You know the drill: They have to shut a major part of the Orange Line for some preventative maintenance they weren't able to get to when they shut the entire line for a month of preventive maintenance in 2022, this time between Back Bay and Wellington for ten days starting Tuesday. The T advises: Read more.
Remember when the T said the cure for the old, wheezing Orange Line cars was to buy new ones? The T reported, at 6:26 a.m., delays on the Orange Line because of a dead train at Wellington.
The MBTA started the morning by announcing delays on the Orange Line due to a dead new train near North Station.
Boy, it sure rained buckets early this morning, huh? In case you managed to sleep through it all, you could still get a feel for just how much rain fell inside Ruggles station, where Handmaid captured some of the many fine barrels the T put in to capture all that water inside the station.
When the T hired CRRC to build hundreds of new cars despite not having any experience with American subways but at a price that was just too good to pass up, the contract contained penalty clauses in case the company was late. CommonWealth Beacon reports the T will be paying CRRC $148 million more - and will waive up to $131 million in penalties if CRRC delivers all the cars by the end of 2027, four years late. Both sides blame the pandemic and restrictions on Chinese companies by the Trump administration.
The Orange Line has a photo of some old Orange Line cars crossing Rte. 9 - on flatbed trucks.
The MBTA reports ongoing delays on the Orange Line this morning due to signal problems near Community College.
Not everything that goes wrong on the T is the T's fault, it seems. First it was the little duck and today, the T says, it had to shut the Orange Line between Forest Hills and Back Bay after an overhead Amtrak power line unspooled or snapped or something near Ruggles, causing problems for the neighboring subway line. Read more.
WCVB reports MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said today that the power cable that shorted out or blew up or something that tripped all the other power cables at North Station to shut down, taking the Blue, Green and Orange lines with them didn't belong to National Grid - it was the MBTA's own cable. Read more.
A man screaming about masks attacked a 69-year-old woman at the State Street Orange Line stop Wednesday afternoon, ripping her mask off, knocking her to the floor and trying to drag her to the tracks before a bystander intervened, Transit Police and WBZ report. Read more.
At 11:17 a.m., the MBTA reported: "Delays of about 15 minutes while personnel complete a track repair between Haymarket and State." They have since updated the track is no longer whack.
At 8:17 p.m., the MBTA reported delays on the Orange Line, when one of the new trains exhaled its last at Community College. At 8:41 p.m., the T reported delays on the Red Line when a train died at Park. The T did no say if that was one of the new Red Line trains, one of the old Red Line trains or one of the even older Red Line trains.
John Mcboston watched as a T crew filmed an actor and commuters making a video at North Station about how to use the new faregates - just moments before all faregates everywhere on the T were set to spring free for four hours as recompense, or something, for this morning's non-service.
MBTA General Manager Phil Eng says the T's subway lines will be free between 3 and 7 p.m. to try to make up for this morning's three-line disaster, which he blamed on some sort of failure in a National Grid "feeder cable" supplying power to the T via North Station. Read more.
Update: T blames National Grid feeder cable.
The MBTA reports the Orange, Green and Blue lines all died this morning due to some sort of power and signal problem. The power is back, but trains are moving like molasses (in the traditional sense, not the Boston sense). Read more.
Transit Police report a 14-year-old-girl told officers she was sexually assaulted and threatened with a knife around 4 p.m. on Monday at Forest Hills. The next day, a teen, too young to be named because of his age, was arrested for the attack, police say.
Shortly before 1 p.m., the MBTA announced the Orange Line was "standing by" because one of its brand-new Orange Line trains decided Chinatown was a good place to die.
For the third day in a row, the MBTA had to halt service on the Orange Line because of something that made Boston firefighters have to get on the tracks at Massachusetts Avenue, sometime before 8:25 p.m. Firefighters were off the tracks by around 8:50 p.m. Read more.
For the second time in less than 24 hours, Mass. Ave. on the Orange Line forced an Orange Line shutdown because of something that, once again, forced firefighters to get down on the outbound tracks at the station. Firefighters arrived around 12:15 p.m., then waited for the T to shut down power so they could get onto the tracks. Whatever it was got fixed and the MBTA reported at 1:38 p.m. that service was back to what now passes for normal.
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