Station construction near D.C. comes with its own special hazards.

This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, “You just hit our line.”

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn’t say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in question was “black” wire — a secure communications line used for some of the nation’s most secretive intelligence-gathering operations

“The construction manager was shocked,” Georgelas recalled. “He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you’ve got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing.”

Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up tons of dirt where the black lines are located..

Georgelas, the developer whose company was overseeing the work in 2000 when the Chevrolet Suburbans drove up to the Greensboro Corporate Center, said he figured that the government was involved when an AT&T crew arrived the same day to fix the line, rather than waiting days. His opinion didn’t change when AT&T tried to bill his company for the work but immediately backed down when his company balked.

“These lines are not cheap to move,” Georgelas said. “They said, ‘You owe us $300,000.’ We said, ‘Are you nuts?’ ”

The charges just disappeared.

On the plus side Washington is expanding its heavy rail system* featuring 12 entirely new stations, 23 miles of elevated, subway and ground level running rail with a station atthe Dulles Airport baggage check. Boston can barely get its act together enough to run a new light rail line on the surface. The D.C. project is going to run about $2.6 billion - or roughly 1 billion more than the failed Silver Line Phase III connector which would have linked South Station, Chinatown and Boylston stations via underground bus line.

Would be nice if the kind of vision and project planning ability of Metrorail was shared by the EOT/MBTA in Massachusetts. Oh well. I guess we just can’t do that sort of thing anymore.

* Heavy Rail = Trains similar to the Red, Orange or Blue lines. As opposed to the light rail Green Line.

Click here for pictures!

Sadly, I forgot to snap a picture of the preserved mosaic sign on the outbound side. I also wish I had a 9.5 mm lens. I couldn’t get wide enough to really capture it the way I wanted to (especially on the platforms). Rest assured, it’s beautiful. You’ll note the pit for the incomplete escalator is protected by a sliding wooden door for the time being. Also in picture #6 one can see the metal rollup door leading to the abandoned Public Garden entrance has been removed, replaced with a narrow door leading to a utility room for the automated fare collection system. Apparently the T has permanently abandoned the idea of ever rebuilding and reopening the Public Garden headhouse.

I have to say the T personnel on site were extremely friendly, happy and welcoming of someone walking around with a DSLR snapping pictures incessantly.

Just remember folks: No flash photography in a subway station. Great way to annoy passengers and staff and blind train operators.

We finally get to explore the new platform and mezzanine at Arlington station tomorrow. The pits for yet to be completed escalators have been blocked off with sliding wooden doors to keep people from falling in, and the original mosaic station signs have been preserved and integrated into the new wall. The design is less Kenmore 2009 and more Arlington 1967 - resurrecting the white tiles of the last major renovation, with some metal grilles above to hide the massive amount of conduit installed in the past three years of construction.

The other half of the platform will close again for an undetermined length of time.

Over at Copley there are signs of progress. The ever-shifting fence on the inbound side has expanded once more to consume even more space, though it’s unclear if this is a harbinger of actual work on the elevator shaft or platform below.

I was surprised the other day when I found the east staircase leading down to the outbound platform (just outside CVS) is gone. Nothing but a pile of rubble. I’m hoping this means the contractor has found a way to keep the nearby buildings safe while work continues.

This side of the platform reopens 5/31/09, but for now all one can do is peek:

Not the way you’d want to end your Friday commute.

No word yet on the cause, but every similar crash I can think of in the past has been triggered by car and truck drivers attempting to cut off trolleys at intersections. We’ll have to wait and see before passing judgement here.

Running late was probably not the best idea this morning, though it rarely is. After rushing to Green St. I was happy to see an inbound train arrive less than two minutes after I did.

We made our way to Back Bay fairly rapidly. The tunnel past Mass Ave went quickly. There was the mind-numbing roar of that segment, followed by the last push into the station where the train always seems to go just a little bit faster, the roar intensifies, the glass blocks appear and the sound fades and the lights of the station replace the darkness of the tunnel before you settle to a stop alongside the platform.

This time the darkness of the tunnel was replaced by more darkness. Back Bay was pitch black. All of the lights seemed to be off. The sunlight coming through the station windows in the lobby didn’t make it to the platform.

We continued on to New England Medical Center where the situation was repeated, though there were two lights on. One at either end of the platform. Everything else was off.

The doors remained open and after about three or four minutes an announcement was made that we would stand by. Two minutes later another announcement was made that the power failure continued on further into the subway and we wouldn’t be going anywhere.

It was then that most passengers decided to ditch the train and make their way on foot. There was passable amount of light in the lobby and the gates were wide open. Unsurprising as they require electricity to stay closed.

The new emergency lights that have been installed recently (which - judging by the 600V warning sign on each of them - appear to draw directly from the track circuit) weren’t working.

