Blue Line Extension ROW

BostonUrbEx wrote:

Arlington wrote:If Lynn extension does go along the CR ROW, it makes sense that the Point of Pines ROW gets made into a bike path.

This is a really good idea, never thought of it before. IMO, it would be better than the Blue Line through Point of Pines and an infrequently used station there (which I would expect to happen if it goes that way). This way, the Blue Line can still collect riders from Point of Pines via a collector path to Wonderland.


I have a question for everyone though: How many extra sets, if any, does the Blue Line have during peak headways? How many more, if any would be needed for an extension to Lynn/Swampscott? to Salem? Could Orient Heights hold these? Where would another yard be constructed, if necessary? (just south of the Salem tunnel actually looks really good where the abandoned freight yard is, perhaps making an extension to Salem even more worth-its-while)

I disagree about intermediate stations. The thing about building a project like this is that you have to barter support around constituencies, including pols and business development folks who want nebulous "development stimulus". This is how you get crap like Plymouth Cordage Park built as a TOD-centered complex, but with somebody forgetting to supply the TOD later. There will have to be 1 intermediate stop on this extension as a negotiating concession. Even the public meetings to date have tacitly acknowledged that. Concession maybe too strong a word...station spacing would definitely merit one at the halfway point, and this is a very dense region. Hardly a useless or complicating factor, as it would be a simple station.

Assuming this as a planning inevitability and not a yes/no choice, your stations would be either West Lynn/Riverworks on the Eastern Route or Point of Pines on the BRB&L. Both at almost the exact halfway point. Riverworks doesn't thrill the imagination at all, but it's the only part of the routing that swings anywhere close to Salem Turnpike and is equidistant to both the Turnpike and Lynnway. Planners will want a tie-in. Plus the usual TOD mythmaking about all the redevelopment that's a cinch to happen around Riverworks. Given the choice of the two I'd rather take Point of Pines on the BRB&L. It's a dense neighborhood--denser than Suffolk Downs--and is consistent with the residential density and local bus stop density on the current Blue Line. Can be a simple station with bus loop and a few parking spots. PoP would get steady all-day utilization where Riverworks would be an off-peak ghost town and really dependent on iffy TOD around the plant. Again, this assumes that intermediate stop is going to be a consensus-building condition for sign-off.



As per which ROW, we know the Eastern Route is the T's default preference. The BRB&L has a couple garish new residential towers that have gone up in the last 10 years which abut about as physically close as you can get to the ROW without outright blocking it. Pretty ballsy of the developers and city of Revere to do after this project--on that as the historically preferred ROW--was written into law as a Big Dig Transit Commitment. The EIS and bridge engineering are going to be what tips the choice, though. The Eastern Route may be open, but requires widening that embankment through the marsh vs. no wetlands of significance on the BRB&L. And it has 2 water crossings vs. 1. If it's not cost-feasible to widen the Saugus draw in-place without a total teardown/rebuild then the Plan B routing looks a lot more attractive. In that case they'd be building the same number of new draws, but with open space and open pace without the furious need for commuter rail disruption remediation ramping up the cost. As your NIMBY's here are mainly going to be 2 high-rises on 1 block of North Shore Rd. who knew what they were getting themselves into, they'd be fully justified in barreling through. Take the rear parking lot easements back and offer them mitigation to build a 400 ft. Brookline Village/D-line style box tunnel through there to keep the noise down. And let them stick their parking garage on top of it for air rights rent.

Sound messy? Yeah, more stakeholders makes it messy. But there's a reason why they haven't eliminated Plan B altogether: the environmental and bridge engineering is the far bigger cost arbiter than residential remediation. And they haven't studied it in enough detail to get a feel for how it's gonna tip, other than logic would dictate the Eastern Route has higher likelihood. I wish somebody was actually still trying to answer this question.

The one thing I like about the eastern route routing (which I would have split right after Airport) is that operationally it will be two separate lines, and probably the only thing keeping the trains from having to be extended to eight cars. The blue line is already pretty packed during rush hour and the summer, and tapping into Lynnand beyond will only make it worse. Plus, having the trains express from West Lynn / Riverworks straight to the airport will probably decrease travel times below any alternative means of transportation, making the subway more attractive to commuters. AKA exactly the original vision for the Braintree line.


