Transit Geek: Greenbush

[dmaze]

I have this week off of work, and yesterday's little adventure was riding the newish commuter rail line through Hingham, Cohasset, and Scituate to Greenbush Station. In spite of being armed with camera and GPS, this was kind of anticlimactic. A couple of the stations seemed to be in the middle of nowhere (including Greenbush). There was pretty good ridership coming back for a mid-afternoon weekday train, though.

Technical details: the line runs down the (single-track) Old Colony main line adjacent to the Red Line to Braintree, then splits off north of Braintree Station and the CSX yard there to run east, with a freight spur to the north to the Fore River shipyard area, and wanders a couple of miles from the South Shore. They've gone full-out on the "interlocking signals without intermediate wayside automatic signals" style, which means the only visible signals are three-head color-light signals at the start and end of the couple of sidings on the line. The current style seems to be for LED railroad signals, though, and like LED traffic lights they're really bright.

The other disappointing thing for me was the speed of the trains. It's obvious that the turn in Braintree is pretty tight, and the train takes it at 15 mph. Most of the rest of the line dawdles along at 30-40 mph for no hugely obvious reason, though, up until the last section before Greenbush where it does briefly head back up to 60. 30 mph through the famed Hingham tunnel; speaking of, even though you might think "downtown Hingham by the harbor" is a great place for a commuter rail station, nope, just a tunnel so the train doesn't spoil the view.

Interesting destinations seem to include Weymouth Landing and North Scituate as places with civilization. There was an interesting-looking snowy field across from West Hingham, either South Shore Country Club or More-Brewer Park, which might have had transit-accessible cross-country skiing.

Comments

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Downtown Hingham is actually a crappy place for a commuter rail station for commuters... because they wouldn't be able to park there. The station is sensibly farther out with a large parking lot.