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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
A Tale of Two Rail Terminals: Boston's Century Old Transit Quirk
Boston's North and South stations serve as critical transit hubs but remain disconnected despite a century of failed attempts to link them.
• North Station serves 40,000 daily commuters from northern suburbs and connects to Amtrak's Downeaster route
• South Station handles 60,000 daily commuters and serves as terminus for multiple Amtrak routes including Acela
• Transferring between stations requires a 16-25 minute journey using multiple subway lines
• Five major attempts to connect the stations have failed since the 1930s due to funding issues and political obstacles
• The Big Dig highway project complicated future connection possibilities by placing a tunnel between the stations
• Current estimated costs for connecting the stations range from $12-21 billion
• Engineering challenges include tunneling under existing infrastructure, electrifying commuter rail, and working in a dense urban environment
• Advocates continue pushing for the connection citing climate goals and regional transit equity
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Speaker 2:Boston, one of America's oldest cities, boasts two major train stations, but there's one glaring problem they don't connect. Today we dive into the history of this century-old transit quirk on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Chris and I'm Lewis, and today we are talking about the tale of two terminals. We are going to dive into the story of the North and South stations in Boston and tell you all about what is happening to these two stations, what they do or how they service the Boston area, and why they exist in this weird way. They exist today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we actually got film this portions of this episode that you'll see later. While we were on our trip kind of through the Northeast, we did Boston, philadelphia and Baltimore. Boston was our first stop and this was kind of one of our side quests while we were in Boston was to go check out both North and South stations and kind of look at the ridiculous reasons why they don't connect to each other and we'll get into kind of how that happened. But before we get into the history of all of it and actually showing you today how you get between these two stations, we wanted to take a second to just kind of explain the importance of both North Station and South Station as well as how many people really go out and use these things.
Speaker 1:So the North and south stations primarily act as the terminus for the commuter rail lines in the city of boston, um. The commuter rail lines service roughly 105 000 daily riders per weekday. Um and north station unsurprisingly serves most of the kind of suburbs of the Boston area in the north and to the northwest, while South Station kind of serves the folks more to the south and the southwest Makes a lot of sense. Yes, and there's not specific ridership numbers that are easily accessible for each individual line. But what we do know is that roughly 40% of the 105,000 daily commuters are people who are commuting on those northern lines. So you can make a rough estimate that there's maybe, on the high end, 40,000 or so people commuting in and out of North Station each day in Boston.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this North Station. It's the major terminus for the north part of the city and so you also have a lot of people not only using this station to access commuter lines, which I've done in the past I took the train to Salem a couple years ago, really good experience there but this is also where people are hitting the northern states too. So this is sort of the launching off point for Amtrak service to continue through the rest of New England into New Hampshire and Maine as well, using the Amtrak Downeaster. The Amtrak Downeaster in 2024 actually had an annual ridership of about 600,000 riders, which is higher than pre-pandemic levels. So a lot of Amtrak traffic is coming out of this Northern Terminus and then looking inward to Boston. This is also a central hub for a lot of the internal connections to the city, where this station has connections to the green and the orange subway lines as well.
Speaker 1:Totally. And one other kind of fun fact about North Station is that it literally sits underneath the TD Garden, which is home to the Boston Celtics and the Boston Bruins, so it's a really important hub for getting folks to and from sports games, specifically for basketball and hockey there. So it makes it for easy access for folks who are riding on the subway as well as on the commuter rail, at least if you're on the north side of the city. But moving on though, south Station again plays a very similar role, but for the South has eight commuter lines and it serves roughly 60% of that 105,000 daily commuter rail traffic, so maybe 60,000 or so. Maybe not everybody's going directly to South Station or North Station, but they're going to be a lot of them getting close.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, that is where several of the Amtrak kind of routes in the Northeast terminate. You've got the Acela, the Northeast Regional, as well as the Lakeshore Limited all end at Boston South Station. In 2024, 1.8 million Amtrak riders passed through the station, which is a lot of people, obviously. And then, in addition to all of the different regional rail options, you also have connections locally to the Red Line, which is part of the subway system. Connections locally to the Red Line, which is part of the subway system, as well as the Silver Line, which we had a chance to ride in our Boston Using Only Public Transit episode. The Silver Line is kind of a BRT. In some areas it runs underground in its own dedicated tunnels, and part of that area is literally underneath South Station. One other cool thing about South Station, though, that Chris and I got to go check out was the bus terminal, which I think we were both pretty impressed with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely the bus terminal. It opened in the 90s with about 29 different gates. When I say gates, it feels like an airport. This is probably one of the nicest bus terminals or bus stations I've ever been in. It was very clean. You had, I think, a McDonald's and some other stuff happening in there if you wanted.
