Skip to Content
Streetsblog Massachusetts home
Streetsblog Massachusetts home
Log In
Rail

The Path Forward For MassDOT’s West Station Plans Is Getting Narrower

“What are we giving up by placing a rail yard within this area where we’re creating a new neighborhood, one that could certainly use additional housing?"

An overhead-view diagram of a railway station next to a large highway, with the words "DRAFT CONCEPT" superimposed over the drawing.

A March 2025 concept plan for West Station features a smaller footprint for railroad track infrastructure with a 2-track layover yard for parked trains. For the past decade, MassDOT and the MBTA had been planning a 4-track layover at this location. Courtesy of MassDOT.

After a full decade of planning, the Commonwealth's various transportation agencies are still far away from a consensus on how it will rebuild the sprawling Interstate 90 highway interchange in Allston – but they are beginning to show some willingness to reduce the overall footprint of the project's sprawling infrastructure.

As we've reported previously, fundamental details of the project – like whether the project will include a multi-acre storage facility for MBTA trains, or how to rebuild the highway without major disruptions to the region's passenger rail services – remain up in the air.

The project also faces a funding shortfall that's measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, while the prospects for additional financial assistance from Washington have all but disappeared.

The state says it still intends to file its federal Environmental Impact Statement – a key document that will nail down the conceptual design – within the next year.

A diagram labelled "Preliminary project timeline" with years from 2014 to 2021 on the horizontal axis and rows for project tasks listed vertically below that. The row for "concept development" shades out parts of 2014, and the row for "environmental/permit filings" shades boxes from late 2014 to late 2016. The final row, "anticipated construction", shades boxes from the start of 2018 to the end of 2021. A blue box labeled "We are here" points to the midpoint of the "environmental/permit filings" row in mid-2015.

But project managers have been making similar promises for over a decade (the timeline at right came from the eleventh meeting of the project's citizen task force, which was held in July 2015).

A nine-figure budget shortfall

One fundamental problem with MassDOT's current design for the Allston Multimodal Project is its projected cost, which far exceeds its available funding.

To date, the Commonwealth has cobbled together about $1.75 billion in pledges for the project, more than half of which would come from Massachusetts taxpayers.

That's about $165 million short of MassDOT's 2022 cost estimate for the project, which was $1.9 billion.

The real shortfall is probably much larger. That $1.9 billion estimate is three years old, and predates a historic spike in costs for construction materials.

Since 2022, USDOT's Highway Construction Cost Index has surged by 25 percent – far outpacing the rate of inflation in other sectors. Accounting for inflation with the USDOT's index, the true cost of the Allston Multimodal Project in 2025 would be closer to $2.4 billion.

Shrinking expectations

At the March 12 meeting of the Allston Multimodal Project's task force, discussion focused on one particularly controversial aspect of the project: a multi-acre layover yard for train storage.

An aerial view of Allston near I-90 with outlines of planned infrastructure associated with the new West Station and new streets associated with a realigned Mass. Turnpike. A large yellow box in the center of the picture highlights a large area slated for a proposed train layover facility, just below to smaller purple rectangles that indicate proposed passenger platforms for a new train station.
A 2020 MassDOT plan for West Station, highlighting (in yellow) the proposed 4-track MBTA layover yard that could occupy several city blocks immediately south of the new station.

Many transit advocates and Allston residents have objected to the idea of building what was effectively a massive parking lot for diesel trains in the middle of what is supposed to become a new transit-oriented neighborhood.

Their cause appeared to gain momentum in early 2024, when MassDOT Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said "the layover's gotta go."

But the MBTA, Amtrak, and MassDOT rail planners have been pushing back, citing the need for new trains (and train parking) to realize their plans for increased regional rail service and new intercity services with MassDOT's Compass Rail initiatives.

At the March 12 project task force meeting, MassDOT and project consultants from VHB presented a new analysis that concluded that the state badly needs more space – including Allston – to park its growing fleets of passenger trains.

In gesture of compromise, they presented a revised plan for West Station with a smaller layover yard, with two tracks instead of four (see the diagram at the top of this post). The new plan also added an additional "express" track that bypasses West Station altogether (the previous design had proposed only one bypass track).

Task force representatives from Harvard University and the City of Boston – two institutions that have pledged critical stakes in the project's construction financing – still urged MassDOT to analyze alternative, less expensive layover sites elsewhere in the region to support its rail service plans.

“What are we giving up by placing a rail yard within this area where we’re creating a new neighborhood, one that could certainly use additional housing?" asked Albert Ng, Harvard University's representative on the project task force.

Former MassDOT Secretary Fred Salvucci, whose widowed grandmother lost her home in Brighton when the Commonwealth seized and bulldozed her house to build Interstate 90 in the 1960s, was more blunt.

"This community got screwed when the Turnpike was built. They got screwed when the CSX (rail) yard was there. We spent a lot of time trying to get the yard out, and we’ve been talking (about it) since the administration of Deval Patrick," said Salvucci. "This is going backwards. It’s going back on people who have been led to believe that this would be a great mending of the scar through our community."

The bigger barrier

No matter what West Station eventually looks like, its size and its costs will be minuscule compared to the impacts of the two expressways – Interstate 90 and Soldiers Field Road – that MassDOT is still planning to demolish and rebuild through the project area.

But financial, legal, and environmental constraints might force the state's transportation officials to reconsider the 20th-century assumptions behind their previous designs for those roadways.

The path forward for MassDOT's highways in Allston might also be getting narrower – we'll write more about that in an upcoming story.

Read more recent coverage of the Allston I-90 project here.

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Streetsblog Massachusetts

Region Seeks New Operating Contract for Expanding Bluebikes System

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, on behalf of the municipal owners of the Bluebikes system, has issued a 'request for proposals' for private-sector operators who can manage the system for the next five years.

U.S. House Moves to Rescind $3.1B for Reconnecting Communities Divided by Highways

The legislation could cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for Massachusetts projects, including a $335 million pledge for the reconstruction of I-90 in Boston's Allston neighborhood.

April 30, 2025

MassDOT Is Filling Gaps In the Border to Boston Trail

Updates on the Mystic River bike and pedestrian bridge, new trail connections in Peabody, and rail trail upgrades for rural Essex County.

April 29, 2025
See all posts