MBTA Subway Lines Reduced to Crawl over new Safety Concerns

Image from a Gizmodo story on designing subway trains

– News covered by Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.

Are snails now faster than T subway trains?
Image via WikiCommons

MBTA subways have slowed to crawl in recent days in spite of serious millions spent on redoing rails lines, including various suspensions of service since last summer so as to accommodate the work.

After the T announced am online slow zone notification system last week in an effort to provide improved transparency which, among other problems, noted that the Red Line had the most slow zones along its tracks as of the end of January.

At the time, if no also true to form, as near as Quincy Quarry can tell has not been updated with data through the end of February even though somehow or other the Boston tabloid apparently found these data and then reported on them yesterday.

Blown out Red Line Window
An old MBTA Twitter image via Catherine Groux

Even more troubling, while the tabloid noted some reductions in the slow zones this month given repairs and such made, it also noted new ones have emerged with the Red Line still having the most slow zones of the T’s subway lines.

Things then, as one could only reasonable expect, continued to hit the fan.

Care of a manner of a recent sample audit inspection of Red Line track between its Savin Hill and Ashmont stations by the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities finding problems, the T announced late last night that train speeds would be reduced on ALL of its rail lines out of “an abundance of caution.”

And then there were the usual sorts of new instances of random fails yesterday.

In the most recent known instance, Blue Line service was disrupted by a power supply fail this morning.

The (latest, ed.) Mattapan Trolley line fail
An eyewitness image via WCVB

And for yet another problem, equipment that was being used to demolish the long condemned and thus controversial stairs at the Milton stop along the Mattapan trolley line in the Milton Village/Bakers Square neighborhood fell on the tracks overnight last night and so disrupted service.

In short, about the only good news for straphangers is that it is too cold for plagues of locusts to arise.

At least for now anyway.

Quincy Quarry News staff for brief moment considered calling Quincy’s Mayor Thomas P. Koch for comment as he is also the over a decade long Chair of the MBTA Advisory Board as well as the senior ranking member of the MTBA’s Board of Directors, however, the City Editor sagely ordered to not bother as why waste time on hold and/or waiting for a return call that would likely never happen.

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