Speaker 1:So nice. It's got a McDonald's inside.
Speaker 2:Well, no, but like you know what I'm kidding? I'm kidding, but it's. It was a really nice space and it does kind of feel like you are at an airport. There's, you know, a concourse with multiple gates where the buses pull up and you walk out to the bus. It's actually really cool. Exact number of riders for this bus terminal are pretty hard to find. In 2011, the regional bus station saw nearly 600 bus departures per day, so a ton of traffic coming through here, totally yeah.
Speaker 1:Part of the reason it's tricky to track down the exact numbers for this sort of stuff is there are a whole bunch of different bus companies that all utilize this space, uh, ranging from, like bigger kind of you know, uh, flixbus, greyhound type stuff, but also in the northeast, there are a lot of like regional bus services.
Speaker 1:You've got the concord coach lines, you've got c and j, you've got peter pan, you've got all these different uh kind of options. Uh, I think, like dart dartmouth has one as well, like there's a whole bunch of different companies that all sort of utilize, uh, this space, um, in south station, um, and trying to kind of go through and figure out all the different departures is tricky, but yeah, that that's stat from 2011 is pretty interesting. With over 600 buses, is pretty wild. But you would think, though, that, given the amount of people traveling on both the commuter rail lines, on the buses, on Amtrak again, you've got 600,000 people riding the Downeaster at North Station, 1.7 million people from Amtrak passing through South Station you would think that these two massive stations would connect, but there is one huge problem, and that huge problem is that they don't connect, and it's not even that easy to get between them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and as Lewis said at the top of the episode, we took this as a side quest during our Boston trip and we decided to go to the stations and see just how easy or how difficult it was to connect between the north and the south station. You'd think it'd be really easy to get between where I am at North Station and where Lewis is at South Station. Right, let's find out. Starting at the North Station, we had to find our way underground, where we explored the labyrinth of hallways to the Orange and Green Line platform. Meanwhile, lewis waited for us at the South Station, boarding the first Orange Line train that that came. We took it for two stops until we arrived at the transfer station to join the red line, lewis still waiting for us. From here, we took the red line for one stop to south station, made our way up all of the stairs, through the gates and into the concourse where we finally met up with lewis.
Speaker 1:Hey, lewis, you made it. How was that? It was good, it's fast. Yeah, you got here faster than I thought you would. About 16 minutes, 16 minutes, that's honestly really good considering.
Speaker 2:Or by special YouTube magic, I made it here in 30 seconds, 30 seconds just like that.
Speaker 1:You know this wouldn't be too bad if you didn't have to do the transfer in the middle, too bad if you didn't have to do the transfer in the middle. All in all, it didn't take us too long. It was actually only 16 minutes, but still it's 16 minutes that you shouldn't have to worry about. You should be able to just continue to sit on your train for one more stop to connect you to this next station.
Speaker 2:When I think about taking the Amtrak, say, from Portland to New York, and now you have to stop in Boston, unload all of your luggage and either take a taxi or an Uber, a bus, or now transferring through a subway stop to get to your next train which is then going to take you to New York. So definitely a hassle that could be improved.
Speaker 1:Totally. At this point, I think it's time to probably take a look at why this problem was never solved.
