Central Mass commuter rail?

[millerm277]

Bringing some actual numbers into things:

Fitchburg station has a daily ridership of 462 passengers inbound (2010 data) split across 13 trains inbound. So there's about 35 of them per train.

Beyond that, there's a big improvement project underway at the moment, to make it much more reliable (and improve flexibility, allowing expresses), and that IIRC will cut about 10min of time off a Fitchburg-North Station trip as-is.

Bringing down trip times makes it not so "overextended".

[Boston_Burbs]

Originally Posted by 495neighbor

Perhaps, if someone lived right next door to the Fitchburg station and worked right next door to North Station. Half the people on the Fitchburg line are getting off at Porter Square and switching at the red line. The rest get off at North Station and are walking to a different part of Boston or switching to the green or orange line from there.

It's too bad there isn't a weekend Amtrak line that would go between Boston and Gardner and/or a ski train up 93 in NH. The Gardner train could have a shuttle back and forth to Mt Wachusetts and the Gardner furniture factories and little artisan galleries in the area to bring interest to the Appleseed Trail. The Gardner people would be able to take a trip into Boston without driving.

Part of the construction project is to make a wachusett station (1 stop past Fitchburg) at the intersection of 2 and 31.

[Parsec]

Originally Posted by Morris Wanchuk

Part of the construction project is to make a wachusett station (1 stop past Fitchburg) at the intersection of 2 and 31.

There will also be a shuttle bus between this new station and Wachusett. There's already current bus service from the Fitchburg station to Wachusett, but it only runs once per day to and from.