casino. Then throw on the Shops security fence and the high-tension power line towers right behind the T shops where the power lines first join the ROW. Can't snake an egress around there because it's a restricted area (those particular towers especially so). So first opportunity ends up closer to the rotary than casino...and it's not really a casino stop at all.

ADA vs. incline, turnout vs. security, or distance too far. All of those options are immovable objects precluding a station build that in any way serves the casino door-to-door.

[RenegadeMonster]

I was thinking they would back down the siding to the point where they were filling all those cars with the dirt while they were digging out that huge hole presumably for a parking garage. So the trains would pull off onto that siding, change the switch, and back directly between the line and the casino.

That would solve for restricted area with the high-tension power lines, too far away from the Casino and what not. It could be done, but is not practical to pull off on the siding, switch change directions and back into the area behind the casino.

Though, there are regular power lines along side that siding now. So I can't really see a raised platform without some sort of adjustment or a mini high at the end.

Like I said, they would ever do it. But I think it could be possible that way. Approaching from the north would be even harder because they would have to back onto the siding, then pull forwards resulting in two changes in direction without changing the configuration of the sidings connection to the main line.

[Aerie]

It would be unfortunate if the casino/resort opens without some sort of public transportation beyond the water shuttles they intend to run. I mean Routes 99 and 16 are traffic nightmares now for much of the day, never mind with 1000s of new people trying to get to the casino. I wonder if the developer knew about the inability to branch the commuter rail in that area? Frankly, the idea of an aerial tramway from Assembly Station may not be that unreasonable an idea.

[RenegadeMonster]

There was proposed talk of connecting the Silver Line to it. Not sure how far along that is or if it's even happening.

[Trainman101]

The grade flatens out quite a bit as it comes off the bridge on that side. Boston allows up to 2% pitch in all directions on all wheel chair ramps so of they really wanted a platform im sure they could make it happen.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

No, it still doesn't work. You don't have space before the first Everett Jct. crossover to stick an 800 ft. platform without the south end being too far up that grade to stay under 2%. Platform tip is literally up against the bridge footings. The only ways around that are:

-- Short the platform to 450 ft. (5 cars). Which would kill the Rockburyport schedule on a sardine-packed rush hour train from passengers having to elbow their way through the cars that can't platform. And keep in mind that on an outbound the first car closest to the North Station egress would be the one that can't platform here, so this is an acute station dwell problem on every...single...PM rush.

-- Spend $$$ moving the whole of Everett Jct. another 500+ feet outbound. Both crossovers relocated and compacted into slower-speed turnouts, the switch to the freight lead relocated, the ballast pile stub relocated.

-- Stop on the other side of the junction, which as in previous post would make it not be a casino-serving stop at all being closer to the rotary.



Furthermore, putting a platform that close to the bridge induces:

-- ...extra braking distance speed restrictions coming off the bridge grade.

-- ...extra restricted-visibility speed restrictions coming off the bridge curve and grade.

-- ...reduction in Eastern Route passenger headways due to speed restrictions from ^^all of the above^^. Which will severely compromise any notions of running Indigo Line-level "once every 15" service to Lynn or Salem.

-- ...freight speed restrictions due to ^^all of the above^^ grade/visibility concerns near a platform on trains carrying heavy carloads. This is a big operational restriction, as the bridge grade already puts a strain on freight power (PAR being notorious for stalling at the top of the grade). Everett Terminal becomes less economically viable to serve via freight rail if it takes a +1 protect loco on the freight lash-up to ensure compliance with the extra platform-vicinity speed restrictions without stalling. MassDOT will have to monetarily compensate PAR and CSX for the inconvenience and cost drain of the bulletin order that requires overpowered lash-ups for crossing that bridge.



Who's going to "surely make it happen" when all of these things are in play? The T most certainly isn't because the ops restrictions are so much bigger a drag than the meager ridership this stop would net. Keep in mind that Wynn is paying for shuttles from the adjacent Orange stops and for increased after-hours Orange headways. Frequencies on the subway + transfers are going to be far better for any Boston-originating casino-goers than a Zone 1A ticket on a Rockburyport schedule. And probably faster, too. That leaves reverse-commute ridership from the 'burbs inbound. Well...Chelsea superstation is opening up soon with a combo CR & Silver Line Gateway stop. While not announced yet, it's hard to see how Wynn won't opt to send another casino shuttle to Chelsea because of all the Logan and Seaport patronage he can scoop up at that Silver Gateway stop. North Shore CR patrons can very easily transfer there too. If he wants to pay the T for it, he can extend the Silver Gateway one-seat on his own dime straight out the back driveway of Mystic Mall down uncongested Beacham St. to his front door. That ops-only buy-in for a Silver one-seat is worth more ridership than the capital costs of a CR one-seat.