Speaker 2:Why does it exist and why haven't we solved it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and very similar story to a lot of other places in the United States. Rail was very much a private industry. By the 1830s, passenger rail in the Boston area was becoming very popular and growing very rapidly. You had five or six different railroads all popping up with their own private networks. Many of them all had their own lines and their own stations and their own terminals in the downtown area, which obviously was a problem. Does not bode well for efficiencies if you're trying to transfer between these different options.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in fact it was so disorganized. At one point there were four primary passenger rail terminals or depots in the Boston area, including the Providence Depot, the Worcester Depot.
Speaker 1:You should keep saying Worchester. The Boston people call it Worcester.
Speaker 2:Worcester. Okay, so the Worcester Depot, the Boston and Mainz Haymarket Square Depot and the Eastern Railroad's terminal near Causeway Street. So you had this mix and match of companies that were sort of had rail lines stretching across the city, again very disorganized, all private companies. There's no fare sharing at this point.
Speaker 1:So definitely I can imagine it being a pretty confusing time their terminus station in the city and that's where we get the creation of South Station in Boston, which is actually called South Union Station, and this really cleaned up the amount of chaos, at least on one half of the city. But Chris found some interesting stuff while digging through this about why this was called South Union Station and why we see Union Stations kind of all over the country.
Speaker 2:We see Union Station everywhere. I mean, you have Union Station in DC, I believe in Philadelphia it was Union Station, or it's Penn Station, sorry, in Denver there's a Union Station. It's just all over the country. You see this and it's as simple as it is the union of multiple rail companies into one central terminal or one central station. So kind of a cool, cool history fact for railroads across the country.
Speaker 1:I was always saying I just like this is with, having not really put thought into it. I always assumed that, like Union Pacific had something to do with all of these. Now, obviously Union Pacific was not everywhere, but I always just thought it was Union Pacific, but that this makes a lot of sense, obviously.
Speaker 2:I always thought that it had something to do with like the Union as like the US.
Speaker 1:Well, you would think that with South Station being formed and this kind of consolidation of infrastructure on the south side of Boston, that the same would be done on the north side of boston. That, uh, the same would be done on the north side of boston, but it actually took basically an additional 30 or so years before that came to fruition. So you had 30 more years of multiple terminus stations on the north side of boston and that still did not connect into the south station. But eventually, in 1926, construction began on north station, um, and it kind of consolidated those remaining lines to the north all into one place. Um, you would think, finally, rail service in boston is fully united, um, however, at the time when they put north station together, there was no thought or effort really put into connecting North Station to South Station.
Speaker 2:For the time period. I'm actually really amazed they didn't just demolish a part of the city and have one central station in the very middle of Boston. It all goes back to the privatization of passenger rail service. These two, these companies, didn't necessarily want to intermingle. Perhaps One of the cool things about the North Station is that it was really innovative for its time. It was incredibly modern. But also it incorporated a sporting venue with the station from the start, which really hadn't existed anywhere else, and it's a legacy that continues to this day at the North Station with the TD.
Speaker 1:Garden Center, formerly the Boston Garden. It should probably just be the Boston Garden, but whatever, we're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out. Please share this with your friends.
Speaker 2:And if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. So the North Station is finished around 1930. As we were saying, it surprises us that they didn't necessarily have the foresight to think to connect to these stations beforehand, but there were plenty of people at that time who were really pushing for this connection to happen. So now we're in the 1930s.
Speaker 2:The Public Works Administration is in full force and the Works Progress Administration looking for ways to employ the American people and keep in mind, we're sort of in the Great Depression era and they really looked at these large infrastructure projects. They set their eyes on Boston with a plan to connect the North and South stations with a rail terminal. So finally, here's the plan, here's how we're gonna connect them. We have all of this labor to do it and it's going to happen. But it didn't happen and one of the reasons it didn't happen and this is going to be a recurring theme over the century is that the funds just weren't there. Again, we're in the Great Depression. It made this a very politically tricky project to do. And there were other priorities that existed elsewhere in the country, other New Deal priorities like roads and bridges and dams, like the Hoover Dam, and other power projects. And then, as we talked about before, the railroads were still privatized and there just wasn't the cooperation needed between the companies to finally bridge that gap.
