WBZ talked to the woman who jumped from the Orange Line bridge over the Mystic River after she got out of the train when its first car began flaming and smoking after a metal panel came lose and created a short circuit with the third rail.
MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak said today's Orange Line fire was caused by a roughly one-foot-by-six-foot metal strip that separated from the rest of its car and came into contact with the third rail - "sparking smoke and some fire and limited ignition on the underside" of the car. Read more.
As passengers stand on bridge, train keeps smoking. Photo by Jay Bernard.
Update: MBTA says metal strip came loose from train and then into contact with the third rail.
The first car of an older inbound Orange Line train suffered an explosion, then burst into flames on the bridge over the Mystic River just before Assembly this morning, sending panicked riders onto the bridge while the third rail was still live. One rider jumped into the river; came out OK. Read more.
Yesterday, Handmaid got on the Orange Line:
It took over a year before I got to ride a new OL train. Today I rode Methuselah - the OG OL Car.
The 1200 cars started rolling out in 1979.
The MBTA announced today it's returned all the new Orange Line cars to service, along with the smaller number of new Red Line cars it has. Read more.
The MBTA announced this evening it's once again running Orange and Green Line trains downtown, now that what's left of the Government Center Garage has been shored up enough to keep it from collapsing atop Haymarket station. Read more.
Orange Line at 6:13 p.m. Photo by Emily.
The T shut the Green and Orange Lines downtown again this evening after another "structural issue with the Government Center Garage."
Green Line service has been replaced by buses between Lechmere and Government Center. The Orange Line is shut between North Station and Back Bay, "until further notice," the T says. Read more.
So you can understand why the MBTA, already under the gun for all those safety violations and the ongoing delays in getting new Orange and Red Line trains into service, might want to downplay what happened early Monday morning in the Wellington Orange Line yard, calling it a "battery failure" but grudgingly acknowledging, at least to a Globe reporter, that the "failure" caused "significant damage" to the part of the car where the battery used to be. Read more.
The Globe reports the T took all the new cars out of service today after finding some sort of battery problem in one of them.
The T today announced its first step in responding to this week's critical safety demands from federal investigators: Starting Monday, it will run fewer trains on weekdays on the Red, Orange and Blue Lines to give employees at its Operations Control Center a breather until it can find and train more of them. Read more.
Transit Police have released a couple of photos of a man they say got out of his seat on one of the last Orange Line trains of the night this past Friday, stood in front of a woman, unzipped and "committed a lewd act" as the train hurtled between Haymarket and Malden.
If he looks familiar, contact detectives at 617-222-1050 or send an anonymous text to 873873.
An Orange Line train pulling into Oak Grove got ThisClose, then died, now it's just sitting on the tracks, as passengers wonder if they'll ever get to the platform. For what it's worth, it's one of the older rec-room models, not the newly bolt-enhanced newer trains.
The MBTA announced this morning it's returning the new Orange Line trains to service after finding that a braking problem on one train last week was because a bolt on one of the eight braking units on one car had been improperly installed at the factory. Read more.
The MBTA reports it pulled all the Springfield-assembled bingbingbing Orange Line trains today after one of them "experienced a problem" in one of its braking units and it pulled up lame at Wellington, where new Orange Line trains go to die. Read more.
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