On the way up the stars the mass exodus of passengers crossed paths with a handful tourists headed down. Welcome to Boston.

I’m a fierce supporter of unions, but this latest development in the 5/9/2009 crash story is beyond idiotic, beyond all sense and hurts the cause of unions. I hate bulleted or semi-bulleted lists like this, but I’m thinking in itemized lists of stupidity right now, so it’ll have to do. Let’s go:

You’re running the Carmen’s Union.

The transit system you work for is collapsing.

Cutbacks are imminent, will be severe and long-lasting. Major structural changes are coming.

One of your members has just destroyed at least one, quite probably two trains that cannot be replaced for years, shut down a swath of the central subway for several days and caused $9.6 million in damage.

All because he HAD to send a text message.

The previous year has seen countless numbers of cell phone complaints regarding train and bus operators.

Two trains were destroyed last May. Cell phones were not involved, but the safety systems on the trains checked out fine.

A few weeks prior to that an operator blew through an intersection, derailed a train only a few years old, slammed into an electrical pole where the train was welded to the pole by the ensuing electrical fire.

Months later another train slammed into one stopped at Boylston, locking the couplers and unexpectedly creating the first four car train the MBTA has ever seen to my knowledge. Commuters were still somehow unimpressed by this ingenious service upgrade.

Needless to say, public opinion of your members is at a low ebb. Yet you have a large number of experienced, safety conscious, polite and otherwise great members. You look to show a sign of good faith to the public and instill confidence.

What do you do?

The stupidest thing imaginable

Thursday, the MBTA’s main labor union reversed course and decided to challenge the transit agency’s new ban on the possession or use of cell phones.

The Boston Carmen’s Union said in a letter to T officials that “the rule is unreasonable under the contract” with subway and trolley drivers

Good job guys. The public already hates the T’s management and is extraordinarily suspicious of the unions and their motives. But go right ahead! Do the right thing and then back off because you want something in return! Live up to that stereotype of being greedy and only out for yourselves.

Fiscal year 2009 is coming. Wonder how that’ll go?

Another questionable project is dead. Or at least comfortably sedated until further notice. The T has been on a commuter rail building binge for the past decade and the latest communities targeted for a favor to build political support commuter rail expansion were New Bedford and Fall River. Were, not are.

As far as projects go, it was easily one of the least useful. 12,600 trips a day in exchange for $1.4 billion. Add a few hundred million to that to get a reasonable estimate for what it would have actually cost taxpayers.

Unsurprisingly the cash just isn’t there, nor is the will to supply it.

NEW BEDFORD — State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill said Tuesday it will be “virtually impossible” to build a commuter rail line to the city and Fall River without a major turnaround in the state’s economy.

As state treasurer, he knows just how badly the state’s revenue sources have collapsed, he told The Standard-Times Editorial Board, and he cannot think of any scenario in the current economy in which the local rail line could be built.

“Unless the federal government can finance it,” he added. He then quickly expressed skepticism that federal assistance would be available in the immediate years to come.

“They don’t trust us because of what happened with the Big Dig.”

This was another one of the transit “commitments” the EOT/MBTA had to fulfill as part of the Big Dig environmental mitigation agreements. Commitments is in quotes because the word has never really meant much to the state. The T built commuter rail parking spaces for outlying suburbs instead of restoring the full E line, and simply walked away from the Red / Blue connector which would carry far more commuters each day and significantly reduce traffic to, and inside of Government Center and Park St. But we can’t trust the state to build what really needs to be built - or to build it well. And the Federal government shares that view. Thankfully.

Normally future-proofing is the order of the day when spending hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure. Even the Silver Line was right-of-way was built to light rail standards for eventual conversion at some future date when someone realizes a bus is not the same thing as the Green Line.

Which brings me to my point. The planned Green Line extension extension will have two branches. One to Rt. 16 in Medford, and another to Union Square in Somerville. The latter is where it gets interesting. You may have noticed Union Square isn’t that far from Porter Square. If the money and will were present, the Green Line could be continued up to meet the Red. So no trips from Porter to Park back out again. It would be almost like a ring… an Urban Ring.

Not happening.

As you can see in this absolutely adorable animation, the the station is being built at the end of the tracks. Forcing the Green Line to permanently dead-end there.

Plans for the extension have been in the works since the 1940s, and up until recently it was still being threatened with transformation into a Bus Repackaged Transit project (thanks to The Overhead Wire for supplying that term). It took years to get any political weight behind it outside of Somerville and Medford. Lots of foot-dragging and a “maybe we don’t want to do this…” attitude that comes attached to all non bus, non commuter rail projects these days.

But now it’s happening. Definitely, maybe. We can only hope. But we can be sure it’ll go no farther.