Speaker 1:Now this wouldn't be the only attempt at trying to build a North to South Station connector. Fast forward to the 1970s, the MBTA was trying to work with Penn Central, who at the time was the largest railroad in the United States. They were studying the possibility of doing this exact same thing building a tunnel between the two terminals. There was a lot of good reason to look into it at the time In the 70s. You've got rail ridership declining as everybody can afford a car now, but with that you have massive suburban sprawl car congestion. Think about Boston traffic At that point.
Speaker 1:This is pre-Big Dig. You don't have the tunnel going through. You've got a double-decker highway running right through downtown Boston and there was some federal interest in actually supporting these sorts of projects and it felt like all of the pieces were in place to make this happen. Unfortunately, penn Central goes through a major financial crisis and their end of the deal is starting to seem like it can't come through Politically. It starts to become less of a popular idea and unfortunately, it basically fizzled away and, once again, was never completed.
Speaker 2:Then we fast forward to the next attempt, which was in 1984. Congress actually passed funding to make this connection happen. So for the first time on the federal level, congress says no, we're going to pay for this, we're going to make this vital rail connection actually happen. It was part of a broader federal transportation bill where they approved $5 million to study this In today's money, that's about $15 million. In today's money, that's about $15 million and the funds were specifically for creating the preliminary design and the engineering for this north-south rail link. Again, this was a period of time where the gap that existed in Boston was again a federal focus. This is a critical infrastructure project that needs to be completed. So it passes Congress, it moves on to the White House where the president should sign it. However, 1984, ronald Reagan is president and famously this is around the time that, I think, public transportation projects started to fall out of favor with conservatives. So, president Ronald Reagan, he vetoes the entire transportation bill, objecting to what he calls unnecessary pork barrel spending and federal overreach in local transportation planning.
Speaker 2:So we could have had it, if only it wasn't for.
Speaker 1:Reagan, and that was the third attempt. Uh, so here we are, uh, attempt number four uh, we're in the 1990s now. I lightly mentioned the big dig before. Um, that's what's going on in the 90s in boston is planning for the big dig, which is burying i-93, which was a double-decker highway that cuts right through downtown boston, and burying it under the city. Um, that project obviously took that is like the the classic example of like way over budget, way past time due. Um, but it's done and it's, it's like, made downtown boston such a more pleasant space on foot, you know, in the actual city, compared to what it was before.
Speaker 1:But this would have been the perfect time to consider, while you're down there already doing this tunneling work, major transportation project, to complete both of these projects at the same time. It was seriously considered as an add on to this huge project. There was a whole bunch of different alignments and engineering. You know schematics and scenarios that were drafted up for it and ultimately it was excluded, just given the sheer costs and undertaking of the Big Dig at the time. But this was a huge kind of blow to the North-South Rail connection as a whole for a couple of reasons, but primarily if you look at a map of Boston, the Big Dig essentially connects I-93 in a way where it splits right between north and south stations.
Speaker 1:So that means if you're going to go from south station to north station in a tunnel, you have to go under or over the Big Dig. You can't go over the Big Dig because you've got downtown Boston dig. Because you've got downtown Boston, you can go under. However, it's really tricky because you need to get the trains from South Station, they need to go down to get under the big dig and and then they need to come back up again to get to North Station and those grades now that this wasn't done during the big dig are just barely feasible. There's some good visuals from the North-South Rail Link website that talk about this and it's about a 3% grade down and then flat for a quick second to get underneath. Then it's about a 3% grade back up, which doesn't sound like a lot if you're walking or something, but for a train you can't go much more than that without running into issues. So it definitely complicated things quite a bit not having this done and thought out while the big dig was being undertaken.
Speaker 2:So the big dig was a bust for Rail Connection and then we move into the 2000s. So here we are brand new century, tons of opportunity out there. Romney is now the governor of Massachusetts and is actually in favor of transportation spending between the North and South terminals. He commissioned a formal feasibility study, evaluated a two-track versus four-track solution. They identified portal locations, tunneling, logistics and costs. They did all the estimations and it came out to around $4 to $8 billion. Again, he endorsed this in principle, but when it actually came time to fully fund and put the money there, the political will just kind of evaporated. Mitt Romney leaves office and unfortunately the project just didn't move forward.
