First Daylight Savings Time Worcester Line Commuter Rail Commute On Time

The inbound P508 train was right on time this morning. We arrived to Back Bay station at 8:17 a.m. - the train's scheduled time. I got off and took the Orange Line to the office.

This is sort of more of the same news about the MBTA's plans to make improvements to the commuter rail line. The article appeared in today's Metro. Beginning this May, the T will begin replacing 2,000 windows on 75 south-side commuter rail coaches at a cost of $1.3 million. South-side commuter rail lines are those lines that go into South Station. Additionally, the T will spend $4.5 million overhauling the HVAC systems on 148 coaches. Many of these coaches, purchased between 12 to 20 years ago, have never had their HVAC system updated.

The replacement projects are expected to take 18-months because the MBCR needs to limit the number of coaches it takes out of service at once to avoid delays.

Call me crazy, but shouldn't the MBCR have a decent gauge on ridership and just remove extraneous cars from train lines that run during non-peak hours?

I still cannot find any on-time performance stats for February 2008 for the Worcester-Framingham line.

In other commuter rail news, things don't sound so great on the Franklin Line. As we know, the Franklin line via Fairmont had the worst on-time performance stats for February - a measely 46%. Both Dave at The Franklin Line and Quasit of Charlie on the Commuter Rail published posts this morning about the delayed 706 (which caused Dave to miss a meeting) and the 708 train. Apparently some of the Franklin trains are skipping the Ruggles Station stop, even though this is a scheduled stop. For Quasit, the Ruggles station IS his commuter rail stop.

According to Quasit, the MBCR/MBTA does not "think" that skipping the Ruggles station stop will be a regular occurrence.

According to their customer service rep, they don't expect it to be - it's just a signal problem. Now that I think of it, that's a little disturbing - I wonder what other problems there might be? I'd hate to find out by having my train run into another one at full speed!

And why haven't they been able to fix that signal over the last four days? It could have been two different problems, I suppose, but that seems unlikely.

Hmm, will Franklin Line riders soon be seeing a "new" schedule a la the Worcester-Framingham commuter rail line?

As Dave wrote in one post titled "Late! Late! Late!"

Why the hell did I think a 7:05 train would get me into Boston for an 8:00 meeting?!? Idiot, idiot, idiot. I should have slept under my desk last night.

Indeed, why should we expect the trains to get us to where we need to be on time?