A rendering shows one of a planned fleet of new new Amtrak Airo trains that will operate on several routes around the United States, including on Massachusetts' planned East-West Rail. Image courtesy of Amtrak
Before the end of the decade, commuters should be able to zip from Boston through Springfield and all the way up past Albany twice a day via rail. That is, if plans for the West-East Rail expansion chug along smoothly.
West-East Rail is one part of the broader Compass Rail project – the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s vision for intercity passenger rail within Massachusetts with Springfield as the hub.
Intercity rail, offering longer distance trips connecting metro areas, differs from the promise of suburban-urban connections on the commuter rail, Andy Koziol, who was appointed director of West-East Rail in February, said on The Codcast, CommonWeatlh Beacon’s podcast.
“This is going to bring new connectivity, new opportunities for mobility, particularly for Western Massachusetts to Eastern Massachusetts,” Koziol said. The expansion is an “opportunity to connect some of our more rural communities to job centers in the Northeast.”
Compass Rail will improve existing services, like the North-South routes in Western Massachusetts, and bind them to a new rail system connecting the east and west parts of the state.
The expansion will be an incremental process. The first real investment seen will be early work on the inland route, connecting Worcester and Springfield to Boston and New Haven. A $108 million award from the Federal Railroad Administration will fund track improvement between Worcester and Springfield to operate two daily passenger rail round trips, Koziol said. The project is currently going into design, slated for construction in 2027 and completion in 2029.
Beyond the inland route, Boston to Albany route improvements will mirror a Boston to Pittsfield section studied in 2021.
“When we are advancing these initiatives, particularly between Boston and Albany,” Koziol said, “it’s within a larger context of a nationwide network.”
The Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor ID program is designed to connect states through their major cities. It includes the Boston-Albany route as a corridor to be advanced and improved through a series of projects, guided by a service development plan Koziol hopes to begin this year. This federal project is the first of its kind in the US, he noted, so the timeline on the long-haul projects is “a little less certain” than the inland route.
MassDOT’s Rail and Transit Division administrator Meredith Slesinger, who joined Koziol on The Codcast, said the plans have been kicking around for years.
“I like to joke that there are no new ideas in rail,” she said. “I think there’s been a desire for Boston to Albany or East-West service for a very long time.”
Historically, she noted, regular service did exist “way back in the day, and we still have one train a day between Boston and Albany. However, it’s not necessarily a useful train.” As part of Amtrak’s long-distance network, Slesinger said, the one daily train isn’t operating frequently enough to be a regular connector for the communities around it.
Over the past 15 years, MassDOT has bolstered what it calls the “knowledge corridor” of North-South service through “incremental infrastructure investments,” Slesinger said. This involved coordination between Amtrak, Massachusetts, and its counterparts in Connecticut and Vermont rail.
Likewise, the West-East Rail project will involve a balance of interests. Most of the West-East corridor is owned by freight transportation company CSX, with services operated by Amtrak.
“It is important for everyone to remember that we’re not constructing the inland route project on right-of-way that we own, so we have to work with our partners in order to advance these projects,” Slesinger said. “It also means we’re a bit dependent on other parties to move things along on the timeline that we hope to.” So far, she said, the relationship is “wonderful.”
Smaller infrastructure improvements, like eliminating bottlenecks in West Springfield, will smooth the larger project.
But there fundamentally needs to be a vision for a shift toward more robust public transit, Slesinger said. In quoting a colleague, she said “single-occupant vehicles are the worst use of highways.” Cars are the “least efficient, least environmentally friendly” transit option, she said. “The future is rail.”
At this point, Slesinger expects the rail networks will use Amktrak’s upcoming Airo fleet of trains. The trains will be more fuel efficient than the current fleet and generate fewer particulates, she said, emphasizing that “mass transit is inherently green,” as travelers ditch cars.
There is local demand for these options, Slesinger said. Local communities and the federal delegation have pushed for more rail funding, and ridership has doubled along the North-South corridor since coming out of the pandemic.
When looking at existing intercity rail in Western Massachusetts, Koziol said “the growth that we’ve seen on those lines has been incredible. It’s been outpacing our forecasts. We are well beyond pre-pandemic ridership numbers that we had.”
That isn’t an outlier, Koziol argues. Intercity rail has a different profile of riders than commuter rail or the MBTA focused on connecting the suburbs to an urban core. The demand for services in Western Massachusetts has involved a lot of long-distance travel, even past New York on to Washington D.C., Koziol said, especially given changes to in-person work patterns since the start of the Covid pandemic.
Koziol, whose regular commute is taking a bus to a commuter rail line into Boston, joined MassDOT last year as the director of rail and transit after more than a decade with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation.
As a rider, Koziol describes the essential markers of a working transit system as “fast, frequent, reliable service.” Slesinger, who has lived in Washington, DC, and New York City, co-signed Koziol’s description and also highlighted the feel of the facilities themselves – clean stations, clear signage, available staff – as the thing that can help rail compete directly with cars.
During monthly evaluations of services in Western Mass., Koziol said, the team zeroes in on ridership, on-time performance, and customer satisfaction, which are “also going to be the metrics that are going to be driving us as we plan future services, because you have to be able to count on a service and it has to be useful.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