Another thing I'm surprised hasn't gotten any attention is how prime the old Saugus Branch RR would be for D line style light rail. It goes through the center of Malden and Saugus, passes under Route 1, and gets closer to the center of Everett then any other existing rail line.

username wrote:Personally I think that if the blue line extends to Salem, then the T should convert to MU's for the existing CR branch and the proposed peabody/danvers branch. It makes more sense to run it this way, because there will need to be smaller but more frequent trains to service all three branches. Plus, the blue line should really be the one bringing people into the city, the CR would be designed to feed the higher capacity system at Salem and Lynn, not neccesarily to be deisnged for running straight into Boston. Plus I don't think that the more rural towns need a higher capacity service, and more flexible hours brought about by MU's would be more favorable. IMO this means that there will need to be lots of double tracking, as MU's will be slow from signalling problems brought about by the single rail.

I agree. Even if CR stations like Lynn and whichever Salem one the BL terminates at (north of portal or south/Salem State U of portal) will likely remain, they'll be low-use and only for the branch traffic that has to switch to Logan or a bus hub like Lynn. Dwell times are going to drop way off and you can schedule each branch to skip something different like the Old Colony lines do inside 128. The goal wouldn't be packing the headways full on a shorter-turn because that's what the Blue Line's for. It's taking the congestion off the inner half of the line so the trains on the branches fill up before Salem boosted by the much faster express-oriented trip. This is exactly how the Boston Transit Commission reimagined the rapid-transit and commuter railroad systems in the 1940's: locals to 128 flip over to rapid-transit, freeing the RR's for the outer burbs (and then-planned 495 corridor) and more throughput by expressing through the core suburbs. Keep in mind also that if they revisit Urban Ring Phase II and skip the asinine BRT step in favor of light rail from the start the Everett-Chelsea-Airport leg can go as a Green Line branch off Lechmere and subsume Chelsea from the Eastern Route schedule for an even faster trip + a whole crapload more transfer ridership to the outer Blue. The GL extension yard schematics already put the yard leads on a trajectory out to Sullivan; it's clearly future-proofed for those becoming mainline tracks later on. UR II is one of just the couple of transit projects with higher potential ridership than the BL extension. It turns the Eastern Route trunk into a veritable rail superhighway with all the flow that'll be moving along it.


As for Blue Line capacity, keep in mind that the headways we see on it now are way way below what the infrastructure can support. It's a small car fleet, a short line, and currently has the smallest ridership of the 4 lines by a wide margin. It uses as many peak-hour consists total as the Red Line does for Ashmont alone...half of the Cambridge-Dorchester trunk's total capacity. The BL has pretty much the same running speed and station spacing as the other lines, but one-third as many daily boardings as the next-smallest, the Orange Line. Service levels can be doubled on the existing infrastructure if it needed to be. The Orange Line will be instructive of this on the next car order when it finally has enough equipment to run over 20 peak-time consists simultaneously instead of the artifically low number and wide headways it currently does. And it still won't be maxed even then. The BL to Salem would be pretty operationally identical to the current OL length, but still with fewer stations and almost half the ridership even with the incredible Wonderland-north numbers tacked on. You could easily x2 the number of consists and not totally tap it out. As a matter of scale the Blue Line is ridiculously underutilized from what it could be and what the other lines are.

What is the difference between EMUs and Heavy Rail? What if we either converted the whole Blue Line and the Newburyport/Rockport to EMUs, or just run the Newburyport/Rockport with EMUs and keep the Blue Line the same (but use ATO or something to restrict the EMUs to 40 MPH when running in Blue Line territory). If you convert both, you could short every other one at Salem as a "Blue Line" train, and the rest that continue onward will rotate through Danver, Newburyport, and Rockport routes.

Are subway cars not technically lower-speed EMUs? I can't think of any example where full out EMUs are used as subway then continue on as commuter rail, so perhaps someone could help me understand here.

Parts of the BART system come to mind; that's pretty far-flung. The DC Metro also begins to resemble commuter rail on some of the northern sides; I know there's a long term goal of Green Line trains to BWI.

I think the "Eastern Route" through Point of Pines could work if a short cut-and-cover subway is built in the old railroad right-of-way just where it passes between the two new apartment buildings. The short subway would probably be cheaper than building the additional bridge across the river required of the Western Route. The Western Route (alongside the existing commuter rail line) would also require a huge wetland take, something that probably wouldn't be allowed by the Army Corps and all the environmentalists.

There are a lot of advantages to using the old right-of-way through Point of Pines that I think a short subway would make possible.

If the extension follows the commuter rail, would the commuter rail eliminate stops at Lynn and Swampscott? With the Blue Line only making those stops. I could see that as being a benefit to the commuter rail riders with a fast trip.

BostonUrbEx wrote:What is the difference between EMUs and Heavy Rail? What if we either converted the whole Blue Line and the Newburyport/Rockport to EMUs, or just run the Newburyport/Rockport with EMUs and keep the Blue Line the same (but use ATO or something to restrict the EMUs to 40 MPH when running in Blue Line territory). If you convert both, you could short every other one at Salem as a "Blue Line" train, and the rest that continue onward will rotate through Danver, Newburyport, and Rockport routes.

