Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
About 11 hours ago I started walking towards the Porter Square Red Line station to return some books to the Boston Public Library, and then to do some food shopping. I had known that there was going to be bustitution between Kendall and Park Street due to track work on the Longfellow Bridge, but for various reasons I didn't end up having a chance to get these errands done on the preceeding weekdays.
All of the Red Line trains I saw in Cambridge during this maintenance were running with four cars, not six, and they were pretty packed. I don't really understand why the MBTA wouldn't have been running 6 car trains; the 6 car trains do use a little bit more electricity, but who cares. I know there were at least two trainsets running north of the longfellow bridge (especially from seeing a trainset passing us on the opposite track shortly after we departed Kendall on my way home), but it felt like there couldn't have been much more than three.
The MBTA uses only the normally-inbound platform at Kendall when operating a bus bridge across the Longfellow Bridge; I think the track configuration (in particular, the direction of the switches) is such that using the outbound platform would be impractical. Of course, it always strikes me that using the outbound platform would make more sense in terms of making things obvious for riders, since exiting a station from the ``wrong'' platform is much easier to figure out than trying to figure out where to board.
People felt a need to start boarding the car before everyone had finished getting off.
I think after I got off the train (four packed subway cars, which probably require somewhat more than four buses), I ended up on the second bus that arrived. The buses were pretty packed.
We stopped at Charles/MGH, and then followed Cambridge Street to Tremont Street. Again, people started boarding through the back door before I had a chance to get off the bus.
I transfered to the Green Line subway. The MBTA did not seem to have made any provision for someone who had boarded at Porter and taken the bus from Kendall to Park Street to be able to transfer to the Green Line for free that I could see; but I have a monthly pass. (At Kendall, the fare gates were shut off and left open, and they were not collecting fares on the buses.)
The only real annoyance on the green line portion of the trip to the library is that the end of the articulated car I boarded was pretty full, and the opposite end didn't look so full, and it didn't look like there was any chance I could have gotten through all of the people to get to the less crowded end. (That train was sitting in Park Street with its doors open when I entered the station, and I'm not sure why it sat there for so long, and certainly didn't want to risk missing it entirely by not boarding it from its rearmost door.)
After I dropped off the books I was returning at the circulation desk, I ended up looking at a Boston Commuter Rail book that is kept behind a reference desk (that may even be its title) that seemed to be from the late 1980s.
It mentioned that the Old Colony Railroad once had a practice of handling branch routes by uncoupling the coach at the rear of a train from the rest of the train while the train was moving, with the majority of the train continuing along the main line and another locomotive then being attached to the coach that had been split off. Massachusetts didn't like this practice but didn't have the authority to stop it. Eventually there was an accident involving a locomotive with an open throttle colliding with a freight train (I didn't quite follow how this worked) and they stopped doing that.
There was an assertion that there just aren't enough Fall River residents with jobs in Boston (because it's too far) for commuter service to be viable, and that such service has been tried on several occasions without much sucess. Given that our current governor's focus on commuter rail expansion seems to include Fall River, this was an interesting claim to come across.
Shortly before the library closed, I took the Green Line from Copley to Government Center. That trip was pretty uneventful, and I didn't have to wait long at Copley for a train to arrive. I probably would have taken the Green Line to the Red Line to Charles / MGH were there no bustitution, but I think this route doesn't really take any longer to get where I was going, and while the walk may be slightly longer by coming from Government Center, it's pretty much downhill going to Charles / MGH.
This gave me an opportunity to notice how surprisingly close Bowdoin is to Government Center, which makes me think that the plans to make Bowdoin go away when the longer Blue Line trains go into service makes a lot of sense.
I walked past another branch of the Boston Public Library which is on Cambridge Street in Boston, which gave me an opportunity to observe that branch's hours: it's not open as late as I might like. I'm trying to figure out the optimal branch to use when requesting a book from the Metro Boston Library Network to be delivered to whichever of their branches I find most convenient. This particular branch is probably has the best location of any branch of any library in that system when arriving by MBTA from where I live.
Then I did my food shopping, and then wandered to Charles / MGH station.
A couple of rather full buses came by, which I let others squeeze into. After a few minutes, an empty bus showed up, and everyone who had been waiting at Charles / MGH to go to Cambridge got on the bus; the number of people on this bus was roughly equal to the number of seats it had. The particular bus I rode was signed ``out of service'' the whole way to Kendall, and the driver adjusted the mirror that's in the front center of the bus while waiting at a light in Boston.
While waiting for the bus to Cambridge at Charles / MGH, I finally learned that there was a fire near South Station that was causing the length of the bustitution to be much longer than had originally been planned. I think the T communiticated very poorly in that I had not previously understood this. There was something that sounded like the dispatcher on the radio played over the public address system somewhere near Harvard Square on the inbound trip (I don't remember ever previously hearing more than one live MBTA employee's voice plus the automated announcements on a single Red Line Train), but somehow that didn't quite manage to explain things clearly enough to get that point across; I knew that they were busing a longer distance, but I had somehow ended up with the impression that the trains were still running, and that for some bizarre reason they'd decided to have the buses overlap the train route.
