State finally finds a use for that abandoned train track to the waterfront: To test the new Red Line cars

This is only one of many upgrades coming to the Red and Orange Lines beginning in the next 5 years.

Have you ever seen a west coast container port? Almost the entire stretch of Puget Sound from Seattle to Tacoma is container port, and most of the transport is "in yard". Ditto for the Port of Long Beach, where the pollution from trucks considered to be off-road was so bad that regulators stepped in.

Conley isn't big enough to merit that. It's MA's biggest container port, but it's just too tiny compared to NY/NJ, Halifax, Norfolk, Baltimore, and so on to be anything other than a niche ship-to-truck port for shooting trucks out on the Haul Road to points around Eastern Mass. Adding Trailer On Flatcar (TOFC) train transloads on top requires more acreage than Massport has available even post- Conley expansion. The railcar storage alone would be a major problem, since CSX would only be coming to fetch once a day vs. every truck being able to drive off the second the crane plops the cube on top. They don't have enough land to let stuff be sitting around for hours on end clogging up space after it comes off the boat like they do with city-sized ports like L.A.

We already get way more container traffic by rail coming into Worcester on CSX from points west out of all of the mega-ports (PANYNJ, Halifax, Norfolk, etc.) than Conley produces Boston-out. So the money the state spent upgrading CSX for double-stacked trains and building them that state-of-art yard in Worcester already addressed that issue. There's no way to goose those volumes to any significant degree by hooking rail up to a gnat-sized terminal like Conley. There WILL, however, be a second direct-competing rail corridor from the west when Pan Am Southern's Patriot Corridor to Ayer is upgraded for stacked cubes in the next 5 years after they enlarge the Hoosac Tunnel in Berkshire County. CSX's arch-rival Norfolk Southern co-owns that line 50/50 with local/regional carrier Pan Am, and is self-funding most of the work so it can compete with CSX for New England supremacy. Which means we get access to even more really big shipping ports and direct price competition between two mega-carriers. The state will end up making money back several times over from all the $$$ it spent on CSX from the economic impact of all those stacked containers flooding in from the west, and the pot-stirring that got Norfolk Southern buying its way into the region.

If, for whatever reason, Conley does need rail service later the new haul road they built to Summer St. has enough room on the side for a single railroad track...and they can build a small trestle adjacent to the Summer St. bridge across Reserve Channel to connect it up with Track 61. But they won't ever have a business case for doing it. The division of labor for container traffic just tilts so overwhelmingly outside-in vs. inside-out that it'll never make dollars and sense. The misc. freight that Massport's targeting with the Marine Terminal spur is much smaller in carload volume than Conley's container loads, but is geared to specialties like perishables and other niches where purely local ship-to-rail has clear advantages over routing a refrigerator car 1000+ miles between Halifax and Worcester. It's niche, but it's an exploitable niche we need more of unlike Conley rail which is a surplus-to-requirement raindrop in a swimming pool compared to what containers Worcester & Ayer will move 24/7 from points west when they're both operating at full-tilt.

CSX still has operating rights; it was never abandoned, just placed out-of-service when the most recent customer at Cypher St. left town about 10 years ago. And it can't be abandoned unless CSX voluntarily gives up its perpetual operating rights, which it has no incentive to since they are free-of-charge per the state's purchase agreement for the track.

Massport has long-term plans (5-8 years, after the Inner Harbor gets dredged) to spur from where Track 61 crosses into Design Ctr. parking lot up Tide St. to Marine Terminal once that site gets built out. They want to attract businesses that can do ship-to-rail transloading (cold storage warehousing & the like). CSX has already committed to serving the Terminal with an overnight freight job out of Readville via the Fairmount Line if Massport signs on the customers. Not at the top of Massport's priority list, but cracks the lower Top 5 and a matter of when, not if.

The Springfield plant is becoming their anchor in the USA for rail car manufacture. They have already accepted contracts for other rail cars for other transit systems which will start soon after the MBTA order is underway or near completion. They are also building a second plant for heavy rail near Chicago. So the Springfield plant will not roll-over after the MBTA job is done. It will be going for quite some time.

That's what I was (wishfully thinking). Build the "test" track, then in 5 years..."Hey, we have this newly built red line capable ROW directly to the seaport, why not use it for revenue service?" That would be a clever way to get it built without having to propose and "expansion".

Few issues with it however. I don't think there is massive demand for south shore to the south boston waterfront direct rides. Everyone else would still need to transfer to the red line in town, take it out to JFK UMass, then back to SBW. It's much easier to just grab a silver line bus. The rail connection, if it ever happens, needs to be back bay, to the waterfront, and would make the most sense to run the green line out there.

Another issue is it's a single track ROW, and I don't think there is any room to add an additional track. This would mean only one train at a time could exist on the track between JFK/UMass & the convention center, which would undoubtedly lead to bunching & delays.

Adam - pin this message and reference it frequently. It's gold, and explains a lot. Now if people were to only read, comprehend, listen, and accept rather than just be an armchair bitchy because the T doesn't run like Thomas the Tank engine. (Tweet Tweet!). It's not as simple as it looks.

The few systems in the world where mainline rail and tram/metro stock do mix--time separation or otherwise--do so with vehicles and lines intentionally built to the same RR wheel profile (sacrificing the ability to do sharp tram turn radii). NJ Transit's RiverLINE, the oft-cited successful example of a time separation agreement, uses lightweight "diesel LRV" -type DMU's with a RR wheel profile. So unfortunately if you brought the Camden end of the line across the river into Philly it can't ever interface with any form of SEPTA or PATCO subway track. Likewise, you wouldn't be able to run tram-wheeled Hudson-Bergen Light Rail across the Arthur Kill Lift Bridge onto Staten Island without some very novel kludges (gauntlet track ground at trolley profile???) for getting safely across that single-track RR-profile span.

