It's been discussed for years, but next month it could finally arrive - and leave - five times a day, every Monday through Friday.

The MassCoaster, a new passenger rail "feeder" service operated by Massachusetts Coastal Railroad, would offer daily commuter service by the end of March between Sandwich and the Middleboro commuter rail station with station stops in Buzzards Bay and Wareham.

The proposed service would allow Wareham residents to travel by train to South Station, Boston in a little over 1 hour and 15 minutes.

The service hopes to secure enough public and, possibly, private funding to purchase the equipment - coaches and locomotives - necessary to inaugurate service at the same time as construction resumes on the Sagamore Bridge.

Last fall, bridge construction caused such disruptions to truck and freight commerce on the Cape that Governor Patrick and U.S. Rep. William Delahunt (D-Quincy) commissioned a task force to propose ideas to mitigate delays when construction resumed this spring.

Passenger rail "feeder" service - which travels at slower speeds than commuter rail - was one of the proposed solutions, providing an optimal opportunity for Massachusetts Coastal Railroad to initiate service.

"This is the only approach to solving traffic woes in and around Southeast Massachusetts by taking cars off the road," said Cape Rail Inc. President and CEO John F. Kennedy. Every mom-and-pop store and Chamber of Commerce is trying to get people out of their cars. This will do it."

Chris Reilly, director of the Community Economic Development Authority in Wareham, agreed.

"We're really excited," said Reilly. "It's going to improve prospects downtown immeasurably by bringing people right to our downtown merchants. There's always been a need and a demand for passenger rail."

Mass Coastal Railroad general manager John Pearson said that the bridge construction provided a "heightened interest" in the service, but that the project has been in consideration for a long time.

Mass Coastal Railroad and Cape Cod Central Railroad are the freight and excursion/dinner services, respectively, of Cape Rail Inc. of Hyannis. Since taking over those services in 2006, the company has been working to implement passenger rail service. Compared with the controversy surrounding the refurbishing of the MBTA Greenbush Line, the railroad has received very little negative feedback.

"We've heard very few Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) concerns," said Pearson. We'll certainly listen to any comments, but we're not constructing a new railroad, we're simply using what's there."

Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority Administrator Tom Cahir is unsurprised and predicts Mass Coastal will receive wide community support.

"Kennedy has been promoting this idea for years," Cahir said. "I've been involved in rail a long time and because this has been in the works for so long, and because of the dinner and energy trains already running through on the tracks, I think they'll be successful."

Plus, the benefits of avoiding Cape traffic cannot be underestimated, said Kennedy.

"The construction cycle has underscored how dependent we are on only four lanes of traffic to get us off this peninsula."