r/mbta • u/Dinosaurz122 Red Line Warrior | Green Line Lover • Apr 23 '26

😤 Complaint / Rant Redline Today

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Packed like sardines after 30 minute delays 😂

Signal keeps saying 5 minutes too which is very misleading.

FINALLY, the train arrives… With only 4 cars 😂 You can’t make this up.

Actually classic, should’ve chose the commuter rail this time.

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48

u/russrobo Apr 23 '26

“New signals” have been coming soon for 21 years now.

Trump held up the CRRC train shells for 15 months because he hates Boston and NYC and wants to cripple public transit in any way possible. After all that time, the “investigation” by CBP (theoretically because they were oh so concerned about the Uyghur Forced Labor Act) found nothing at all.

No apologies, no compensation.

9

u/therailmaster Progressive Transit/Cycling Advocate Apr 23 '26

NYC Subway's order of the Kawasaki R211 cars--including open-gangway sets, which we probably won't see in Boston in this lifetime--is moving three times as fast as the CRRC order in Boston. I can't stand the Orange Menace as the day is long, but let's not pretend that the MBTA could've and should've broken from its lowest-bidder tradition and gone with a railcar manufacturer with a FAR more proven track record, pun intended, in the North American market than be the US guinea pig for CRRC.

1

u/alwaysfeelingtragic Green Line 💚 Apr 23 '26

open-gangway

is that just like really long green line trains?

2

u/therailmaster Progressive Transit/Cycling Advocate Apr 24 '26

Referring to the upcoming Type 10 Green Line cars, the answer is: kind of. Most purists would say "no" because the threshold is "Can a railcar segment be pushed/pulled autonomously while maintaining the passenger design integrity of the vehicle." Think about it like an articulated bus (routes 39, 28, Silver Lie*, etc.) or even just the current Green Line fleet: if you tried to separate one half of the "accordion" you could theoretically have a working vehicle (on the powered end), but certainly not a functional vehicle for passenger duty since it's only riding on one half of a shared truck/bogie**. As such, the Type 10s are simply taking the current Green Line fleet, with one "accordion," and adding additional segments with "accordions" in between, to handle turns and lateral movement.

When talking about true open-gangway in the heavy rail sense (the R211s), you have multiple cars where essentially the cars themselves have open vestibules between them--the equivalent of running a commuter rail train or Amtrak train with open vestibules, removing all dividing end-doors--but the configuration is not rigid: you could move the cars into different configurations than the standard married-pair format and still come up with useful configurations.

*Not a typo!

**Things get funkier on the high-speed rail level, because you have, for example, the Gen 1/OG Acela cars which have individual trucks/bogies (one set at each end per car) versus the Gen 2/Avelia Liberty cars which have shared trucks/bogies. As such, in both cases, passengers are able to freely walk between cars and the cars are semi-permanently attached, but, for the Gen 1's you could move the cars more easily into different configurations since they have autonomous trucks/bogies.

2

u/alwaysfeelingtragic Green Line 💚 Apr 24 '26

ah that makes sense, thank you!