I think the PA announcement on the inbound train had also left me with the impression that the buses were running to South Station and not to JFK, though the signs on the buses did say JFK.
At Kendall, we had to wait for what felt like a long while for the train. The size of the platform and the width of the stairs and fare gates probably turned out to be a significant bottleneck in swapping the crowd between the platform and the train. I had choosen to ride in what would be the second car from the rear; my experience is that the southernmost (or maybe it's easternmost) car at Harvard Square always gets more riders crowding in that the others because of where the entrances to Harvard Square station are, and I'd wanted to avoid that; but the main entrance at Kendall is approximately even with what is the first car on an outbound four car train, and while the MBTA staff was encouraging people to head down to the far end of the platform, most people (including myself, initially) weren't paying much attention to that.
Since I had been annoyed on my inbound trip by people boarding before everyone got off the train (and I think on my inbound trip there had been a smaller crowd on the platform), I decided to wait by the wall, away from the train. After a little while, it seemed like the car in front of me had emptied out, and most of the people who were boarding it had already boarded, and there was a large stream of people, probably 2-3 people wide, slowly walking down the length of the platform I managed to cross that large stream of people and board the train, but it turned out I would have had plenty of time had I not been so agressive about crossing that crowd. On the other hand, under normal circumstances it is very normal for a Red Line train to depart while people who have just gotten off the train are walking next to it.
At one point, it felt like the whole width and length of the Kendall Square platform was full, at least judging from the section I was in, and I wonder if that's a fire safety problem.
There was a blinking red light in the middle of the outbound track and two people just west of the Kendall Square platform and just east of the switch that redirects the train to / from the other track's platform, and I think the track work was being done primarily on the outbound track. I got the impresion that those people were probably there to make sure that the safety equipment stayed in place to make sure that a train didn't try to run over the track workers.
At Central, I briefly got off the train, because I'd been standing next to the door that opened at Central, and I figured that was helpful for getting out of the way of people who actually wanted to get off at Central. Then I ended up standing directly in the center of the car, widthwise, from Central to Harvard, and was kind of a bit in the way of people getting off at Harvard, and then there were probably people who were a bit in my way getting off at Porter, and then I made my way through the escalators and walked home.
I think the T did use the newer (like, two decades old instead of three or four) cars for the north section of the route; the newer cars have four pairs of doors per side, whereas the older ones only have three, and that probably helped a bit.
All of the Red Line trains I saw in Cambridge during this maintenance were running with four cars, not six, and they were pretty packed. I don't really understand why the MBTA wouldn't have been running 6 car trains; the 6 car trains do use a little bit more electricity, but who cares. I know there were at least two trainsets running north of the longfellow bridge (especially from seeing a trainset passing us on the opposite track shortly after we departed Kendall on my way home), but it felt like there couldn't have been much more than three.
The MBTA uses only the normally-inbound platform at Kendall when operating a bus bridge across the Longfellow Bridge; I think the track configuration (in particular, the direction of the switches) is such that using the outbound platform would be impractical. Of course, it always strikes me that using the outbound platform would make more sense in terms of making things obvious for riders, since exiting a station from the ``wrong'' platform is much easier to figure out than trying to figure out where to board.
People felt a need to start boarding the car before everyone had finished getting off.
I think after I got off the train (four packed subway cars, which probably require somewhat more than four buses), I ended up on the second bus that arrived. The buses were pretty packed.
We stopped at Charles/MGH, and then followed Cambridge Street to Tremont Street. Again, people started boarding through the back door before I had a chance to get off the bus.
I transfered to the Green Line subway. The MBTA did not seem to have made any provision for someone who had boarded at Porter and taken the bus from Kendall to Park Street to be able to transfer to the Green Line for free that I could see; but I have a monthly pass. (At Kendall, the fare gates were shut off and left open, and they were not collecting fares on the buses.)
The only real annoyance on the green line portion of the trip to the library is that the end of the articulated car I boarded was pretty full, and the opposite end didn't look so full, and it didn't look like there was any chance I could have gotten through all of the people to get to the less crowded end. (That train was sitting in Park Street with its doors open when I entered the station, and I'm not sure why it sat there for so long, and certainly didn't want to risk missing it entirely by not boarding it from its rearmost door.)
After I dropped off the books I was returning at the circulation desk, I ended up looking at a Boston Commuter Rail book that is kept behind a reference desk (that may even be its title) that seemed to be from the late 1980s.
It mentioned that the Old Colony Railroad once had a practice of handling branch routes by uncoupling the coach at the rear of a train from the rest of the train while the train was moving, with the majority of the train continuing along the main line and another locomotive then being attached to the coach that had been split off. Massachusetts didn't like this practice but didn't have the authority to stop it. Eventually there was an accident involving a locomotive with an open throttle colliding with a freight train (I didn't quite follow how this worked) and they stopped doing that.
