Transportation officials in Massachusetts have released a final report going over what passenger rail returning to northwest Massachusetts and beyond might look like – and potentially cost.
The MassDOT study weighed multiple scenarios for trains traveling between North Adams, Greenfield and Boston. The report comes as state and local leaders from the Berkshires to Central Massachusetts call on the state to continue exploring the possibilities.
That includes regional rail advocate groups like Trains in the Valley. WAMC sat down with its co-founder Ben Heckscher to talk about the study, east-west rail and other developments.
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WAMC: Your group has been diligently cataloging and promoting very nearly every facet of the West-East Rail Project over the last few years, as well as the rollout of the Valley Flyer, or at least how the Valley Flyer is doing going north and south.
When we talk about trains in this region, how has it been transforming? Is it going in a particular direction, in your opinion?
Ben Heckscher: I think there is a trend. So, what's happening is, there's investments being made, there's improvements being made, trains are being added, there's planning - long-term planning is being done that started many years ago to basically begin to provide this form of transportation and build it up.
It's been here for a while, south of Springfield. You know, it's interesting that you can get from Springfield to New Haven to New York - that's been around for a very long time. In fact, it never went away, but we were cut off from Boston, effectively … decades ago, and it's funny that we can get to New York and it's not our state capitol, but we can't get to our state capitol.
WAMC: I want to talk about Northern Tier rail - the restoration of passenger rail between Boston and large swathes of central and western Massachusetts and in at least one scenario, New York as well.
It's been gone for decades, but movement in the legislature led to a recent study conducted by MassDOT. Before we dig into those findings, how would you describe the energy behind this project and the support that seems to have surfaced recently?
Ben Heckscher: I think there's a lot of energy and it's been building up over time. As you probably know, the origins of this study for Northern Tier go back to Jo Comerford.
When I met her for the first time when she was running for office, and we were having a coffee like we're doing here today (this interview took place in the Old Mill Café & Bar in Hatfield, MA), she brought up the topic of Northern Tier Rail, and I frankly hadn't heard of it at the time. The rail advocate hadn't heard of it, amazing!
And I asked her, ‘So, what prompted you to do this?’ and she said, ‘When I was running for office, every town meeting I went to, there was one or two or three people and they’d raise their hand and they said, ‘What about the train to Boston? Can't we get it back?’” and she took that on as … one of her major priorities, to try to move it forward, and she realized, when she got into office, the way you start that is with a study.
So, she's the one that brought the study and now, over time, through public awareness, there's sort of a growing level of support. You could call it a groundswell, but there's a level of support in the towns of the northern part of the state - they're really interested in this, but it's important to realize this is a study at this point: it's a proposal. It's not a plan to move it forward, it's not a project. We're moving it, step-by-step, through the planning process here, hopefully, to, over time, get the improvements that are necessary to make it happen, to make it go forward.
WAMC: Generally speaking, when we think of Northern Tier Rail, which makes the west-east rail, stuff I just mentioned seem like the southern tier in the grand scheme of things, Northern Tier generally seems to include reliable passenger rail stemming from Boston that, one way or another, makes its way to, at the very least, Greenfield and North Adams. How would you define Northern Tier Rail?
Ben Heckscher: You've basically defined it. It's service from Boston to Greenfield to North Adams. [MassDOT] looked at also going to Albany, but the problem with that - a lot of the tracks were ripped up in certain areas of New York state years ago, and the only way to get to Albany … you'd have to go all the way up to Schenectady and then dog tail back. So that's not going to happen.
WAMC: It’s a different duck from the southern tier in more ways than one - one of them being southern tier benefits from an Amtrak line that's going through it right now. Technically, there is a train that goes from Springfield to Boston. Is it the Southern Shore Limited? [sic.]
Ben Heckscher: It's a historic train name, called the Lake Shore Limited and what's really important about that train is that when you want to establish rail service, of course, the first thing you need are the tracks. But there's layers on top of that that make it easier or tougher to establish passenger rail service and if you already have at least one Amtrak train or commuter rail running on a rail line, you're basically just about at the level where you can add trains.
If you don't have passenger trains, there's lots of extra things you have to do. But, since we already have one train, adding additional trains really means, and the people at MassDOT would say there's much more than this, but adding the necessary number of tracks, so the freight trains don't interfere with the passenger trains, and the signaling and … the stations, of course, to make this move forward.
WAMC: Let’s go ahead and dig into the study. The final report recently came out, and [there’s] not a whole lot of differences from the [draft] report, as it lays out the different alternatives, scenarios and estimated costs - a lot of hypotheticals and a considerable amount [in terms] of capital cost estimates as well. But, at the very least: Ben, when you first saw the study, at least the preliminary results, what was your immediate takeaway?
Ben Heckscher: They did a very thorough job and I give them credit for that. It's similar in thoroughness to what they did for the East-West Rail study.
It's important to remember - this is a conceptual study. It's not a study to figure out the nuts-and-bolts of what you have to do to every bridge or every switch or everything like that. It's basically looking at the potential market and the infrastructure along the line, and what would it take to move this forward.