Speaker 1:And then the last attempt here in 2016, 2018, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation kind of decided to reevaluate this whole project again. There were some studies that were reopened. You know they were able to reaffirm that, yes, this is still technically feasible to be able to do. It's not impossible. But you know, again, like we said, it's definitely more complicated now than it maybe would have been. You know, pre-big Dig or any of the other. I don't even know what number of attempts we're at here now, but any of the other. I don't even know what number of attempts we're at here now, but any of the five times before.
Speaker 1:Um, but uh, you know the the estimated costs at this point were just going up, as you would expect, as everything has gone up like crazy in regards to infrastructure spending in the united states. Uh, the estimated costs at this point were now somewhere between 12 and 21 billion. That's a bit of a wiggle room there to play, with Support from all the right folks that you needed. As far as the groups that we're working on this sort of thing Amtrak, regional planning groups, the city. Unfortunately, though, politics gets in the way, as it always does in the United States. That sounded like a real doomer thing for me to say right there, but it's been true lately it's been true.
Speaker 1:Governor Charlie Baker instead prioritized expanding the capacity at South Station, saying that that's more practical. It's like okay, yes, sure, you probably do need capacity upgrades at these things in time, but that's nowhere close to the same level of project or project benefits that you would get from actually connecting these two stations together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the interest is still there. I mean, we're now in the 2020s and quickly approaching the 2030s Don't like to think about that and the current governor continues to express interest in reconsidering this North-South rail link. Current governor continues to express interest in reconsidering this North-South rail link. There are plenty of advocates in the city of Boston who are citing reasons like climate goals, regional equity and the federal infrastructure window that did exist during the Biden administration. That has somewhat closed in the Trump administration. And then there's also still federal support with people like Representative Seth Moulton, who is a huge advocate for this. Senator Ed Markey. All of the interest is still there. It just it needs to get the political will to finally make it happen. And that leads us to the last part here, which is will it ever happen? And the answer is maybe it's technically possible.
Speaker 2:As you said, lewis, the geography is very complicated. Somebody has described it and I don't have the exact quote, but it was described as performing open-heart surgery on a crowded city, while it's still awake for all of the reasons that Lewis has already mentioned. You have the big dig. That's in the way. You have a ton of historic architecture that you can't really disrupt. The subways are also there. Boston is one of our oldest cities so there is a ton of stuff that is underground in between these two locations and it's a very, very dense environment. Also, boston famously Port City and has really close proximity to water and the Big Dig. If anybody else grew up watching modern marvels and looking at every episode about the Big Dig, like I did, you learned all about how water seeping into the tunnels was such a huge issue for the Big Dig and that is going to continue to be an issue if they make this project as well.
Speaker 1:Totally and in addition to all of those constraints, I mean presently the Boston commuter rail system is not electrified. To have these commuter rails running through tunnels at this length, you can't be running diesel trains through there without dealing with all sorts of different ventilation and whatnot. So you would need to be able to electrify these trains, which is, you know, it's not just electr electrify these trains, which is, you know, it's not just electrifying that one section, it's, you know, getting locomotives that actually can be electrified. It's dealing with catenary wires and whatnot along the tracks and or doing battery commuter trains and whatnot. Andrew talked about that a little bit in our interview with him. There's a lot of folks who are skeptical about that sort of technology as well. So you know, it's not just one thing, it's a whole bunch of different things all stacked on top of each other. But I would say that while complicated, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an attempt to do it and that in this case the benefits for the city of Boston could be immense.
Speaker 2:So the real question is, Bostonians, are you ready for the second big dig or are you still a little traumatized from the first? Let us know in the comments if you support this, if you think it's feasible, if you think it's going to happen. Let us know. We want to hear from you if you're local to the area.
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Speaker 2:I think,