Waiting for the train

State Rep. John Barrett III, D-North Adams, stands along the tracks near the Western Gateway Heritage State Park. Barrett and others are pushing to restore passenger rail service from North Adams and Greenfield east to Boston, and a new state study details options for the project. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By JOHN TOWNES
Contributing writer

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

The effort to bring passenger rail service from Boston to northern Berkshire County has reached at its first stop, but it could still be a long wait before the first trains roll into North Adams.

Last month, the state Department of Transportation released a draft of its long-awaited Northern Tier Passenger Rail Study. The comprehensive 112-page report examines the goals, requirements and options for upgrading an existing freight rail line to enable passenger trains to run from North Adams and Greenfield to Boston.

The report’s release opened a public comment period that runs through Oct. 12. After that, the study will be revised into a final form that the state’s political leaders could use as the basis to pursue an actual service proposal. (Copies of the report are available at www.mass.gov/lists/northern-tier-passenger-rail-study-documents.)

State Rep. John Barrett III, D-North Adams, a strong supporter of the idea of restoring train service across the state’s northern tier, predicted that the advent of North Adams-to-Boston passenger trains would provide a significant stimulus for economic development in the northern Berkshires.

Although the trains would help tourists to reach the area, Barrett said the project would have a more profound effect in attracting new residents, jobs and other economic benefits to the region.
“It would be similar to the role of commuter trains for people who live in Connecticut and work in New York City,” he said.

Barrett said that with the increasing traffic congestion and high costs of housing in and around Boston, people are looking for alternatives. In a new era of remote work, he suggested, train service could open up western Massachusetts to people whose professional lives remain anchored east of Route 128.

“Convenient passenger service would make the Berkshires an attractive and affordable option for people who would want to live here and commute to the Boston area,” he said. “That’s especially true for the increasing number of people who work remotely at home and go to their office a couple of times a week.”

 

Hoosac Tunnel route
The northern tier project would restore passenger service along a 140-mile line that was once a major east-west travel route through Massachusetts. The line, originally known as the Fitchburg Railroad, was surveyed and constructed from the 1840s to the 1870s and today is roughly paralleled by state Route 2.

The rail line includes the 5-mile-long Hoosac Tunnel, which starts on the east side of North Adams and played a vital role in the city’s growth and development. It remains the longest U.S. railroad tunnel east of the Rocky Mountains.

A fleet of passenger trains still plied the Hoosac Tunnel route between Boston and Troy, N.Y., until the late 1950s, when passenger service gradually was eliminated west of Fitchburg.
Today, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority owns and operates the line for commuter trains on the 53 miles between Boston’s North Station and Wachusett station, a large park-and-ride facility west of downtown Fitchburg. The track west of Fitchburg, through Greenfield and North Adams and into Vermont and New York, is owned and operated by the freight carrier Pan Am Southern LLC.

Under the scenarios contemplated by the new study, the state DOT would have overall responsibility for any new passenger service to western Massachusetts, while the trains would operated by Amtrak, the national passenger rail carrier. That would involve having Amtrak use its train cars, locomotives and crews and coordinate train movements with the freight railroad that owns the line.

 

Five years of study
Although there have been periodic calls over the past few decades to extend passenger service westward along the line from Fitchburg, the issue moved to the front burner in 2019 after state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, successfully pushed for legislation calling on the DOT to conduct a formal study.

Barrett was a co-sponsor of the legislation, which directed to the DOT to examine the benefits, costs and investments required to implement passenger rail service from North Adams to Greenfield and Boston — and to develop the speed, frequency and reliability necessary for trains to be a competitive travel option along this corridor. The report was supposed to be issued in 2023, but it was delayed until now.

The draft report is based on extensive research and was developed with the aid of working groups of stakeholders as well as public input. It establishes goals including economic development, reducing transportation’s impacts on public health and the environment, and increasing transportation equity and mobility.

“The population in the study corridor, particularly west of Fitchburg, is currently static and has been projected for long-term decline,” the report notes. “Part of the rationale for Northern Tier Passenger Rail is to potentially reverse this trend.”

The study includes extensive information about specific physical construction and the investment required to implement train service, a cost-benefit analysis, and information about potential ridership, job creation and economic and environmental impacts.

After the public comment period, the DOT will revise the report, which will become the basis for a specific plan the department ultimately will submit to the Legislature and governor for review.
“This is the initial stage of the process of moving it forward to planning, design and construction,” explained Ben Heckscher, co-founder of Trains in the Valley, an advocacy group that has been pushing for expanded rail service in the Pioneer Valley and elsewhere in western Massachusetts.
“The first hurdle for a project like this is determining its feasibility,” Heckscher said. “That includes a cost-benefit analysis with a preliminary number for the investment that will be required to help determine if money is available. Ultimately, the final decision will be a political one.”

 

Five trains per day
The study details the work required to make passenger rail service a reality on the line, including track and signal upgrades, station construction and other infrastructure improvements. It also evaluates studies for integrating freight and passenger traffic along the route.

