The Dorchester Reporter goes on a tour of the stations from JFK/UMass to Ashmont and quickly finds lots of things wrong.
Red Line
Better safe than sorry: Transit Police dispatched the bomb squad to the Davis Square T stop when somebody spotted a pressure cooker just sitting there, Live Boston reports, adding that the thing was, in fact, a discarded pressure cooker.
WBZ reports an 18-year-old man was stabbed at the Franklin Street entrance to the Downtown Crossing T stop around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, and that police are looking for an even younger suspect.
The Dorchester Reporter gets the scoop: Inspectors found a critical structural problem along Columbia Road that required the entrance to be shut over the weekend - along with "additional structural issues" that led to the concourse over the Braintree tracks to be shut - for possibly the next four to five weeks.
The Savin Hill T stop also has some issues, the Reporter adds.
A roving UHub photographer snapped this shot of the only way to get into JFK/UMass from Columbia Road now that the T has shut the original entrance for some sort of construction. For some reason, the T officially would prefer that people coming from the west take the extra hike to the Old Colony/busway entrance.
The MBTA has shut the pedestrian entrance to JFK/UMass station from Columbia Road. Read more.
Just another manic Monday on the Red Line, where one train dying near JFK/UMass led to a cascade of delay that lasted long after that train was hauled off the tracks. "Dying of frostbite and old age at Wollaston," Hopesmomma reported at 8:41 a.m.
Guy gets ahold of some old Red Line seats, the ones with the LSD-inspired patterns, turns them into chairs. Now when is somebody going to redo their basement with some of the fake paneling from the old Orange Line trains?
At 6:21 a.m., the MBTA sighed there would be no trains to start the day on the Red Line because delays in some overnight track repair work near Alewife meant it had to roll out shuttle buses between Alewife and Broadway.
A $214-million revamp of the Red Line's Cabot Yard in South Boston that was originally scheduled for completion this past February is now as delayed as the snazzy new subway cars it was supposed to maintain, with no lead contractor in place but a growing number of lawsuits swirling around it. Read more.
Red Line Braintree service was all kinds of screwed up this morning due to a train with a "mechanical problem" right at Braintree, but the T says "regularly scheduled service" has resumed.
Aiyoub Alsallak, 29, was arraigned today on various charges for a Sept. 5 attack on a Red Line platform at Andrew station that left the 56-year-old victim with head injuries, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports. Read more.
The MBTA announced new bus schedules with reduced service on 49 lines starting Aug. 28. Read more.
The T made the Ashmont branch slow its roll this morning because of a "disabled train" at Shawmut. Or as Erica Warner, who was on the train, puts it:
So our MBTA train started smoking at Shawmut station and had to be taken out of service…long wait till the next one.