You could make it work the other way around if the freight loads were small/intermittent enough to skate on wheel incompatibility. Newark Light Rail's early-00's Grove St. extension overlapped with 3 city blocks of Norfolk Southern freight trackage, where trolleys had to shut down early so NS could *crawl* across the trolley-ground track to spot a couple carloads at one last remaining customer (who's since gone out of business, ending all co-mingling). Top-condition trolley track is way less derailment-prone than god-knows-what condition barely-regulated spaghetti rail is on excepted industrial tracks and customer sidings across the world, but they're only running at sub- 10 MPH so the stakes are much different for a one-off light freight move vs. all-day passenger service.

RiverLine would've been vastly more expensive to build if they wanted direct track connections to PATCO (and complicated, too, but more in the bi-state politics sense than the engineering sense), and probably would never have been built at all. As it is, the Line crosses PATCO, ACRL, & NEC, with stations at each. I'd call that pretty useful for NJ-Philadelphia commuters, especially since being an arterial spoke is not its primary purpose.

Funny that you earlier mentioned tight loops for PCCs and then mentioned Newark light rail extension (about other matters). Back in the Newark pre-extension PCC days, the track loop at Franklin Av station (the old end station, eliminated with nearby Heller Pkwy station and consolidated as Branch Brook Park station) was just about the tightest loop possible. Only PCCs could scrape through it, and NJT only ran singles at that time.

Not that the HBLRT is anyplace near the Arthur Kill, but has anything run across that lift bridge yet? They were talking about fixing that 20 years ago, and at that point it had been years since it had moved. I suspect it would be more likely to be revitalized as a freight (or as some sort of mixed use) than a strictly passenger line.

It's interesting to contemplate, though... If Amtrak, the feds, NY & NJ keep struggling along 'til the NEC Hudson tunnel and Penn Station track maintenance and the Portal Bridge is a complete nonfunctioning disaster - alternates will be needed and it might be attractive to have some sort of connecting passenger service between the NEC (somewhere at Elizabeth or Linden) and the Staten Island Ferry. Probably less practical that other alternatives even in that worst-case scenario, but it's fun to imagine...

Or, to build on your simile, it's kinda like when a banker asks you why the value of the car loan for which you are applying is for way more than the value of the car and you say "Well because I need a new place to test drive it too of course !"

Boston Street over the RR was built in 1977 (maintaining the street profile of Boston Street over the Expressway, which was built in 1957).

Amtrak's overhead yard electric ends just north of Boston Street. I don't know if that's because they didn't need any more space than that (from their yard to that point) or because they couldn't fit under Boston Street, but - that's where it ends. I'm assuming their yard electric wasn't put in until around the time the line from New Haven through Providence was electrified. Can't remember - mid 90s, early 2000s?

Southampton over the RR was built in 1981. Southampton over the Expressway was sometime 1956-1958.
W 4th over the RR was built in 1989.
Broadway Bridge was built by 1999.

North-South Rail Link doesn't have much to do with it.

after the Big Dig was deep enough into design to know that we'd have space reserved underneath the O'Neill Tunnel for the North-South Rail Link

"Reserved" for the NSRL? Oh, you mean the voids created underneath the tunnel after they cancelled construction of the fire suppression system with retention tanks because the Boston Fire Department decided they didn't want it.

Cabot's already deckable for air rights pegs and cover-over on the Rolling Bridge Park-Traveler and Traveler-W. 4th blocks the way the tracks are spaced, so there isn't even a land use incentive to try to relocate it. Those two blocks would arguably be higher-value on the pecking order for air rights redev than much-overhyped Widett Circle since there's a real pre-existing rectangular street grid to engage on those blocks, and it directly aids with knitting together Dot Ave. @ a post-USPS expanded South Station with GE headquarters @ Ft. Point and the immediate Broadway Station area with contiguous density. The state's and BRA's 50 years of futility at moving any of the Pike air rights between Back Bay Station and Albany St. without snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is unfortunately the main reason why these two over-Cabot parcels aren't subject to much mindshare for on-again/off-again dev proposals. They're more valuable once you've moved the even more geometrically perfect Pike parcels on the other side of 93 rather than a compelling priority by their lonesome, so lack of progress filling in the grid of Pike airspace a stone's throw away hinders Cabot's immediate infill value.

The only 'sacrosanct' part of Cabot's land usage is the actual Red Line maintenance complex between W. 4th and Southie Haul Road. Multi-story and space-intensive for the size of the fleet it has to maintain, so can't be tucked under a deck and doesn't have any equivalent-size tracts of land in equal shot of JFK/Columbia Jct. that could substitute its functions. But that's tucked in back behind the (also mission-critical) Cabot bus yard and the commuter rail inspection facility in the middle of a big break in the street grid, so is conveniently on the least valuable redev parcel of all anywhere the whole mile length from Rolling Bridge Park to Southampton St. Too many better parcels that could be decked-over first before enough land is gobbled up for anyone to start coveting the footprint of the Red Line maint complex.

If they move the Food Market from Widett and install ground-level commuter rail storage that can be decked over, then there's almost 2 million sq. feet of developable land reclaimable between Widett/etc. and those two Cabot blocks without squeezing one single transpo-supporting building structure. It's the canvas of our wildest SimCity dreams AND we get to eat cake too with 50-year needs for transit storage. If only this weren't the same state that's so inept at moving even better Pike airspace after a half-century of futility, we might actually see that canvas exploited before the heat death of the universe. :-\