It lists six potential service options, ranging from the most basic and least costly to implement to those that would achieve faster travel times and other benefits but would require a bigger initial investment.

All of the service options envision an operation with five trains daily in each direction between North Adams and Boston.

The first, lowest-cost alternative would take the minimum steps necessary to operate passenger trains, eliminating low-speed segments and creating additional track capacity to accommodate the new trains. This option would yield a travel time of 3 hours and 55 minutes between Boston and North Adams.

A second basic option would include additional track upgrades and other work to enable a faster total travel time of 2 hours and 48 minutes, which the study says is competitive with driving.
An additional four options would expand on these, with some involving additional intermediate stops and one option having trains continuing west from North Adams to Albany, N.Y.
Most of the options are based on trains being hauled by diesel engines, but one would use electrified trains, which would be less costly to operate but require a larger up-front investment in infrastructure.

Among the service options is one with “full local service,” with intermediate stops at Shelburne Falls, Greenfield, Athol, Gardner, Fitchburg and Porter Square in Cambridge.
The study also mentions the possibilities for connections to a wider region, such as by linking with train service to Vermont and Connecticut through scheduled connections to Amtrak’s north-south Vermonter route in Greenfield.

 

Costs of $878M to $2.9B
Although the report estimates the potential construction costs of various options, these are rough estimates that could be affected by future changes in the cost of supplies and services and other factors.

The lowest-cost alternative is pegged at $878 million for initial infrastructure work, while the second lowest would cost $1.57 billion. The full local diesel service is estimated at $1.59 billion, while the cost of establishing the electrified service is projected at $2.92 billion.

The report also analyzes anticipated operating and maintenance costs, ridership and revenues. It does not endorse any specific alternative and instead emphasizes that further analysis is required.

The draft report does note that the lowest annual cost of operations and maintenance per rider are associated with the full local service option and the electrified service option. Although these options would be more expensive to design and build, the study estimates they’d be more cost-effective to operate because they would have the highest ridership.

The report doesn’t draw any conclusion for or against the merits of the overall project. However, one line in its conclusions that has drawn some criticism states: “Given the estimated benefits and costs associated with each of the six alternatives, the benefit-cost analysis indicates that the benefits may not offset the capital costs required for implementation.”

Barrett called that statement absurd.
“That’s a very premature conclusion,” Barrett said. “How can they make that assumption before a specific plan has been determined or anything has been actually done? It’s obvious this will have many benefits far beyond what a preliminary cost-benefit analysis might indicate. Look at the benefits the MBTA has provided to eastern Massachusetts.”

Heckscher also noted that the overall initial costs do not have to be incurred at once.
“People should not be scared away by the numbers in the study when they see billion-dollar figures for a full-build scenario,” Heckscher said. “That does not necessarily mean it would all have to be done and spent at once. Changes can also be made incrementally by doing the more basic steps to start the service and making additional upgrades and improvements over time.”
Although the state would need to decide the scope of the project and what level of investment to make, it could seek federal funds to pay for a significant portion of the infrastructure upgrades needed to get the trains rolling. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan initiative enacted early in the Biden administration, provided $66 billion in new funding over 10 years for passenger and freight rail, including $43.5 billion for grants to states that want to expand and upgrade the passenger rail network.

Many states and multistate compacts are competing for those funds, however, and the flow of future infrastructure spending could be dramatically reshaped depending on the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional races.

 

Connecting to a network
The study of potential rail service in the state’s northern tier is one facet of a wider goal of revitalizing freight and passenger rail service across Massachusetts, with several separate but related initiatives under way.

Two years ago, the Legislature approved $275 million in a first round of funding to support expanded train service on the east-west route that extends from Boston and Worcester to Springfield and Pittsfield. The route currently carries a once-a-day Amtrak run, but New York officials are backing Massachusetts’ proposal to add two additional trains per day along this route between Boston and Albany, and Massachusetts hopes to add additional frequencies between Springfield and Boston.

The expanded east-west service via Springfield is one part of a concept officials have dubbed “compass rail,” an integrated system of east-west and north-south rail services with Springfield as their hub. Springfield is already the northern terminal of frequent rail service to Hartford and New Haven, and Massachusetts for several years has been supporting a couple of additional daily round-trips between Springfield, Northampton and Greenfield on the line used by Amtrak’s Vermonter.

The different rail projects in Massachusetts are not necessarily in competition with one another, but the state has had to establish overall strategies and priorities among various options. Advocates say the proposed east-west service through Springfield has advanced further in the planning and design process because it was started earlier.

Barrett said he believes the most effective strategy for a statewide rail system would be to integrate the northern tier service into the “compass rail” network based in Springfield.

“Currently, the northern tier is not considered part of compass,” Barrett said. “However, once we progress further after the comment period, we’ll be able to demonstrate the benefits of including this in compass.”