Are subway cars not technically lower-speed EMUs? I can't think of any example where full out EMUs are used as subway then continue on as commuter rail, so perhaps someone could help me understand here.

No, because they aren't built to FRA crash-worthiness like a RR-rated car that can run in mixed freight traffic. DMU's/EMU's are pretty robust beasts; a subway car is a tin can by comparison. Starts/stops are a lot more nimble on a subway car, and subway cars can handle steeper grades. Signal systems are totally different NORAC on a railroad vs. a subway's trip arms or ATO. EMU's have much heftier power draw. The rail profile is different enough from the trucks that mixing/matching would be a speed restriction for both types of cars because of the derailment risk at curves from splitting the difference on the rail grinding. And biggest problem of all is the Blue Line's special undersized dimensions from the East Boston Tunnel being a retrofitted streetcar tunnel. Shrinking a DMU/EMU while maintaining crashworthiness and the front/rear crumple zones would severely crimp their size.

Basically, there's no reason to do this with the kind of track capacity available up north of Wonderland.

I don't usually just post to commend, but that was a terrific post, F !

3rdrail wrote:I don't usually just post to commend, but that was a terrific post, F !

Indeed. Thanks, F-Line.



If it weren't for the Global Terminal's freight deal coming up, perhaps it would have been great to have some sort of junction near Airport and run up along the Chelsea Creek. Straight out express from Airport to perhaps Bell Circle (equivalent of expressing to Revere Beach Station) and then another uninterupted straight run, to West Lynn.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:As a matter of scale the Blue Line is ridiculously underutilized from what it could be and what the other lines are.

Thats because it runs so close to the ocean. 50% of the service area is water, so no riders.

A blue line extension charles along beacon street to kenmore would have the same problem. The north would be water, so the only riders would be those living to the south...but north of the green line. A very small area to pull passengers from.

One easy way to spruce up ridership is to zone the entire beach coast as highrise condos.

Could revere beach look like this?

jamesinclair wrote:

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:As a matter of scale the Blue Line is ridiculously underutilized from what it could be and what the other lines are.

Thats because it runs so close to the ocean. 50% of the service area is water, so no riders.

A blue line extension charles along beacon street to kenmore would have the same problem. The north would be water, so the only riders would be those living to the south...but north of the green line. A very small area to pull passengers from.

One easy way to spruce up ridership is to zone the entire beach coast as highrise condos.

Could revere beach look like this?

God, that looks depressing.


I don't think water has much to do with it other than there just aren't enough transfer hubs to draw ridership. GC, State, and Maverick dwarf the ridership at everything else. Why: Green, Orange, and the bus hub for Eastie and Chelsea. You aren't tapping the Red Line, you aren't tapping massive Lynn terminal, and even Logan is pretty much 1:1 ridership with the terminal shuttle because it doesn't connect to anything else. Suffolk Downs and Revere Beach have no bus connections. Beachmont has just 1, and it's the loop end of the zig-zagging 119 from Northgate Mall to downtown Revere and the neighborhood in walking distance to Beachmont. Those wanting a direct BL shot from central Revere or Northgate go to Wonderland. Wood Island has 1 route to downtown Chelsea; its other two are straight shots out of Maverick that pass by and thus aren't feeding it terminal ridership. Orient Heights has more because it's the only access to Winthrop, but otherwise just has the same loop-end service on the 120 that Beachmont has on the 119 with most bus ridership originating from Maverick. None of those express routes out of Lynn hit anything inbound except the gerrymandered expresses at Wonderland.

Consider what the ridership would be if you actually tapped Lynn or all the 1A routes passing right by West Lynn or Point of Pines, if there was an actual Red-Blue connector, and if the Urban Ring actually fed Logan. Or Central Station on the N-S Link transferring to Aquarium. The routes wouldn't have to be awkwardly routed and there'd be a ton more passengers running through the intermediate stops instead of most of it only riding between GC and Maverick to get from local bus across the harbor to the other lines. The 1954 extension was supposed to have stops at Bath House (i.e. the last neighborhood up by the marsh), Point of Pines, and Lynn. The close spacing between Revere Beach and Wonderland was a half-compromise when the extension had to stop. This is why it's underutilized. It's an unfinished line that doesn't go where the planners originally saw the ridership daw.

Look at the beach ! Yech !

3rdrail wrote:Look at the beach ! Yech !

The picture is what the coastline will look like in the future, after the beach has been submerged by rising sea levels.

What happened to Kelly's? Save the roast beef!!!!!!