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I'd forgotten about the bypassed Tremont Street Subway section in Cornhill that included Adams Square station. Thanks for bringing that back up.
But the "unearthing" had nothing to do with the Big Dig, which buried the nearby Central Artery elevated freeway. This tunnel lies entirely under windswept City Hall Plaza, which was created in the early 1960s when the City of Boston demolished all of the Scollay Square red-light district to create today's Government Center. The old northern loop track that ran from the northern subway tunnel portal just north of Haymarket Square to Scollay Square via Adams Square was replaced by a new, straight northbound track between Government Center (former Scollay Square) and just south of Haymarket.
BTW, broadstreetexpresstrain, I also forgot to include the original Tremont Street Subway in the list of four-track subway lines, most likely because the two outer tracks between Park Street and Boylston, which continued to the abandoned southern portal, are now unused, and the two inner tracks of the tunnel from the old Haymarket portal (since replaced by a subway extension past North Station) to the old junction with the tunnel to Adams Square were also removed; they now form the platform of a relocated Haymarket station. Between Park Street and Government Center, the tunnel has only two tracks.
I believe that the one-station spur off Atlanta's east-west subway line is not counted as separate from the main route. So there is also precedent for not counting the Ridge Spur as a separate subway line.
Not to nitpick your very excellent write up, but since moving to color-coded lines, MARTA does now count the Proctor Creek branch as a separate "Green Line". I think it's important they do for two reasons - one because only two-car trains run on the branch because of the shorter platform (though this is soon to change), and two because it's been long proposed as a likely candidate for expansion through the now unserved northwest side of town.
Additional information to consider when counting subway lines in Philadelphia is this, on the Broad street line there a 3 seperate trains ( a local train making all stops, an express train stopping at express stations only and a Ridge Avenue Spur making certain stops only). On the Market Frankford Subway- EL there are 3 seperate trains also (there is a local train making all stops, an A train making stops at the A stations only and a B train making stops at the B stations only) if this condition existed in Washington DC, for example, each of these seperate trains would be considerred seperate lines, whereas in Philly they are not considerred seperate lines. Maybe Philly should re consider them to be seperate lines in order to give a more accurate depiction of the system.
Enjoy the youtube links to the Philly rail links and then you decide if the seperate underground rail lines in Philly are all seperate subways or not.
THe T Ridership will be reversed in the next 5-10 years... lots of changes happening.
2019-2020: Orange and Red Line Car Replacements will make the T More Pleasant.
2019+: 8 Billion Dollar Revenue to perform service enhancements.
2021: Green Line Extension to Somerville and Medford including Union Square, Magnoun Square and Tufts University.
2023: Commuter Rail Extension to New Bedford and Fall River.
2024: APM to Logan Airport connecting it to Blue Line, Airport Station.
*2024: If Future Green Line Extension gets approved, we could see further service to West Medford (2 More Stops)
*~2025/2026: Possible Red-Blue Line Connector
*~2026-2028: Possible Blue Line Extension to Lynn.
-Also there is about 1,000+ housing units being constructed at each, Quincy Center, Wollaston, North Quincy, South Station, Suffolk Downs, Kendall/MIT, North Station, Haymarket, Govt Center, Back Bay and Kendall...
-Wollaston Station is being rebuilt as well.
So I can see an uptick in passengers on the T throughout the 2020s... 2010s seemed to be the real low for the T.
Although if they REALLY want to see ridership increase, I suggest utilizing the railroad tracks throughout Kendall and connecting Kenmore to MIT to Chelsea and eventually the Airport area by making the double track actually happen (its planned). Then extending the Orange Line to Dudley through a light rail extension. Ontop of GLX, Blue/Red Connector and Lynn Blue Extension and all these improvements, we may see the T ridership flour!
I mean, both the red and orange line do have new cars running on them. The rollout has def been slower than most would want and iirc one of the new cars derailed near Wellington like last week. Sounds like the track was more to blame than the car, though.
Additional information to consider when counting subway lines in Philadelphia is this, on the Broad street line there a 3 seperate trains ( a local train making all stops, an express train stopping at express stations only and a Ridge Avenue Spur making certain stops only). On the Market Frankford Subway- EL there are 3 seperate trains also (there is a local train making all stops, an A train making stops at the A stations only and a B train making stops at the B stations only) if this condition existed in Washington DC, for example, each of these seperate trains would be considerred seperate lines, whereas in Philly they are not considerred seperate lines. Maybe Philly should re consider them to be seperate lines in order to give a more accurate depiction of the system.
Does anyone know if New York counts its express lines separately from the local lines with which they share tracks?
