Framingham/Worcester Line Questions

[BandA]

F-line forgot to mention this time the rail-trail in ?sudbury? that CSX and the town(s) have been negotiating forever over.

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

What on earth does a trail agreement where local selectmen don't want to meet the property owner's asking price have to do with B&A let's-make-a-deal and MassDOT? That's no counterpoint; the negotiating parties aren't remotely alike. Hell, even MassDOT can't stand doing business with Sudbury on ROW politics after that whole power line easement freakshow.

Cite a RELEVANT cautionary example, please.

[BandA]

I thought the idea was to wrap-up all the CSX related business in one package, rather than leaving small pieces dangling for further decades. And the rail-trail connects existing rail-trail all the way to Lowell or something, so it shouldn't be about one town.

[nomis]

Monday will be a new Worcester Main Line for passengers, and hopefully OTP will improve.

[MBTA3247]

New in what sense?

[Arlington]

New in what sense?

That was my question too! New schedule? signals? track?

[harshaw]

Well, on Monday the morning trains switched onto track 1 in Weston and stayed on track 1 into south station. This was the first time I observed this behavior. I guess the new switch before Boston landing is completed?

[BandA]

Wow, so that's the first time in about 55 years that you could do that.

[BandA]

What's next for this line? ADA platform for BBY would be dead simple; Start pouring concrete forms & adjust the elevator floor stop heights. And would help with dwell time & fare collection.

[Kilo Echo]

What's next for this line? ADA platform for BBY would be dead simple; Start pouring concrete forms & adjust the elevator floor stop heights. And would help with dwell time & fare collection.

This should be a no-brainer. What are they waiting for?

[harshaw]

This should be a no-brainer. What are they waiting for?

Funds presumably? There are previous discussions of rebuilding various stations to add high platforms (Natick for example).

On a different topic, this week clearly Keolis has dialed up some pressure to deliver on time performance. Trains are coming the stations (at least in Westborough) before schedule and leaving promptly. Conductors have been prompted not to wait for stragglers.

Additionally, I have informally clocked the train speeds as being higher than the Class 3 limit. In a couple of cases we have hit speeds near 70 mph. Did the Worcester line get upgraded to class 4 in some areas?

[F-line to Dudley via Park]

Monday's FCMB meeting had a little blurb on Back Bay improvements: https://d3044s2alrsxog.cloudfront.net/s ... mcb-gm.pdf. The current budget allotment mainly tackles the big-ticket item of much needed airflow improvements, and bathroom renovations that settle up an ADA to-do item by finally making them fully accessible. Which makes sense...one's an urgent longstanding health concern, and one is correcting an outright ADA shortfall at a terminal-district station serving substantial multimodal CR, rapid transit, bus, and Amtrak ridership. Those should take funding priority over the Worcester platform, which does fully meet letter-of-law accessibility on the mini-high. I believe there's some other misc. general-repair stuff in upcoming CIP years addressing 30-year SGR rollback with the building, but none of them happen to touch the CR platform level.

It's not that upgrading the Worcester platform hasn't been a priority, but rather that there are bigger-ticket items like air quality taking precedence for the rider experience and also a need to not start swimming against deferred maintenance lest that drive up the costs of building upkeep. They're simply one funding allotment short of being able to put the Worcester full-high into prelim design with the jobs at BBY that take precedence...but this isn't a costly line item so it won't take too much effort to get the project advertised. It's modest enough to get greenlit sooner than the next 4-year budgeting CIP window if they find a ripe enough opening for sticking it in there.

[RenegadeMonster]

Wow, so that's the first time in about 55 years that you could do that.

What was the first time in about 55 years? I train coming all the way into South Station?

Has the track been in place the whole time or did they just put it back in. If it was in place how come they weren't using it?

[harshaw]

to be very specific:

For a long long time there was single track through beacon yard. There was no track 1 between the switch after yawkey and around the Boston Landing area. With the Boston Landing development track one was extended through beacon yard. And then a new switch was recently completed east of Boston Landing. Apologies that I can't tell you the CPXX number, I am yet a lowly train commuter.

MOST of the time on the worcester line, the rush hour trains tend to use track 2. This is for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because you have stops like West Natick that only really make sense to pick up and drop off on track 1 because otherwise you have to have people cross the track.

My comment was that on the 507, the inbound train switched onto track 1 in Weston instead of continuing it's normal run on track 2. I don't know why - it's just interesting.

Even more interesting is that the trains seem to be moving above class III speeds in certain area's. I have not observed that before. Using my trusty GPS app I have clocked the trains moving at 75 mph in sections in the Wellsley's, on the mass pike section, and between Southborough and Westborough. At time the speed has gone up to has a high as 80mph. This would seem to indicate that with the recent upgrades the tracks are now class IV compliant. not that I really know what I am talking about. But maybe someone (f-line??) can shed some some light.

TLDR: Keolis does a poor job of publishing the technical details of what is changing on the railroad so nerds like me are observing stuff and theorizing.

[Trinnau]

to be very specific:

For a long long time there was single track through beacon yard. There was no track 1 between the switch after yawkey and around the Boston Landing area. With the Boston Landing development track one was extended through beacon yard. And then a new switch was recently completed east of Boston Landing. Apologies that I can't tell you the CPXX number, I am yet a lowly train commuter.

MOST of the time on the worcester line, the rush hour trains tend to use track 2. This is for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because you have stops like West Natick that only really make sense to pick up and drop off on track 1 because otherwise you have to have people cross the track.

My comment was that on the 507, the inbound train switched onto track 1 in Weston instead of continuing it's normal run on track 2. I don't know why - it's just interesting.

About a year ago they did this some, as Dave Perry talked about in this blog post, which I found linked on page 17 of this thread. It was only from CP-11 in Weston to the now removed CP-4 because it was still single-track through Beacon Park to CP-3. Now, CP-11 to CP-3 is fully double-track, and the new crossovers will be at CP-6, but they have yet to be fully activated. If the schedule allows, they can now cross over and stay on that track all the way to Boston instead of getting "back in line" when it was only single-track.