Boston-Springfield HSR study proposed

State Bill Would Examine the Feasibility of Boston to Springfield Rail Service

The ongoing talks about the potential for Boston to host the 2024 Summer Olympics come with the constant revisitation of the Greater Metro Area's state of infrastructure and its ability (or lack thereof) to handle the influx of people that accompany the Games. But a state bill could help alleviate some of those woes by allowing for direct train service to and from Boston and Springfield.

State Senator Eric Lesser, a Democrat from Longmeadow, Mass., will file SD1383 – "An Act to study the feasibility of high-speed rail access between Springfield and Boston" – during the 2015 legislative session.

According to MassLive, the bill requires that MassDOT submit a report by August 1 of this year outlining and evaluating the economic pros and cons, as well as cultural effects on Greater Springfield, of building a line between the two cities.

The MassDOT 10-year capital investment plan suggests that building such a rail, using what is known commonly as the Inland Route, would cost approximately $362 million. Funds would be used to rehabilitate the route, create a second track, widen bridges, upgrade signals and train equipment, and support a high-speed rail from Springfield to New York City.

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It'll be interesting to see how this mixes with NEC Future, since a BOS-SPG-NHV routing would probably be a viable alternative to the existing routing (as well as most of what Amtrak has been looking at) and let at least some trains get around the capacity block on SLE.

There is at least one routing that passes through Springfield in the paired down set of alternatives. See:

http://www.necfuture.com/pdfs/map_alts_oct2014_3.pdf

Though I suspect that of the three routings from Hartford that might be the last one. but who knows?

IIRC, the routings were a messy mix-and-match. I seem to recall that the Ronkonkoma option is the one that cut just short of Springfield to meet the time requirement. I forget whether the Nassau-Danbury option went via SPG or not (and there may have been versions of both under consideration, such was the mess of options on the table at the beginning).

What does the state bill ask for that is already not being studied or in the long-term plans? MassDOT in coordination with VT & CT is already conducting a SDP and NEPA study for the NHV-SPG to MTR and BOS corridors. Upgrading the BOS to SPG corridor to 90 mph speeds is one of the alternatives in the study. See the most recent presentation (May 2014) at the Northern New England Intercity Rail Initiative project study website. 90 mph is of course not high speed rail, but "high speed rail" has become a misused (abused?) description over the past 5 years.

BTW, the study appears to be going along at typical MassDOT/MBTA speed; they have missed the October 2014 date for producing the Alternatives Analysis Report.

Is State Senator Lesser seeking a SPG to BOS train service? Which is an understandable goal if MA is going to spend money to initiate a Greenfield to SPG corridor service. As it stands, restoration of Inland Route Regionals is in the planning documents and even showed up in the NHV-SPG corridor EIS document schedule examples.

Afigg: Could you link me to the NHV-SPG documents or tell me where to find them?

Anderson said:

Afigg: Could you link me to the NHV-SPG documents or tell me where to find them?

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The EIS documents for the NHV-SPG corridor are available here. If you dig into Appendix #2, the Passenger Service Plan, you will see conceptual train schedules that include an Inland Route Regional running from Norfolk to Boston. Which would be an interesting, albeit, long daytime route. Not a formal or finalized plan by any means, but someone at Amtrak went to the trouble to lay it out. In the Appendix schedules, the trip times from NYP to WRJ are reduced by 90 minutes over the Vermonter schedule from before the track upgrades in VT were completed (which cut 28 minutes off of the trip time north of MA).

With regards to an Inland Route Regional, I suspect we won't see one restored until after the currently funded upgraded from NHV to SPG are completed, the new station in SPG opens, and MBTA completes signal and track upgrades out to WOR (whenever that is, this is the MBTA after all). Since an Inland Route Regional route is off of the NEC, it would require state subsidy support from MA and CT, or at least in theory. But if the NEC Regionals are making a profit above the rails and the VA Regionals are close to breaking even, why wouldn't Inland Route Regionals generate a net operating surplus with faster trip times and upgraded & busier stations than they had when the Inland Route Regionals were dropped? Which in turn should mean that Amtrak could run them without state subsidy support if Amtrak wanted to - right?

That's a tangled question right there...on the one hand, Amtrak has to have an agreement in hand with the state. On the other hand, Amtrak and MA could easily come to an agreement of some sort that basically guarantees MA a modest surplus for a long time on the route...not to mention that there's the question of who would get the revenue for a BOS-NYP trip on such a train credited to them (since BOS and NYP are both NEC stations but the intermediate track isn't NEC).

On the one hand, those trains suffer from a longer runtime than those on the NEC proper (I get about 6:00 NYP-BOS from one of the early 2000s timetables); on the other hand, with demand surging and with some reductions in time I can see some folks opting for a Springfield-routed train at the cost of 60-90 minutes. It is worth noting that Corridor Regionals in this era show a runtime of about 5:00 NYP-BOS whereas daytime Regionals run between 4:05 and 4:42 now (I'm ignoring the Shoreliner for a host of reasons).