Washington has some short-turning on the Red Line, but no one considers that to be separate service. So to me, the Market-Frankford Line is one single line, with different operational patterns. I count the Broad Street Line as a single line as well, though if New York counts its locals and expresses separately, I supposed Philadelphia could too. Yes, I do count the Broad-Ridge Spur as a separate line. PATCO as well.
The Subway-Surface Lines operate as streetcars when running on the surface, so those portions of the lines don't even deserve to be discussed in a thread about subway systems. When these lines are actually in the subway tunnel, they operate as one single line from 13th Street to the 40th Street portal (excepting the No. 10, which branches off after 33rd Street). I think that the fairest way to regard it is as a single Light Rail subway line.
The Philly subway surface trolleys are no different than the green line subway in Boston, the Muni trolleys in San Francisco, nor the light rail/trolley subways in Seattle, Bufffalo, Portland or Dallas.
Additional information to consider when counting subway lines in Philadelphia is this, on the Broad street line there a 3 seperate trains ( a local train making all stops, an express train stopping at express stations only and a Ridge Avenue Spur making certain stops only). On the Market Frankford Subway- EL there are 3 seperate trains also (there is a local train making all stops, an A train making stops at the A stations only and a B train making stops at the B stations only) if this condition existed in Washington DC, for example, each of these seperate trains would be considerred seperate lines, whereas in Philly they are not considerred seperate lines. Maybe Philly should re consider them to be seperate lines in order to give a more accurate depiction of the system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bus man
Does anyone know if New York counts its express lines separately from the local lines with which they share tracks?
I could argue both sides of this question, but in so doing, I also want to point out something about the Broad Street Line that separates it from the other four-track routes being discussed here.
New York City has always assigned a separate route number (IRT/A Division) or letter (IND and later BMT, whose lines bore numbers under Brooklyn Rapid Transit ownership/B Division) to every branch that operated through the main midtown Manhattan subway tunnels (IRT East Side/Lexington Ave tunnel: 1, 2, 3; IRT West Side/Broadway-7th Ave tunnel: 4, 5, 6; BMT Broadway: N, Q, R; IND 8th Ave: A, C, E; IND 6th Ave: B, D, F; BMT Nassau Street Loop in lower Manhattan: J, M). New York's subway operators and later the City Board of Transportation (now MTA New York City Transit) had good reason to do so, for once outside Manhattan below 96th Street or above Washington Square, the routes branched off to serve separate parts of downtown Manhattan/uptown Manhattan/the three outer boroughs the subway system serves. The main IND routes in Queens and the Bronx each had a line that would take you down 6th or 8th Avenue in Manhattan, for instance. However, the three separate Queens branches of the A train (Far Rockaway/Rockaway Park/Lefferts Blvd) are not considered separate lines; they are all considered branches of the IND Fulton Street subway in Brooklyn. And for purposes of wayfinding/color coding on maps, the lines are color-coded according to which of the midtown (downtown, in the case of the Nassau Street Loop) Manhattan they use (from west to east: IND 8th Ave: blue; IRT West Side: red; BMT Broadway: yellow; IND 6th Ave: orange; IRT East Side: green; BMT Nassau Loop: brown; IRT Flushing Line (east-west crosstown on 42d St): purple; BMT 14th St-Canarsie Line: gray. The IND Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown [G], the only line in the system [Staten Island Rapid Transit excluded] that does not enter Manhattan, is light green). No doubt another color will be introduced once the Second Avenue Subway, which is now run as a branch of the BMT Broadway and the IND 6th Ave tunnels, extends the length of Manhattan Island.
In Chicago, each of the routes that use all or part of the North Side elevated has its own color: the line that operates on it at rush hours but at other times of the day runs only between the Howard Street terminal and Evanston is purple, the State Street Subway route is red, and the Ravenswood line brown. Given the all-day operating characteristics of the three routes combined with the fact that two use the Loop while the third runst into the State Street subway, this too is easy to understand.
But let's go back to the A train in New York City now. The northern terminus of all three branches is 207th Street at the northern tip of Manhattan Island, and they all follow the same route as far as Rockaway Boulevard in Queens, where they then split in two; the two Rockaway branches travel together to Broad Channel, where they split in two (and the Rockaway Park branch terminates at Broad Channel and operates as a shuttle in the overnight hours). None of these are classed as separate lines.