So if the state has no incentive to wreck its own ops funding a direct casino CR stop, and Wynn has nil incentive to self-fund his own stop in lieu of other more lucrative modes out of Chelsea superstation...which stakeholder is "going to make it happen"?

Sorry...this is a hypothetical beyond the realm of anyone's self-motivation. Yeah, if somebody wanted it bad enough they could paper it over with enough money to relocate Everett Jct. so the thing doesn't get torpedoed on its own performance compromises coming off the grade. Now how do we answer the question of who wants it bad enough, with empirical evidence as to why? If the state has no incentive to haggle with the compromises, and the transit options that Wynn is actively investing in all outslug a vanity CR stop on ridership...then who else??? Nobody. Note as well: Wynn has always been way more bottom-line oriented and less self-reverential than other Vegas developers, so an "ego" station build doesn't fit his career M.O. at all. He has already scaled back some of the hotel space planned for the across-Broadway parcels he snapped up because further internal audit revealed less demand for luxury rooms than his accountants figured a couple years ago. He's brutally matter-of-fact about picking his battles, so splurging here on 'intangibles' is one very big leap that doesn't jibe with his career.

If there's no party to cite with the self-interest to address the hurdles for making this happen, its feasibility exists only in imagination. And thus all the couldas/wouldas aren't any more real than a foamy daydream. It is not the same as New Balance or that apartment developer in Lynn who wants to build his own River Works replacement: the captive onsite ridership at those developments are what beckons the private investment in CR stations. Wynn's ridership isn't captive to commuter rail at all. He empirically has more transit vectors to tap from the Orange Line and shuttles at Chelsea superstation given where casino patrons are more likely to come from. If Silver Gateway ever gets extended around the horn as a down payment for eventually crossing the river and completing that quadrant of the Urban Ring, then he'll definitely go for a front-door stop on that mode. But note well: a Silver Gateway extension is not planned in isolation because the $$$ of constructing flyovers to switch sides of the ROW west of 2nd Ave. ahead of the freight lead outslugs all Everett ridership farebox recovery...until you budget for crossing the Mystic into Somerville and tapping the full Urban Ring circuit's ridership. It's the Ring that'll compel that busway extension and front-door stop, not the casino or Wynn's bottom line.

[Trainman101]

One would imagine it would run on a weekend/high peak times, not full time. Say similar to the patriots foxboro trains.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Foxboro is not a relevant analogy, because that is not at all what Wynn Resorts estimates as their peak demand hours. They are shelling out-of-pocket for enhanced weekday off-peak Orange Line service because the resort's location near the Boston CBD puts their surge hours after-work, not weekender. Boston is a not a large gaming market for weekenders; the compact physical size of the city means the tourists and day-trippers hop and skip around with their leisure activities in couple-hour chunks instead of parking in one spot for 8+ hours at a time. Self-contained resorts like Foxwoods & Mohegan Sun (and the strips of Atlantic City and Vegas, if you want to consider those big blocks of resorts as one big amusement park) run rings around Wynn Everett in "set it and forget it" day-long entertainment. Where nothing can top Everett is on quick-trips and business-oriented travel. Foxwoods & Mohegan aren't the kinds of places you can go to after work on a Thursday night and still get home with enough sleep for for Fri. morning. They're not the kinds of places that can take a corporate day of fun and still get the out-of-town execs to Logan on their red-eye by mid-evening. And they're not the kinds of places where end-of-day at a big Boston Convention & Expo Ctr. event can send convention-goers to the after-hours entertainment in 25 minutes on a Silver Line bus.

Those are the demand spikes Wynn is chasing, and if you can't stop at the CR stop during peak hours or on the near-peak...then it's not only useless to Wynn's bottom-line but a negative-value build. Wynn Resorts would have to, as its public-private obligation for the station, invent loss-leader ways to goose its utilization. The only times it can run are well off-center from the resort's peak demand, when Orange is well under-capacity and shuttle buses freest from traffic jams, on the hours CR schedules stink and offer the least frequency incentive to ride. What incentive is there for a brutally for-profit corporation to fund that? Are their concierges going to promote a stop that the desk jockeys can't use and the corporate day outings can't use to get home after a day of team-building? Are they going to explain to all the out-of-towners that the trains only stop there the exact opposite hours the trains run most often, contrary to basic understanding of how transit frequencies work? Hell no...they'll just tell people to take the shuttle to Orange or Silver-Gateway because it does what it says and they won't have to explain away a lot of inconveniences. Negative-value.