WAMC: I want to go through the various alternatives that they put forward real quick. I think we already seized on the feasibility of that Albany stretch they described. But there was also electrification, there was the bare bones scenario. There were a few other interesting proposals. Of the six, what had your eye
Ben Heckscher: I think what's most interesting to me… well, first, to back up, what they looked at is a couple of scenarios and they looked at a lower level of investment, a higher level of investment, then how many stations would they stop at, and then the Albany option, and then the electrification option.
What's interesting to me is, when you have more than two stops. If you only go to Greenfield and North Adams, you skip a large part of the state between Greenfield and Fitchburg and we don't really want to do that. I mean - there's people who live in populations, in other towns along the line that, historically, had stations - Gardner as an example - that would be potentially ideal stops if the service comes to be.
Also, what's important to look with the study is, because it's conceptual, they had to do a lot of estimating. The numbers are high … what they put in the study is billions of dollars. But I think it's important to realize that there's ways to do a project like this incrementally.
If you want to only start with one train, like we had with The Vermonter going north of Springfield, you can make incremental improvements to the infrastructure, build it up to the point where you could run that one train, build up ridership from that, and then you could add a second train.
What they did in the study is they built a model to run six trains. If you run six trains from the get-go, there's a lot more cost than if you start with one train. I'm not advocating for one train, I'm just saying here - that's how you could incrementally improve the service along the way.
The other important thing to remember with this study, compared to what we did north of Springfield, is the tracks north of Springfield, when they did the Knowledge Corridor Project, they were in awful shape. The freight trains could only go 10 miles an hour. The line that runs west of Fitchburg today is in fairly decent shape, at the moment. They run multiple freight trains during the day, they run as high as 40 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour - and they're doing upgrades on that, and there's a federal grant that's come through to do further upgrades, so the more upgrades you do for freight, it provides the basis to run passenger trains at a higher speed.
WAMC: During the rally in Greenfield a few weeks ago, the actions that would come next were highlighted, and that seemed to include more advocacy, or at least keeping up the energy. What are effectively the next steps for folks that advocate for this?
Ben Heckscher: So, in my view, or the way others are thinking also, is ideally, when a study like this is done, you move into sort of a development phase or planning phase, which is: the professionals start to think about ‘How would you move this forward if you wanted to move it forward?’ and what we need is for the governor, as example, to have a look at what's been done here and decide is this a priority for her and her administration? And I think that's sort of one of the things that's going to happen in the next couple months, to try to figure out how to take the groundswell of support out here in western Mass that came out of those rallies and then transfer it to Boston… at important people in the legislature, but importantly, in the Department of Transportation and then the governor, the lieutenant governor, to say, “We need to start the process now to see how we move this forward.”
WAMC: How are you feeling about the West-East Rail project as is - its [at a] point where we're talking about, the early designs of a rail station in Palmer, for example. There's track reconfiguration [work] going on in Springfield…
Ben Heckscher: I'm happy with what's going on. Things are moving: you know, you could naturally say, ‘I wish they were moving faster,’ but these are complicated projects to do, and there's a lot of pieces - it's sort of like a jigsaw puzzle that has to be put together.
There's a lot of smaller projects and larger projects that have to be put together and knitted together in a way so they overlap and connect, so you can provide these additional trains.
This line will run from Boston to Worcester to Springfield and, eventually, Pittsfield and Albany. You've got the MBTA section of the track, you've got the CSX Railroad … which owns everything west of Worcester.
There's a lot of work that has to be done with different parties, including the Federal Railroad Administration, to make this possible, to happen. So yes, it's going to take a couple years, but there's so many wheels moving now that weren't moving a couple years ago.
We just have to wait a little bit and it's going to come.
WAMC: In the findings for the Northern Tier Rail study, federal funding components were touched on a whole awful lot. The West-East Rail Project has benefited a great deal from the FRA and this has been a White House that's been very friendly to train projects.
Of course, we had a presidential election and we're seeing a lot of large-scale, proposed changes to various facets of government that's more than likely going to [affect] investments in rail. Does this have any bearing on what we've talked about so far in your opinion?
Ben Heckscher: You'd have to be honest, it brings some level of clouds over the whole situation for a lot of different programs, including west-east rail and passenger rail in general, partially because we don't really know what's going to happen.
It's clear there's going to be a focus on fiscal austerity and controlling spending and maybe balancing the budget - valid efforts, but … I guess time is going to tell how this is going to play out.
We don't know at this point, to be frank. I mean, there is money that's been already allocated, future allocations under the infrastructure bill, that could be used. But when a new administration comes in, anything can happen. You know, in our state, the prior governor wasn't so interested in east-west rail, until the federal money became available, and then he was quite interested.
The current governor is very interested in west-east rail. So, we just have to make sure that, hopefully, the new administration of Washington has a similar interest in the advancement of rail programs in the country. We'll see.
