MBTA Announces Ambitious Track Improvement Program to Eliminate All Speed Restrictions by End of 2024

Repair work will replace rails, fix or replace deteriorated ties, install new ballast, improve signals and switches, and more, MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said. Free shuttle buses will replace subway service during closures.

The proposal will inflict widespread disruption on riders, with a portion of the core subway system scheduled to be closed on almost exactly half of the days between now and the end of next year.

With their new plan, MBTA officials are providing more advance notice than they have ahead of recent shutdowns, and for the first time are putting an estimated endpoint on the slow train service that has become the new norm and turned some riders away from the T.

Paraphrasing Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Eng said the plan exchanges "short-term pain for long-term wins."

The first closures will hit the Green Line. Subways will not run between North Station and Kenmore, Heath Street and Babcock Street from Nov. 27 to Dec. 5, nor will they operate along the entire D Branch from Riverside to Kenmore between Dec. 11 and Dec. 20.

For 2024, the plan lays out nearly 20 planned closures of individual pieces of the Green, Orange, Red and Blue Lines, ranging in duration between four days and 21 days. Eng said the sweeping proposal would eliminate all slow zones, which currently blanket about 23 percent of the system, plus tackle any new issues that emerge.

Altogether, MBTA modeling projects the work will slash a total of 86 minutes in delays that exist today because of infrastructure problems that prevent trains from safely operating at full speed.

"The intent is to, again, address those things that have been impacting the public today and address those things that, if we don't get to, will impact them in future years," Eng told reporters after the subcommittee meeting. "That will allow us now to come in and do that proper cyclical, preventive corrective maintenance on a regular basis, being able to respond more timely, and not allow us to get to the point where we're trying to tackle hundreds of speed restrictions."

The cost of the repair campaign was not available. Eng said the work will all be funded through existing budget sources, including money set aside for the MBTA to address problems identified in a Federal Transit Administration investigation and the agency's five-year capital investment plan.

A "significant amount" of the work will be put out to bid, which Eng said might alter some of the specific closure dates.