Furthermore, the ops restrictions in the bulletin with speeds over the bridge and freight protects go into effect if the platform exists at all, regardless of when it's used or not. If a public-access platform exists, the trains must assume 24/7 that there could be a waiting passenger standing on the platform whether the train is stopping there or not. The only way around that is to spend extra $$$ to design an enclosed egress that can be locked with physical barricade during slots it's not in use (like, unfortunately, rush hour), and have security sweep the area for stragglers when it's being closed. Not only are gate-locked CR stations extremely rare systemwide, but they're unprecedented on part-time stops. And a real customer service problem for Wynn Resorts, because what are they supposed to do with the day-trippers who start milling around at 6:00pm after a hard day of gaming waiting to catch first off-peak Train #123 to Rockport arriving 7:20? Let them loiter outside the gate until it's unlocked at 6:50 after Train #175 clears, provided the T security guard shows up on time? Build a waiting room for them? Those antsy people are going to be bitching at Wynn customer service for the inconvenience, not the T who made the rules for the sake of not destroying the peak schedule on its third-busiest mainline.


It's not a real-world proposal unless there's a real-world value proposition the stakeholders can pin to it. It makes no sense for the T because of the pretzel-logic it takes to shiv anything in this location without destroying ops. And it's a negative-value proposition for Wynn Resorts because it runs contrary to their cited hours of peak demand and induces so many customer service problems with the achievable hours-of-service. Not "nice to have" few extra patrons from Ipswich on a sparse weekend schedule, not chasing every last passholder, not some manifest destiny "no frill too far" sense of vanity for a luxury resort making a big splash. An outright negative-value ROI determination for the crap they'd have to put up with for the cost. That's the end. There's no couldas or what-if's here when a bottom-line business bottom-lines it. Wynn is putting real money down for enhanced Orange Line mid-evening frequencies, and running shuttle buses to the transfers. They have even honest-to-God stuck their nose in some of the very low-odds proposals for a trans-Mystic walkway above the dam, with cursory interest. But they didn't consider for so much as 2 seconds running a front-door CR stop up the flagpole, because achievable hours-of-service doesn't fit their business model at all.

A real transit proposal is grounded in a Q&A about demand served. That Q&A about demand served has been resoundingly answered straight from the horse's mouth by where Wynn Resorts is putting real self-funded transit $$$. There's no vector one can ascribe to them for getting this CR station done, because they've already shown their math and emphatically pointed "Here--Orange + bus on our surge hours...not there where it doesn't matter." It's not a real transit proposal if it has no value proposition to its stakeholders and exists only as railfan brain-teaser re: establishing the tippy-top pain threshold that allows for building a theoretical something here for the sake of saying you built a theoretical something here. That's a civil engineering strongman competition, not public-private transpo planning.

[BostonUrbEx]

I still think an opportunity was missed for Wynn to do a land swap with the MBTA for its Charlestown property. Wynn could have played off of both Sullivan Sq and Assembly Sq, and it could have played very nicely into the future for both areas. Walking distance to two rapid transit station, one of which (Sullivan) is a major hub and has potential to become even more of a hub. Sullivan Sq may soon have more buses routes (redirected from Wellington), a commuter rail stop, and may be the next terminus for the Silver Line Gateway. Assembly has middle and high end retail and shopping -- and worth noting is that Wynn failed and is subsequently scrapping nearly all of the planned retail at the casino after failing to entice numerous businesses into relocating. The Mystic River Path is begging to be extended down along the river, and the casino would sit right below the future junction of the Mystic River, Malden River, and Northern Strand paths. Wynn could still have his water shuttle to the Waterfront or Seaport or Airport, or wherever. Sounds to me like much more of a true "resort" destination that Wynn wants.

The MBTA would have benefited from combining its Charlestown and Everett facilities into one massive Everett complex.

[RenegadeMonster]

They took out the siding, rails, ties and all by the Wynn Casino site over the last couple days.

[BandA]

They could have created a unique CR stop; Track 1, inbound. Track 2, outbound. Track 3, horse track. With grandstand seating for patrons & commuters. Betting parlor would allow betting on whether train would be late or breakdown - odds of late trains start at 5:1. Live horse racing with horse-drawn trolleys, entertaining and functional.