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Sparks flew underground this weekend

Working on the Orange Line

The MBTA posted some photos of its work on the Orange Line downtown over the weekend, during the second of six straight weekend shutdowns on that section of the line. Part of the work included replacing track at Downtown Crossing.

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But much of this maintenance has been deferred for many years.

If there was regularly scheduled maintenance then perhaps T riders wouldn't have to deal with shutting down the system during a busy weekend. Some people work on weekends. There a many tourists in town during the fall season. Some people come into town to shop, dine, drink, and attend events.

The upcoming weekend shutdown of the Red Line from mid November to mid December could be even worse. It will be during peak holiday shopping season, when retailers often make a large part of their annual sales and profit.

And some stations that need critical maintenance aren't even on this weekend shutdown schedule. It's been good to see rusting crumbling stairs and other infrastructure repaired in some stations recently. But other stations are still in dire need.

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I’m waiting.

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People complain when the T needs work, and then they complain when the T is shut down to do said work.

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And you have the complete picture this weekend. Why on earth did they not align this rail shutdown with the Garden's summer shutdown

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As art, I approve of the digital manipulation that makes it look more like a painting. As news, I prefer straight, unmanipulated photographs.

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Here you would see one splotch of bright and a bunch of dark.

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photographs themselves are "manipulations", since they filter one moment in time through the mechanics and electronics of the particular photographic equipment being used at the time, as well as the choices of the photographer.

no one "untouched" photograph can perfectly capture what something looked like in person. the human eye and brain together are better able to balance the huge differences between bright and dark in a scene like this, making the exposure correction necessary to tell the whole story.

as news, you can argue that good image correction actually gives you more complete information than "unmanipulated" images.

sure, there are limits (oh man do I wish there were punishments for HDR abuse), but I don't really think it applies here.

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of a Russian propaganda poster.

Weld away, comrade Stakhanov!

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Shadows were probably brought up a bit, and there's a smoothing effect in those shadows, but that's just digital noise reduction.

The most obvious thing, the strong blue/orange contrast, is actually the result of *not* doing manipulations. The two light sources are strongly different color temperatures, and the camera can't cope with that, so this is the natural outcome.

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Not an expert but it takes multiple scans of a shot and brings out the highlights in certain areas of the shot at each pass. You get this effect.

Personally not a huge fan except in some situations and this would be one of those situations. Industrial shots work well with this technique.

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Looks like you've got a long-ish exposure where the levels were adjusted later to make the dark parts more visible. If you have a problem with THAT, boy, do I have bad news for you.

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As it stands, this is an attractive piece of art photography, although, personally, I think HDR is overused. Jeez, just dial it back a little bit. But there's something else going on here. Look at the orange ends of the stuff stacked on the flat bed rail car. Or the green safety jacket.

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I will often boost the colors in my photos (although I do mostly digital SLR, very common and even seems built in/automated on many cell cameras). However, I follow an instagram site called Earthfever and I see this a lot. There is some ability to highlight a color range in a photo. My guess is they wanted the yellow of the sparks to pop and by highlighting the yellow they also superpopped the other similar colors with lots of yellow - thus the vibrant oranges and greens.

Cool photo - but I agree with you. From a "news" perspective - which this isn't - it certainly pushes the boundaries of a true presentation of the image.

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Mr. Fix-it Baker was on hiatus for 5 years

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These make sense, because it affords extra time to access the core of the system, and the T has finally been able to figure out how to run shuttles which are at least moderately coherent (and with things like bus lanes through congested areas). Although it sounds like some additional Green Line service would help.

But here's an idea to really get things moving: shut down one of these lines for the whole week between Christmas and New Years, when ridership is less than half of normal (and on par with a Saturday or Sunday). The exact length would depend on the calendar but for the next two years this would allow access to the tracks for 10 straight days, if service shut down late on a Thursday (Christmas Eve 2020, the night before Christmas observed 2021) and continued through the Sunday after New Years. This only really makes sense for underground sections, since the weather above ground is uncooperative at that time of year, but given how much time is spent staging for construction and preparing the tracks afterwards this could accomplish the work of 10 weekend shutdowns in one solid week.

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Lots of people left behind on platforms that could not fit on the trains.

I squeezed onto two trains that day -- both were single cars.

I would assume they added extra Green Line capacity to handle the Orange Line crowds (maybe those were the single cars?), especially with a Bruins game, but I know what happens when I assume. Either way, they still needed to run more Green Line cars -- every train was beyond crush capacity.

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Ridership definitely drops around Christmas, but that chart is a bit hard to read. Does it actualy show “less than half of normal” for that entire week? And even if so, there's also a spike, which I suspect is on New Year's Eve/New Year's Day. That's a very busy day for the system, I believe.

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You'd have to get a lot of people working on a week they'd otherwise be looking at some time off (if not time away). Holidays in there, too - either two less days to work (than you're thinking) or a lot of holiday-rate OT.

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New Years Eve is a day people are encouraged to take the T.

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If you take Ari's idea and mobilize for construction on a particular stretch of a line on the 26th, and if you plan to de-mob by the morning of the 31st, you have the possibility of running several 12 hour shifts for about 5 days. That is a substantial amount of time where an incredible amount of work could get done. Returning service from that isn't difficult. This is done essentially every night on any given line that has Early Access diversions (like what was done for Wollaston's closure or what's going on for the Orange line between Wellington and Oak Grove, now). By this point it's completely routine. And those routes would be shuttled.

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Baker, for finally giving the T the kick in the ass they needed.

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came from Baker, you're a lying partisan.

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