I used to be HQ'd out of Middleton, RI back when I was a business consultant for IBM. Almost every meeting someone would stand up and thank IBM profusely for picking Newport as a place to HQ, white collar jobs and that mostly all they had to rely on is low paying tourist jobs.
So I look at the rail map and all the rail lines into the City are abandoned or cut. In fact Newport has a railroad but it is cutoff and isolated from the National Railroad system due to bridge being out on one end. I believe that is the former Boston to Newport Old Colony line. I am not sure about access to Newport from Providence but in good times of no congestion it took me 45-50 min to drive from Providence's TF Green Airport to a hotel in Newport RI over that large harbor bridge. Not including time to pickup a rental car. Seems to me the State should figure out a way to either restore rail service or lay rails for a rail shuttle from the Providence Amtrak station and Airport Station into Newport. After that the state should attempt to recruit Manufacturing plants that need rail freight service back to Newport. I don't see any of this happening naturally with just market forces because of the capital costs.
I haven't lived in Newport since 1983, but there is little there that would be served directly by passenger train, unless it were interurban-like with trolley-like light rail; it is a bit incomprehensible to me how you would propose to run this through town. There was nothing south of Tiverton I could see that could remotely benefit from restoration of rail freight service; I doubt that has changed. I don't see this changing with the advent of zero-carbon transportation either -- a hybrid-electric railbus would accomplish anything meaningful that passenger 'rail' from Providence south would likely achieve, and give the necessary last-mile flexibility.
Overmod There was nothing south of Tiverton I could see that could remotely benefit from restoration of rail freight service
You need to fly the line on Google Earth there is plenty of potential rail freight opportunities that still have their old sidings in place but that was not the point (resurrecting old clients). The point was to lure new ones there with the restored rail freight / passenger line. The large formal naval base is one......if it is former and not current. Also, much of the right of way is in place from former passenger service including the mile long tunnel under East Providence that connects with the Northeast Corridor and Union Station. The current downtown Newport, RI rail passenger station is at the edge of downtown and is right next to the bus station which if they restored passenger service. RI is rehabbing that rail line up to around the point where the bridge is out, they are putting in heavier rail, my guess is speed limit will improve only to 30 mph if that but it's a start. Back in the New Haven days there was a rail connection between Fall River and Providence Union Station which was an interurban. Fall River South to Providence, RI was heavy rail passenger. Almost all of the right of way is still in tact. The tunnel to Providence Union station is still intact but sealed at both ends and was last used by Providence and Worchester for frieght customers. So restoring the rail would be expensive but not prohibitively so, in my view and is undergoing a partial restoration now......up to the first bridge that was destroyed, several bridges would need to be replaced that have been removed. They do not appear to be major bridges though from the air.
The East Side tunnel no longer connects with Union Staion and the Northeast Corridor. That connection was severed when Union Station was replaced with the new station on Gaspee street in the 1980s. The Bonanza bus terminal was across the street from the old station but that was moved out of downtown around the same time. I felt that the old Union Station should have been converted into a transportation center serving both busses and trains along with shops and restaurants. The tunnel connection to eastern RI and Mass should have been saved for future use.
AnthonyV The tunnel connection to eastern RI and Mass should have been saved for future use.
The tunnel connection to eastern RI and Mass should have been saved for future use.
The tunnel is still there it is just capped at both ends. So I can tell about where the old station was "Exchange Terrance" street about 1/2 mile South of Gillespee. They mentioned burying the right of way after the realignment but I cannot tell from Google Earth if that makes reopening the Tunnel to restore the connection prohibitively expensive or just a task of grading from portal opening back to NEC. It looks like there is open space due to the Interstate Freeway having to clear buildings but I can't tell without being on the ground and knowing exactly where the Tunnel Portal was that was Capped.
Seems to me that since the 1980's.......Rhode Island really has made some poor transportation choices in my view. Including abandoning the connection to the line leading to Newport and just letting the track go to hell in a hand basket.
I was the wrong candidate for passenger service from Providence in the first place as I was coming from the west, and by road it was quick and direct to get onto Aquidneck quickly and directly via the toll bridge. (One of Alice's and my 'official errata to the Preppy Handbook' which was published about that time was that you could tell a 'real' preppie's car by the rolls of Newport Bridge tokens in the ashtray... you saved something like 80% with them but of course needed a 'reason' to be going and coming so often...)