There was an assertion that there just aren't enough Fall River residents with jobs in Boston (because it's too far) for commuter service to be viable, and that such service has been tried on several occasions without much sucess. Given that our current governor's focus on commuter rail expansion seems to include Fall River, this was an interesting claim to come across.
Shortly before the library closed, I took the Green Line from Copley to Government Center. That trip was pretty uneventful, and I didn't have to wait long at Copley for a train to arrive. I probably would have taken the Green Line to the Red Line to Charles / MGH were there no bustitution, but I think this route doesn't really take any longer to get where I was going, and while the walk may be slightly longer by coming from Government Center, it's pretty much downhill going to Charles / MGH.
This gave me an opportunity to notice how surprisingly close Bowdoin is to Government Center, which makes me think that the plans to make Bowdoin go away when the longer Blue Line trains go into service makes a lot of sense.
I walked past another branch of the Boston Public Library which is on Cambridge Street in Boston, which gave me an opportunity to observe that branch's hours: it's not open as late as I might like. I'm trying to figure out the optimal branch to use when requesting a book from the Metro Boston Library Network to be delivered to whichever of their branches I find most convenient. This particular branch is probably has the best location of any branch of any library in that system when arriving by MBTA from where I live.
Then I did my food shopping, and then wandered to Charles / MGH station.
A couple of rather full buses came by, which I let others squeeze into. After a few minutes, an empty bus showed up, and everyone who had been waiting at Charles / MGH to go to Cambridge got on the bus; the number of people on this bus was roughly equal to the number of seats it had. The particular bus I rode was signed ``out of service'' the whole way to Kendall, and the driver adjusted the mirror that's in the front center of the bus while waiting at a light in Boston.
While waiting for the bus to Cambridge at Charles / MGH, I finally learned that there was a fire near South Station that was causing the length of the bustitution to be much longer than had originally been planned. I think the T communiticated very poorly in that I had not previously understood this. There was something that sounded like the dispatcher on the radio played over the public address system somewhere near Harvard Square on the inbound trip (I don't remember ever previously hearing more than one live MBTA employee's voice plus the automated announcements on a single Red Line Train), but somehow that didn't quite manage to explain things clearly enough to get that point across; I knew that they were busing a longer distance, but I had somehow ended up with the impression that the trains were still running, and that for some bizarre reason they'd decided to have the buses overlap the train route.
I think the PA announcement on the inbound train had also left me with the impression that the buses were running to South Station and not to JFK, though the signs on the buses did say JFK.
At Kendall, we had to wait for what felt like a long while for the train. The size of the platform and the width of the stairs and fare gates probably turned out to be a significant bottleneck in swapping the crowd between the platform and the train. I had choosen to ride in what would be the second car from the rear; my experience is that the southernmost (or maybe it's easternmost) car at Harvard Square always gets more riders crowding in that the others because of where the entrances to Harvard Square station are, and I'd wanted to avoid that; but the main entrance at Kendall is approximately even with what is the first car on an outbound four car train, and while the MBTA staff was encouraging people to head down to the far end of the platform, most people (including myself, initially) weren't paying much attention to that.
Since I had been annoyed on my inbound trip by people boarding before everyone got off the train (and I think on my inbound trip there had been a smaller crowd on the platform), I decided to wait by the wall, away from the train. After a little while, it seemed like the car in front of me had emptied out, and most of the people who were boarding it had already boarded, and there was a large stream of people, probably 2-3 people wide, slowly walking down the length of the platform I managed to cross that large stream of people and board the train, but it turned out I would have had plenty of time had I not been so agressive about crossing that crowd. On the other hand, under normal circumstances it is very normal for a Red Line train to depart while people who have just gotten off the train are walking next to it.
At one point, it felt like the whole width and length of the Kendall Square platform was full, at least judging from the section I was in, and I wonder if that's a fire safety problem.
There was a blinking red light in the middle of the outbound track and two people just west of the Kendall Square platform and just east of the switch that redirects the train to / from the other track's platform, and I think the track work was being done primarily on the outbound track. I got the impresion that those people were probably there to make sure that the safety equipment stayed in place to make sure that a train didn't try to run over the track workers.
At Central, I briefly got off the train, because I'd been standing next to the door that opened at Central, and I figured that was helpful for getting out of the way of people who actually wanted to get off at Central. Then I ended up standing directly in the center of the car, widthwise, from Central to Harvard, and was kind of a bit in the way of people getting off at Harvard, and then there were probably people who were a bit in my way getting off at Porter, and then I made my way through the escalators and walked home.
I think the T did use the newer (like, two decades old instead of three or four) cars for the north section of the route; the newer cars have four pairs of doors per side, whereas the older ones only have three, and that probably helped a bit.
