NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — A proposed passenger rail service linking North Adams to Boston via the Pan Am Southern route through the Hoosac Tunnel would cost about $2.19 billion according to a presentation last week by Massachusetts Department of Transportation officials.
The Berkshire Eagle newspaper reports that the Northern Tier Passenger Rail Study was launched under a 2019 law. Costs, projected ridership, and potential station locations remain rough estimates, according to Makaela Niles, the study’s project manager, during a presentation in North Adams, a community of 13,000 in the far northwest corner of the state, about 130 miles from Boston.
Consultants from HNTB Corp., contracted by the state to study the project, presented two plans for the service: A $1.04 billion version would involve less upgrade to the route but result in a travel time of about four hours; the $2.19 billion version would see more upgrades and result in a travel time of about three hours, competitive with driving time.
Preliminary plans call for stations in North Adams, Greenfield, and Fitchburg en route to Boston, and up to five round trips per day. Initial ridership projections from Boston range from 20,000 to 50,000 passengers annually.
More information on the study is available at this page on the MassDOT website.
I don’t understand. From reading so many comments on Newswire stories over the years I got the clear message that passenger rail is the solution to all our transportation woes. Yet, based on comments here, it sounds like this project would not be a worthwhile solution. I don’t understand…
Sometimes I read (or come back to) certain articles just for the juicy comments section. Thanks guys!
For this price you could buy every one of us 40 thousand residents of Franklin County a brand new Tesla and we could drive ourselves on the rate occasion we want to visit Boston.
I didn’t know anyone lived in Franklin County. Mark Chmura (former Green Bay Packers tight end) moved to Waukesha County Wisconsin so I would have thought that would bring your population down to zero.
Divide the population of Mass by 351, the average city or town has 20,000 people, but there must be at least a hundred towns under 1,000 population. With little county government or in some cases no county government, towns of a few hundred people (if even that many) are the only unit of local government.
Isn’t North Adams a college town? How would this figure into the calculus?
Yup. Williams College I think is the name. I think there’s a UMass campus in Fitchburg, not sure. This is America. There are colleges just about everywhere. Some college towns have trains.
No Williamstown is the college town. At the price it costs to go to williams they should let the students pay for it.
Not really. Williamstown is the College Town for Williams. N Adams may have a community college. I wonder what the cost of building a totally new RR in the middle of Route 2–until it ceases to be a 4-lane divided highway out near Templeton–would be. $2.19 billion! Station benches must be platinum-plated! They already have a low-platform station at Gardner–which has a state college of some sort. Orange and Athol (stop snickering!) need one station in between them. Charlemont should get a station out of sentiment and maybe someone could reopen the old Charlemont Inn from 1787 before it disappears; a ski area nearby should get some winter business. Same for Shelburne Falls. Look, Route 2 west of Templeton is a two-lane road with too few poorly-designed passing lane so you don’t need THAT fast a train to compete. Many will jump at the opportunity to NOT drive over Hoosac [Indian for “Forbidden” supposedly] Mountain with its switchback or two. The 4.71-mile Hoosac Tunnel can be a tourist selling point too!
This study appears to be an effort to take down any work to improve Worcester – Springfield. Spread the money over these 2 routes and neither one would become competetive.
You know, look at the graphic!!! Nothing screams bureaucracy like a nonexistent nonentity never-will-happen dysfunction that already has its own LOGOTYPE, the Northern Tier passenger servce.
I’ve forgotten her name, the recent former Governor Of the Commonwealth who lived in North Adams and was driven to the State House in Boston every day by the State Police. We could compare her cross-state commute to what it would take by train. (One thing that my wife has learned, Massachusetts isn’t all that small east to west. It’s not Delaware. North Adams to Provincetown by car is probably a good twelve hours.)
Five hours if you’re lucky and don’t get caught in a traffic jam. I almost did it once! Did do Medford-Orleans in two hours or so but it was at the end of October on a late Saturday afternoon.
As much as it would be cool to see passenger trains running through the Hoosac tunnel, I doubt that this project would be economically feasible, and as much as I hate to say it, unlike a lot of other train projects that are under construction RN, I think this idea is a boondoggle. For now anyways.
“$2.19 billion version would see more upgrades and result in a travel time of about three hours, competitive with driving time.”
If we go by Brother Landry’s estimate, we could buy nice cruiser buses, carry between a total of 55 and 137 people, and release almost all of the $2.19 billion for more useful projects.
Mr. McGuire: And by what route would you suggest these “cruiser busses” use along the “Northern Tier” route between North Adams and Boston that along with intermediate stops would take less than 5-6 hours?
Englander Coach used to run that route on Route 2. Three hours max with going off-road into downtowns for stops. The Northern Tier isn’t THAT bad on Route 2. But those busses came off by the mid-1980’s or so.
As for the train, the old 1980’s model Adirondack Railway (Utica to Lake Placid) and the Cape Cod & Hyannis (South Braintree to Falmouth/Hyannis) is a better model. Save money. Open the windows for air-conditioning. Serve food; even have a bar-lounge-pot car! Promote the Hoosac Tunnel for day-trippers.
Charles you are so right. And you forgot to mention that the consultants in order to get further work overestimate the number of passengers and underestimate the cost. This is a government boondoggle if there ever was one. I hope the Mass taxpayers don’t fall for it.
Only the Springfield/Boston corridor is viable.
Extending service to a town of 13,000 people? It would probably be cheaper to move them all to Greenfield than to fix that part of the route.
Look on you tube. Amtrack ran one of their specials through the tunnel about 6 or more years ago.
Any active politicians live along this proposed route? Asking for a friend.
OMG, where to begin? We might begin by saying that North Adams isn’t in the “far northeastern” part of the state. That said, the most intelligent part of the article is that colossal typo. It’s downhill from there.
Five round trips a day would carry somewhere between a total of 55 and 137 people daily, or between six and fourteen riders per train. Awesome! The capital recovery at five percent interest would hover around $2,000 per trip …. on top of the operating cost.
Then there’s the fallacy that you need a train because it’s in the same state. I’m a SE Mass native who has often traveled home. The only two times in my ENTIRE LIFE I’ve been in that territory were these: A family road trip to Orange (near Fitchburg) in 1962, and a train between Montreal and New Haven in 1982.
This article gives a whole new meaning to the nickname for Bay State residents:- Mass Holes.
Directional point fixed.
Don’t worry all you commenters above. MassDOT is only kidding about doing this.
We aren’t all mass holes (that was the big 7+ billion dollar) dig to get to the airport. But for this price you could buy all 40 thousand of us Franklin county residents a brand new Tesla to drive on the rare occasion that we want to visit Boston.
Did you see anything at one in the morning in 1982? Orange is nowhere near Fitchburg. Orange has Athol and Gardner and Ashburnham and Wachusett before you get to Fitchburg. But again, there’s a reason service west of Greenfield ended in November 1958 after being cut back from Troy NY in January. Service west of Fitchburg ended in 1960; west of Ayer in 1965. By that time the B&A was down to TWO trains a day each way to Springfield “and the West” west of Worcester where the Best is like the Worst… Colossal waste of money; could be done cheaper with a Cape Cod & Hyannis-type service. OMG! The CC&H was almost 40 years ago (1984-8)!