The startup was in fact on part of the old naval base, and I was living in the former marine-biology laboratory, not far from the powerhouse. There were certainly active-duty naval personnel there; it was where I realized you could get all the expert stainless boiler-tube welders you needed for the equivalent of (in 1983) about $40k a year plus benefits... in other words what the Navy paid.
The issue with anything at the scale that would use a rail siding is that much of the prospective traffic would have to be bulk or not time-critical. If it were intermodal it would likely be much more efficient to dray it there than to invest in a set of dedicated wells... although I think there would indeed be a potential market for a site in the area that could accumulate blocks of stack containers to be served a la Fuel Harvesters over the Aberdeen & Rockfish... although that wouldn't likely link to the NEC directly. What compelling business use of 'enough' rail capacity would you envision, and how would you technically achieve it without switching and associated costs or time eating your profitability -- let alone justify the costs to restore service.
Overmod What compelling business use of 'enough' rail capacity would you envision, and how would you technically achieve it without switching and associated costs or time eating your profitability -- let alone justify the costs to restore service.
Enough initially for a shortline to make money on freight with the state picking up the maint costs initially. Thats how Wisconsin got the line to Sheboygan Falls reopened. It is not so much the railroad line has to carry 100 Megatons per annum but haul enough freight for a company to turn a profit outside of track maintenence first then growing traffic as more business is attracted.
Though it does not have to be a shortline either. I think the NS deal with the Tennesee Valley Railroad Museum is innovative. The Museum handles switching on the beltline around Chatanooga, in return it uses the revenue to run the museum and restore diesel and steam locomotives.
Maybe Rhode Island could work a deal with the existing tourist line which is already running dinner trains and RDC excursions. They have a rail explorers group that uses modified speeders on the isolated segment of the line as well.
If I remember correctly, Providence and Worcester still has a 'paper hold' on the line all the way from Fall River to Newport, which means that there would be no issue with the STB about restoring rail service. Whether that is true for the 'buttonhook' west to Providence I don't know, but it might be highly interesting to see what would happen if the Sakonnet River bridge were repaired and passenger service coordinated with this, which seems much more likely overall as a practical passenger operation:
https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2019/04/0423_south-coast-rail.jpg
Of course the ringer is that any practical rail service from Fall River south or west isn't going to be track class 1 or 2, and I think for the type of service you'd need to be competitive with trucks (especially electric semiautonomous trucks) you'd pretty much want a TLM pass from end-to-end of the 'freight' mileage.
OvermodIf I remember correctly, Providence and Worcester still has a 'paper hold' on the line all the way from Fall River to Newport, which means that there would be no issue with the STB about restoring rail service. Whether that is true for the 'buttonhook' west to Providence I don't know, but it might be highly interesting to see what would happen if the Sakonnet River bridge were repaired and passenger service coordinated with this, which seems much more likely overall as a practical passenger operation: https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2019/04/0423_south-coast-rail.jpg Of course the ringer is that any practical rail service from Fall River south or west isn't going to be track class 1 or 2, and I think for the type of service you'd need to be competitive with trucks (especially electric semiautonomous trucks) you'd pretty much want a TLM pass from end-to-end of the 'freight' mileage.
How likely is that project going to go through? I was going to suggest a link via MBTA from Boston to Newport. RI but to me that seemed like overkill and I had doubts that would ever work.
You said earlier you thought the bridge route was faster? How did you arrive at that conclusion because looking over the former ROW Fall River to Providence and Fall River South, seems the time would be competitive or shorter for rail, than the toll bridge. Took me 50-60 min to get from TF Green to downtown Newport, RI using that toll bridge. Given the crow flies distance I consider that pretty slow. I wonder how the rail route would do if it could average 40-50 mph in comparison.
Proposed Rail Route Providence - Fall River - Newport, RI: 38 miles.
Current road distance over toll bridge: 34 miles.
Shuttle Bus to Kingston NEC station which allegedly is closer than Providence, RI........1 hour transit time. It amazes me there is a stop at Kingston. I guess 146,000 arrivals and departures is not a small number BUT it is for the amount of trains that stop there. But then Warwick another stop I think is a measly 50k a year. In my view for the NEC, Amtrak needs a higher ridership bar than to delay the folks on the train for these small numbers.
Anyways, the train on the proposed routing would only need to average about 40 mph to be competitive with the car in my view. What track speed would that be with stops? Maybe 55-60 mph? So it really does not appear we even need a high speed solution here. Providence to Newport.
Kingston is the station that serves University of Rhode Island
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.