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Tower 1 no longer Tower of Doom for South Station commuters
By adamg on Fri, 02/19/2016 - 9:06am
Dave, a Worcester Line rider with an interest in trains, begins to break down what happened with the trains into and out of South Station yesterday: It all involves an Amtrak computer room, called Tower 1 from the days when it was an actual tower with men who moved actual levers to switch trains.
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Comments
Excellent Work Dave
Hate to harp on the negative but did we have a Chris Christie GWB/Fort Lee event yesterday?
Amtrak is suing the T for payment of track maintenance work. The T owns the Attleboro line and in lieu of payment for Amtrak using the line, Amtrak does maintenance work on the line and other lines.
Amtrak is trying to change a deal that the T says runs for a number of more years. Amtrak is having early Bush Cheyney administration cojones essentially saying the agreement is "flawed" in order to get a better deal.
The suit, detailed in the Boston Business Journal today, is getting testy.
I wonder if this glitch and Faker just washing his hands of this yesterday means something more?
I'm just spitballing but being an observer of idiotic inter government agency fighting for years, this has a lot of hallmarks of a manufactured crisis.
Maybe, maybe not
It's not like Amtrak signaling systems along the Northeast Corridor hadn't been failing before the suit. Remember the fried controller at Forest Hills last year? Granted, that was due to a lightning strike, but it took months for Amtrak to fix the problem (wait, have they? Anybody know?).
My favorite is when an Amtrak train was mistakenly switched onto Needham Line tracks.
And let us not forget
the Back Bay crash of 1987, which was the direct result of a signal failure.
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/RAR8805.pdf
No, as of about a month ago,
No, as of about a month ago, which was last time I asked, the permanent repairs to the Forest Hills interlocking were not complete.
BTW, I love "a Worcester Line rider with an interest in trains"
Dave is a treasure; difficult to believe manufactured crisis
First, Dave is an absolute treasure - the fact that someone does what he does without it being his primary job is amazing and it is a great example of how people really do care about what goes on around here. Dave, I commend you!
With respect to the idea above that this was a manufactured crisis, I put nothing past anyone anymore. That said, it would seem to make very little sense for Amtrak to do this. Amtrak needs to keep the entire NEC congressional delegation on side or it will be eviscerated by the rest of the Congress (particularly if November brings a Republican President). The kind of tomfoolery suggested above would operate to piss off the entire MA delegation and probably RI, too. Everyone in NY, NJ and Eastern PA would take notice too. It simply seems like way too big of a risk to take to get some negotiating leverage with an entity that is already under siege (and getting weakened by the day) and which might look and be structured a lot differently in the not too distant future (that would be the T).
Again, I am not saying it is totally impossible, but I think it is extremely unlikely as it is a way too ham-fisted approach for an entity that most would agree is pretty politically savvy (Amtrak).
Amtrak is trying to change a
To be fair to Amtrak, a law (the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act) passed in 2008 (so by a Democrat-controlled Congress, for the record) required Amtrak to renegotiate all arrangements with commuter rail operators to comply with a formula devised by a commission comprised of appointees from the states along the NEC. The rationale was that commuter rail operators (with the exception of the MBTA (though not in RI) and Metro-North) run most of the trains on the Amtrak-owned NEC but don't pay their fair share, and this is what prevents Amtrak from investing in rail improvements in the rest of the country (the money Amtrak would get from the commuter railroads would have gone mostly to Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin, though all but Michigan would after 2010 kill those projects)*. The states whose commuter rail operators are tenants of Amtrak's (Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delware, Maryland, DC**) basically decided to team up with the federal representatives on the Commission to stick it to Massachusetts and New York (who were the only members on the Commission to vote against the plan; while most of Connecticut's commuter rail is Metro-North, for which Amtrak is the tenant as on the MBTA, Amtrak is the operator (as Keolis is for the MBTA) of Shore Line East on Amtrak tracks, and will likely operate the New Haven-Hartford(-Springfield?) commuter rail service on Amtrak tracks... Connecticut basically decided that they would do what Amtrak wanted here).
If you're looking for a political conspiracy theory here, to play for swing-state voters in 2008, the Democrats decided to try and screw New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland transit, but a largely Democrat-appointed commission (whether federal or state) then decided to screw Massachusetts (mostly) and New York transit instead.
*: whether this is true or not, who knows? Amtrak's accounting is impenetrable handwaving, even by the standards of the federal government.
**: yes, I know, not a state
This is why South Station
This is why South Station must gobble up the Postal Annex for expansion, and also why Widett /Southampton area must be dedicated to rail infrastructure. It isnt as pretty or vogue as most people would like, but alas necessary.
Better to finally make the
Better to finally make the North South rail link.