1. Work will start soon, probably in October. A long string of equipment moving through town replacing most ties and laying and welding the rail. They average about a mile a day. Some racket for a day or two, no fences built, and they are not going to repaint the bridges, which Pan Am owns. They are keeping a single track to the Route 91 overpass to our south, then a long passing siding that will terminate near the bike trail crossing in back of McDonalds. Single line north to Greenfield.
2. Starting this winter, freight trains will be able to do 40mph on the new welded rails. Ties replaced as needed. A train going by you at 40 mph will be somewhat louder, I think. No clear idea if PanAm RR will schedule more freight trains now that they have a good rail-bed. They haven't got many revenue-producing customers on this length of line. Pan Am doesn't come to meetings, although an impressive-looking big pickup that can run on rails was in the parking lot at city hall.
3. When feasible, the Vermonter, run by Amtrak will start service through Northampton,one trip north, one trip south every day. Temporarily, it will use the old station downtown.It will be able to average 79 mph out in the country, but here in town it will be slowing down or speeding up.
4. Vermonter will still dead-end at Saint Albans Vt, I think, until U.S./Canada customs questions get ironed out. Same equipment Amtrak is using today, no bullet trains. Railroad wants customs work done in Montreal.
5. No money for stations. Buy tickets on board for now. The tunnel that will take the bike trail under the tracks is at the 30% design stage. The work itself to put it into place will only take a day or two. There will be earthmoving equipment, the big culvert pieces will be moved in place by a couple of crane. The planning process for the Damon Road grade crossing,is more intense, involves more parties (the state, the city DPW, the police, the Pan Am railroad, which at this stage, still owns the roadbed. The State is negogiating to buy the roadbed.
6.The State is aiming at completion of the project on December 31, 2013. Amtrak hopes to eventually have trains running every half hour to Springfield and points north and south. But that will be some time in the future when and if demand shows itself. The big federal money has gone to southern Connecticut, and the money to modernize trackage and bridges from Hartford to Springfield is not there yet.
What exactly are the objectives of this project and who are the real beneficiaries?
ReplyDeleteCertainly not Amherst rail customers, including UMass students, who will soon have to figure out how to get over the river to catch their train. It's a bit odd that the planners ice out their largest block of customers with hopes that travelers from Northampton, Greenfield and Holyoke will make up the difference. Really?
As far as I can tell, only Pan Am Railways walks away on the upside. They get millions in taxpayer-funded upgrades to their own rail line to enable them to run their filthy, LOUD diesel locomotives quicker while the rest of us are stuck with a "Train to Nowhere."
Essentially, the Northampton link to Springfield duplicates the more frequently scheduled Peter Pan bus ride or a quicker cab ride (if you can even find one now that Green Cab is out of business). When you reach Springfield, you still have slow, expensive and infrequent service to New Haven and the same long ride to Penn Station if you're headed to NYC.
What's missing in this project is a bold vision, something that's a fading memory in this country: a real high-speed link to distant points north (Montreal) and south (NYC and beyond). Short of that, I fear it's a waste of time and money.
As a resident of Hamp and a downtown office worker, I cannot wait for the rail service to Springfield on a frequent basis to resume. This is precisely the demographic we need to make this a viable enterprise. Sporadic student use will not be sufficient to populate these trains, we need regular daily commuters with the occasional student traveler to make this a success.
ReplyDeleteTo retort to the above commenter, who really cares what the needs of the students are. There are plenty of alternate modalities to get them to Hamp from Amherst or Hadley and those desiring further transport will come to appreciate our initial leg of the journey.
Without seeing a trip projection analysis, it's impossible to say whether the Greenfield - Springfield service will be used by daily commuters in sufficient numbers to make it cost-effective.
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to believe that there would be a large base of daily commuters like TieDyeGuy who would line up to pay for an expensive Amtrak ticket every day, pay to park their cars at their origin, and then walk (Horrors!) from Springfield's station to their workplace, particularly when we have cheap bus service and the I-91 on our doorstep. The Valley, for all its green pretenses, is very much the land of the car. Mass transit is just not in the mainstream culture here in the same way it is in Boston or New York. And that's too bad.
Amtrak works much better for longer regional trips that can't be duplicated by cheaper, faster and more convenient car journeys. But if we had a "real" robust modern, high-speed service that would whisk us to Boston, New York and other nearby cities, I think we'd have a hit on our hands. But the clunky, half-ass plans for this tarted-up freight rail line seem destined to fail regular passengers.
I went to this meeting, and first I want to congratulate Mr. Kirby for his no-nonsense and accurate summary. Well done.
ReplyDeleteNext, I have to say that some of the criticisms I read here don't seem well informed. The project was clearly laid out in stages: first was to speed up the existing trip from St. Johnsbury to New Haven. Going down the Ct. River, rather than through Palmer, will save about a half an hour off that trip.
Second, there are indeed plans to increase the frequency of SPFLD-NH train shuttles... if customers support it. These planners clearly expressed the hope that there could be an increase in the number of trains going through Hamp. But... the planners at the meeting were not in la-la land, and did not claim this was some renaissance of local rail travel. To them, this is part of a bigger plan centered around inter-city travel. Part of that plan is a multi-state effort to build an alternate NY-BOS "high speed" route... the so-called Inland Route... going from NY to NH to SPFLD and then to BOS, in order to have an alternate route when the Coastal Route (basically along I-95) is unavailable or jammed up. The BOS-DC corridor is Amtrak's cash cow, and they want alternatives if routes go down. The bottom line for right now is that the rehab of the Connecticut Valley roadbed (currently owned by PanAm) is definitely happening soon; it's not "in planning stages." Getting to "The Vermonter" will be more convenient for people in Hamp and Holyoke, and the trip will be faster for people from Vermont, but it's still just that one train. Nobody made promises beyond that.
I see tonight in the Recorder that the state is buying all the PanAm roadbed from CT to VT for 17mill. A big price, but in the long run it'll make the railroad operations more responsive to local residents. Good move by the state.
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