Commuters scurry to their trains at North Station in Boston. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, file)ASSOCIATED PRESS
Seth Moulton has a mission: One day, you’ll be able to travel by train, unimpeded, from Worcester to the North Shore. Or, if you’re of a mind, from Needham to TD Garden.
Because, right now, as improbable as it sounds, you can’t get there — or much of anywhere, for that matter — from here by train in Massachusetts.
And all it will take is finally building three miles’ worth of railroad tunnel through the middle of Boston that’s been talked about since Woodrow Wilson vanquished Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party to win the White House in 1912.
Asked if a lack of imagination, funding, or urgency has gotten the state to where it is today, Moulton, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts’s 6th District, told MassLive it’s “been a combination of all three. But I really want to emphasize the failure of imagination.”
“We keep trying to patch up the T when what we need is a transformation,” the Salem lawmaker said over the phone from his Capitol Hill office. “Of any road or bridge project, this would bring the biggest transformation. We could connect every rail line in eastern Massachusetts to every rail line in the west.”
Earlier this week, Moulton tried to jump-start the conversation, releasing a three-page summary of a new study, a joint effort with Harvard’s Kennedy School, making the case for the rail link.
In it, Moulton argued that completing the link would allow rail traffic to flow right through Boston, generate $31 billion in revenue for the state, quadruple the ridership on the MBTA’s Commuter Rail Line and open access to roughly a half-million jobs.
Oh, and it might even help the state do something about its crushing crisis of housing affordability and availability.
“It makes regional rail not just possible but successful. It does more to boost housing than any housing bill,” Moulton wrote in the document’s summary. “And it has huge benefits for climate and racial justice in historically forgotten communities. Until we build the Rail Link, we won’t just be stuck in traffic, we’ll be stuck in the past. The question is no longer ‘Can we afford to build the link?’ but ‘Can we afford not to?’”
The study contrasts building the rail link to another often-discussed project: Expanding South Station. For Moulton, that’s a non-starter because a South Station expansion would be “obsolete in 25 years, and do almost nothing to relieve road congestion,” he wrote in the summary.
And if you’ve ever spent any time sitting in traffic, trying to get out of Boston around quitting time, then you know exactly what Moulton is talking about.
“The key point here is that this has been a vision of many people in New England,” Moulton told MassLive this week. “Now it’s a choice because we have to address the capacity problem at South Station. We can do that by expanding South Station or building the rail line.”
In this undated photo, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-6th District, speaks during an event on Capitol Hill (Photo courtesy of the Office of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton).Ike Hayman
Building the rail link would cost between $2 billion and $8 billion, and take around five years to complete, according to Boston Uncovered.
But this being Massachusetts, and Boston specifically, getting the project from drawing board to shovel-ready, won’t be easy.
But there are plenty of recent examples worldwide of the kind of cross-city rail projects
The Cross River Rail project in Brisbane, Australia, set to open in 2025, is a 10.2-kilometer (6.3 mile) stretch of rail line that would run mostly under the Brisbane River, according to its website.
The project, which will cost AUD$5.4 billion, or about US$3.6 billion, has been touted as a key part of Brisbane’s bid for the 2032 Olympics.
In the United Kingdom, Crossrail’s Elizabeth Line has been billed as Europe’s largest construction project.
When it’s completed, the 100-kilometer (62.1 miles) line will pass through 40 stations, running from Heathrow and Reading in the west, to Abbey Wood and Shenfield to the east, according to its website.
The project calls for 42 kilometers (26 miles) of new tunnels under central London. The central section of the line between Paddington and Abbey Wood opened in 2022, according to the project’s website.
When it’s done, it will carry up to 200 million passengers a year, and inject about UK£42 billion a year, or about US$53 billion, into the nation’s economy.
Moulton brushed aside a suggestion that such an undertaking could be completed by the cash-strapped and perennially challenged MBTA, which could face a “fiscal cliff,” as soon as the 2025 budget year.
If the work is going to get done, it’ll get done by public-private partnerships teaming the government with privately run planning and construction firms.
“When you look all around the globe the most successful projects have been done by public-private partnerships,” he said. “You bring in the most experienced contractors in the private sector, and give them the proper public oversight.”
“I would never suggest giving this to the T. They don’t have the capacity” Moulton said, stressing his respect for the agency’s boss, Phillip Eng.
James E. Rooney, the president and CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, credited Moulton for his leadership on what he described as a key challenge for both Boston and the state at large.
“For projects like this to get to the finish line, they need a prominent champion who sees the value, and who can effectively articulate that value in the public space,” Rooney said. “And [Moulton] has stepped up to that challenge.”
And it is indeed a challenge.
For the many Bostonians for whom the cost and inconvenience of The Big Dig is still within living memory, there could be some reluctance to embrace another big infrastructure.
But in the three decades since The Big Dig, the tunneling technology has changed, and that means more benefits and less mess.
“In a number of spaces, where things are proposed, we have suffered, for a good 25 years, from Big Dig hangover and apprehension on big projects,” he said. “I hope we are turning the corner, and embrace the need for big projects, including this one.”
“We’re in an era in which the continued vibrancy and economic growth of the Boston/Cambridge ecosystem depends on the growth of regional economies across the state,” he continued, adding later, “We have to find again our capacity to embrace the bold like we did when we did the Big Dig. Our future depends on it.”
That means, according to Moulton, who’s no stranger to waging and winning campaigns, winning the hearts and minds of voters. And this one’s an open-and-shut case, he said.
“It’s getting more people to see the shocking results of this study, that not only point out the enormous benefits to housing and climate and racial and environmental justice, to getting around the commonwealth faster than you can today,” he said.
Which might be slightly harder than getting the T to run on time — but is no less aspirational.
