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It really seemed too good to be true: Faster Red Line service already through?
By adamg on Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:18am
Andromeda Yelton reported this morning, after all those Red Line repair shutdowns over the past couple of weeks:
So my kid’s friend is on the newly reopened Red Line and it seems to be running…a couple minutes from one station to the next??? Just like in the days of yore??!?!
But at 8:28 a.m., the T reported:
Red Line: Delays of about 10 minutes due to a signal problem near Harvard. Personnel are on scene making repairs.
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Comments
shhhh
shhhh don't jinx it
Odds Bodkins
There is a storyteller in New Hampshire that has been around since I was a child (in the 80s) that goes by that name.
Was surprised to learn he's still around and still telling stories
https://www.oddsbodkin.net/
Had to change the headline
Which is a shame, because how often do I get to use the phrase "odds bodkins?"
But no sooner did I post it then I learned that, in fact, there were new slowdowns due to some sort of signal problem at Harvard.
What was the Odds Bodkins headline?
For those of us who missed it and would like to enjoy it.
Gadzooks and odds bodkins:
Gadzooks and odds bodkins: Some good news on the Red Line
They can never undo the
They can never undo the slowdown baked in at Harvard due to the curve. Can they?
Miss seeing Brother Blue
Miss seeing Brother Blue waiting for inbound (ie.: southbound)
Harvard
Only if you can get Harvard to move a building.
What gets me is.. the building in question was put up in the 1960s but looks old and colonial. But it is not.. but they still had to curve the red line that way to avoid the foundation. So stupid...
So that’s a
So that’s a permaspeedrestriction at HS then.
Pretty much
I have this google map overlay thing I made in Adobe Illustrator of all the changes to harvard square T in the past century. I should finish it and make a video, its pretty neat because I found a 1912 station map and used it as an overlay.
The footprint of the station didn't change very much between 1912-1978 and again 1983-Today. The curve in today's track is was pretty much a curved walkway and ramps (between modes).
But researching this to figure out where all the original exits were by going on site AND looking at older photos and older aerials, you soon realize that the building on the curve was built in 1964. A mere 15 years before they decided to extend the line north. It looks historical but it is not. Not real sure why it had to remain, outside of that Harvard Univ has power and money in Cambridge.
One could argue that a curve that is less sharp would have interfered with the Wadsworth building but its still several yards away from where a redesigned curve would start. AND until the 1940s, there was an staircase next to the Wadsworth building to the Red Line.. so using the term 'historic' can have limitations.
Not sure which building you mean from 1964?
Lehman Hall dates from the 1920s as does Straus Hall. That's relatively new by Harvard Yard standards but I imagine it was just cheaper to deal with the tight turn than to pay Harvard to knock down one of its campus buildings.
Plus I would guess the tight turn is also partly driven by having the underground bus tunnels on the other side of the station.
That building
Isn't the problem.
Just east of there is Wadsworth Hall, the yellow building on Mass Ave, which dates to 1725. Moving that would have been more difficult. Even if the rest of the Square was moveable, it doesn't solve the issue, because the tracks would have to stay under Mass Ave past Wadsworth before curving north.
There was an alignment which would have used the original station and tunnel at Harvard before curving west and going up Garden Street (see page 80 here) but it wouldn't have served Porter or Davis squares which would have reduced ridership. There were also other alternatives through Harvard Square (see page 362) which wouldn't have improved travel times and had other impacts.
Don't worry, they studied this and what they chose is probably the best alternative.
In addition to stops north,
In addition to stops north, we got the JFK Park, Charles Hotel and the KSG out of the deal.
As slow as the approach into
As slow as the approach into Harvard Station is I remember it being much, much slower than recently.
Didn’t there used to be a
Didn’t there used to be a (red neon) light art installation in the openings between the tracks in the dark of the Red Line tunnel and did someone try to co-opt it for advertising?
its still there
Its still there.. its just powered off. If the lights are on in the tunnel and the train is stopped you can faintly see the blue man group on the screen.
So glad the advertiser(s) paid for that.. what a waste of money. I think it was in use for maybe a year before they shut it off.
Thank you! It was a cool
Thank you! It was a cool concept that a different light arrangement between each column created a moving effect of art as the train moved, but the later ads could not achieve good resolution (Blueman ads you say. They weren’t on my radar then, I didn’t recognize and couldn’t tell what they were.) I think(ital.) (and hope) my memory is correct that there was a pure art installation previously.
Coming home today:
southbound train at Central in the station at least five minutes while T guys were under it checking ... something (the brake lines?), announcements of thirty minute delays northbound due to a "police action at Quincy Center" , and a northbound train so packed one could barely breathe ...
but the ride to Alewife did seem faster, once the northbound train got moving.
DTX to Andrew
...which is a trip I do a lot in both directions, is definitely faster.
Now they have to fix how the LED announcements are done. Yesterday I was waiting for a train at DTX - when I got there it said "2 mins." But then it changed to "stopped 5 stops away" for a short while. That's not even close to logical. Eventually it did show up (a short delay but nothing like the cluster-F from a few weeks back), but even then, the train was announced as "ARR" a good 2-3 minutes before it actually started pulling into the station.
It wasn't all that long ago that there were NO such signals, and we just had to wait without any real sense of when the next train would show up. (Or, remember the era where red, blue, and orange had it but they couldn't figure out how to do it for the green line?) But what good are the LED boards if they're not at least close to accurate?
I propose a new unit of time
I propose a new unit of time (and of air quality), the Charlie. It marks the length of time new ballast goes from white/off-white through to dark grey/black.
I remember 10? 15? Years ago they power washed the then white walls of Dwntwn Crssng and replaced all the ballast, and before I could take a pic the rocks were well on their way into grey. (They since started following the MBTA manual and painted the walls black, so that’s less useful an indicator of what our lungs are experiencing.
Now, there is some new off white ballast at the south end of the platform and I need to remember to track the progress.
I wish...
...that they would finally replace those awful "artsy" marble things at DTX that desperately wish to be benches, with the real thing.