As though the project’s future wasn’t already clear to anyone who heard about the exciting new Silver Line development announced last week - a stunning proposal involving exciting technology and transit planning known as “Driving Around The Corner To South Station” - the Feds have driven another nail into the coffin of the plan that no one outside of the Artery Business Committee er… A Better City wanted.

The Globe has more:

The cost of the MBTA’s plan to build a 1.1-mile bus tunnel under downtown Boston has now officially grown to $2.1 billion, nearly $1 billion more than the estimate from 2006. Just a few months ago, in December, the project budget was about $1.5 billion.

The current tunnel is an expensive failure. With an average speed of 12 MPH it actually takes longer to drive a bus through it than on the road above. Normally you put transit lines in tunnels because that means the vehicles in them can go faster than they could in mixed traffic, but this is Boston, this was the Big Dig and a EOT/MBTA project. So the normal rules of logic and proper planning / execution do not apply.

Take the whole idea of the Silver Line.

Initial Problem:

Replace a heavy rail line connection to downtown.

Solution:

Bus begins at either Logan Airport or the Seaport and travels block after block in mixed traffic under diesel power until it arrives at Silver Line Way, shuts down completely, starts up again under electric power, then runs at 12 MPH through a dedicated tunnel until Charles St. where it stops, shuts down again, restarts its diesel engine, then travels in a dedicated lane that disappears after a few hundred feet and becomes a normal bus line again.

Got that?

For added kicks remember that one 60′ Silver Line bus holds fewer people than one Green Line car. Keep in mind how quickly a two car Green Line train gets packed. Now keep one of the cars home and take away about 1/3 of the useable space in the one that’s left. Then give it a 50% speed reduction and zero ride comfort. Add airport passenger luggage.

That’s the Silver Line.

The first thing to remember about the bus line is that merging the two halves was never really a priority for anyone living in Roxbury. The state has continually repeated the meme that residents there long for a one-seat ride to the airport much to the confusion of people living in Roxbury who can’t remember anyone ever asking for something like that. In fact much has been made of the desire for a one seat ride all the way into downtown Boston. Proponents of such service have pointed to the abandoned tunnels running between Boylston Station and Eliot Norton Park as a possible solution. The MBTA has countered that with claims that the tunnels are too old and unusable. This flies in the face of an engineering survey conducted in 2001… by the MBTA. (See more in the Sierra Club’s report)

The now-dead-for-real-this-time Silver Line plan would have offered Roxbury residents the one-seat ride to the airport no one ever remembers asking for… except when it turned 70% of the buses arriving at Boylston back to the Seaport and Airport. Couldn’t even get that part right.

To allow this the T would need to dig up Boylston St., remove huge swaths of old growth trees on the Common, sneak in a parking garage expansion, likely undermine the foundations of Emerson College’s entire campus, do untold damage to the Central Burying Ground and still manage to put the existing abandoned light rail tunnels permanently beyond use. (See page 18) …and take at least five years to do so.

Keep in mind this is the agency that has spent just as long trying to build a bus shelter above ground at Kenmore and almost destroyed a church trying to dig an elevator shaft at Copley.

The Silver Bus Line is dead, and somehow still expanding. It refused to become anything anyone wants it to be. Roxbury residents are still shortchanged, the rail tunnels still go unused, while Seaport and Airport commuters cram onto cramped buses and enjoy a teeth-chattering 12 MPH ride in a tunnel on rutted, permanently-flooded pavement that ends up a three seat ride to the Back Bay.

Combining a heavy-rail replacement with transit service to a new neighborhood and the role of airport shuttle while ruling out rail entirely was a mistake. Building it the way it was built was a mistake.

Someday a solution will be found, but it should be understood that the Federal investment in the stop-gap plan announced earlier this week means Boston will not be getting billions more = to undo the current, “temporary” project. Not this decade, probably not the next.

Once upon a time there were plans to bury the A, B and E lines. Yes. Really. The center platform at Kenmore was dug to allow the Central Subway to be converted to heavy rail ala the Blue which would continue on into Allston, while the C would remain a streetcar line and loop over the heavy rail tracks below. Until this happened a wooden platform was built over the sunken track pits and used by A and B trains.

The E Line tunnel continued out to somewhere around the Northeastern stop. A temporary wooden incline was built until money was found to continue the subway.

The money never came, and the temporary arrangements became permanent. The track pit at Kenmore and wooden incline on Huntington Ave. were filled in. The MBTA took the closure necessitated by the rebuild of the incline to begin a “temporary” closure of the E Line in Jamaica Plain. Another “temporary” closure had begun on the A Line about 15 years earlier.

Why mention this?

If you continue along the Silver Line tunnel past South Station headed inbound you eventually come to a concrete wall. Beyond it is a stub tunnel leading out into the city. The wall, temporary. The stub tunnel waiting for a purpose.

But I think we have learned all to well what temporary means.