In terms of operations, this mirrors today's Broad Street Line exactly. All three services — local, express, Ridge Spur — operate in the same tunnel from the northern terminus at Fern Rock to Girard, where the Ridge Spur follows another tunnel to 8th and Market. The locals and expresses operate in the same tunnel for the entire length of the express route, which terminates in Center City; stadium expresses use the tunnel for its entire length, skipping all the stations in South Philadelphia between Walnut-Locust and the southern terminus at NRG (nee Pattison). Had all the branches of the Broad Street trunk (Germantown, Northeast, West Oak Lane, Parkway-Roxborough, Southwest Philly) the city had authorized been built, there would IMO be a very good argument for treating each as a separate line but giving the lines a common color code a la Boston Green Line LRT or New York subway. But as it stands, the mainline express is not a separate line but a faster service offered on the main line, and the Ridge Spur is just that, like that one-station spur off the east-west line in Atlanta (which, as you read upthread, is now being treated as a separate line because it's likely to be extended). There's really no reason to treat the Broad Street local and Broad Street express as separate lines, and only weak justification for treating the Ridge Spur as one given the example of both the A train in New York and the Green Line in Boston.
(The spur exists because the downtown loop subway under Arch, 8th, Locust and Broad streets called for in the original 1913 rapid transit plan got scrubbed (or rather, seriously altered, for the 8th and Locust Street legs did get built as an extension of the Ridge spur to Rittenhouse Square, with no connection to the Broad Street trunk where the two cross) by the time work on the Broad Street trunk, suspended in World War I, resumed in 1925; the sealed-off Arch Street tunnel was to have been part of that loop subway. Since the BSL was supposed to deliver riders to the main shopping intersection of the city as well as City Hall when conceived, the Ridge Avenue spur was built to perform that function. I've heard, but discount, talk by some about how the spur was to have been extended up Ridge Avenue to East Falls and Roxborough; I've seen no concrete evidence that this was ever considered.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Broadstreetexpresstrain
The Philly subway surface trolleys are no different than the green line subway in Boston, the Muni trolleys in San Francisco, nor the light rail/trolley subways in Seattle, Bufffalo, Portland or Dallas.
That is partly true.
DART is a true "light metro": once out of downtown, the trains do not operate in streets in mixed traffic but on their own rights-of-way, with access via stations where fares are collected on the platform rather than the train and the platforms are level with the car floor (as they are at the in-street stations downtown). This is also the case for the LRT lines that operate through the downtown Seattle subway tunnel (not all light rail lines in Seattle do).
Buffalo is also a true "light metro," with the difference being that it runs on the surface downtown and in a subway tunnel outside it.
Portland has a downtown loop streetcar in addition to the LRT system, so it's something of a hybrid.
Ditto Boston: two of the four Green Line branches operate in reserved medians, one operates in a median to Brigham Circle, then in the street after that, and the fourth is a true light metro line that uses a former commuter railroad line.
The closest parallel with the subway-surface trolley lines here is San Francisco, where all the lines operate in the street once out of the subway tunnel. But because they operate in wider streets, the lines there have things like raised platforms and off-board fare collection in some places. SEPTA's Trolley Modernization program seeks to introduce these features on the West and Southwest Philly trolley lines that feed the University City-Center City tunnel.
The Philly subway surface trolleys are no different than the green line subway in Boston, the Muni trolleys in San Francisco, nor the light rail/trolley subways in Seattle, Bufffalo, Portland or Dallas.
The trollies aren't subways in the layman's definition. They run above ground, in street traffic for most of their length. I used to commute part way on the 10, and it's incredibly slow going toward Center City until you go underground at 36th. They stop at every block and are at the mercy of car traffic. Philadelphia can really only claim 4 subway lines (BSL, BSL Express, BSL Spur, and MFL). You can add in the A/B service of the MFL as a "service within a service" too maybe.
The Spur is pretty short and not heavily trafficked, and the Express doesn't even serve all of South Philly. PATCO is more a commuter train that runs underground in the city (like PATH, people don't really call PATH "the subway"). Nobody uses PATCO or PATH to get around the city, only to come into and leave it. The trollies aren't fast enough or high-capacity enough to be considered, and you have to climb into them, which slows down the process even more. The Regional Rail trains that run underground when they get close to Center City are just that, commuter trains. Nobody would call LIRR or Metro-North "subways" because they run underground for a short bit.
One of the annoying things about when I lived in Philadelphia was how small of a radius you had to choose to live in if you wanted to be near rapid transit. If not, you got stuck on the awful buses that are incredibly unreliable and slow. Sometimes I would take the 23 or 45 from Chinatown to South Philly, and holy hell was that an excruciatingly slow ride in the afternoons every single time.
I think for now Boston has the better system than Philly, but that may change if plans to turn septa regional rail into a metro move forward. The regional rail system has many ROWs that are currently not utilized by rapid transit and the current location and spacing of many of the stations warrant that usage in my opinion. Several of the lines are completely within the city limits. That and trolley modernization will greatly improve the system in Philly to the point that I think it would be a better system than Boston's. They are also planning on extending patco to 40th street. That said, Chicago probably has the better system than both cities, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure. DC's system is very nice/more modern but I think it's kind of overrated based on my experience and how people seem to gush over it, but again I haven't used it as heavily as septa or mbta.
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