That's for a big bundle of CDOT grants just from MA state line to New London...totally unrelated. The last closeout work on NECR for the upgrades was Northfield-Brattleboro signal system...which dragged and dragged way beyond projected finish date and kept speeds artificially slow. But I'm pretty sure that last NECR-responsibility remainder was settled long ago.
There were a couple speed-restricted bridges on the Conn River in MA still needing work because those were bid out to separate bridge contractors for much later construction starts than all the Pan Am Southern-contracted track work. Obviously you need bridge-specialist contractors to do deck/abutment repair, so the railroads couldn't really speed those tasks up in-house. That would be biggest purely physical source of any remaining north-of-SPG schedule improvements, if rolled up with any timekeeping re-estimates that shed excess padding after >1 year of service under belt. Not sure if the bridge work is done-done on every last structure or if there's closeout work remaining this spring. Pan Am's
loading capacity map still shows the Conn River as "286K pending", meaning that as of the 5/1/2016 map update there were still unfinished bridge rehabs keeping the uprate from taking effect. But there were some scheduled MassDOT road closures underneath some of the structures last Fall so those trailing construction contracts were definitely executed and well on their way to completion.
