Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
I don't understand what ``turning room'' means in this context.However, there is still a bit of problem, in that the Fairmount line can't handle the normal traffic load that it carries, plus the load from the Franklin line. And that's with an operational South Station. I'm not sure what they can handle if South Station and all of its tracks are off limits. After all, the Fairmount still feeds into the Old Colony corridor tracks, which in many places go down to a single track. That doesn't leave a whole lot of turning room, unless they send trains to the yard.
If they could simply reverse the direction of an inbound train once they reach Uphams Corner, there may be no reason to continue onto the tracks shared with the Old Colony Lines if South Station is closed, since South Station is the only stop inbound from Upham's Corner.
The Google Maps satellite imagery suggests there are overhead wires over a good part of the yard south of South Station, and I'd guess those overhead wires come with Amtrak control. But maybe some of the tracks in that general area are controlled by the MBTA.And that poses yet another question, can the T get it's trains out of the yard? I'm guessing that they can, but I'm not sure how they can get trains over to either the Needham or the Worcester line without crossing the corridor.
The Worcester Line has a connection to the Grand Junction Railroad somewhere to the west of Back Bay, so a north side train could probably reach it with little difficulty if it turned out the south side yards didn't have a viable connection.
At Needham Junction, Google Maps suggests there's a track that branches off through Dover to Harding, and it looks like at Harding it joins another track that leads to Framingham. I don't get the impression that tracks that show up on Google Maps necessarily still exist, however, and the MBTA may not have rights to move trains over those tracks if they even still exist.