A man living at a Cambridge homeless shelter was arrested at the Braintree T stop last night after two women identified him as the guy who felt them up and threatened them on a southbound Red Line train.
MBTA Transit Police say the two women, in their 20s, got on the train at Porter Square toward the end of yesterday's evening rush hour. One sat down next to Bruce Harris, 62, while the other stood, holding onto a pole. According to a police report:
Don't worry, it's probably not part of the MBTA's new anti-terrorism campaign. Instead, it's an advertising vehicle for L.L. Bean, which will be picking up the tab for riders on certain buses on the 1, 9, 47, 57, 66, CT1, CT2 and CT3 - the ones that look like examples of abandoned boxes the T has been telling us to call Transit Police about.
That gets Margaret Willison to thinking:
Hopefully next Swatch will sponsor MBTA bus lines that actually run on time.
Via BostonTweet.
James O'Leary is on a Red Line train just sitting on the tracks due to a dead train between Broadway and South Station. He tweets the conductor just announced:
Sometimes you can't help but be late when you ride the T.
Meanwhile, Stacy McNary, who is actually on the dead train, tweets:
Waiting for another T to come push us to South Station (from broadway). Stuck in tunnel going on 15 mins.
Sara watched the burning tracks in Coolidge Corner shortly before 7 p.m. today.
You know the guy: Sometimes he needs money to get to the parole office in Worcester before it closes. Or Springfield. Or someplace vital that requires more money for the trip than he has. An alert UHubber reports he was on an inbound Orange Line train at Back Bay late yesterday afternoon working the crowd with a simpler story: He'd lost the bed lottery at the Pine Street Inn and needed money for a place to stay.
The Herald reports two of the five locomotives the MBTA recently brought up here for testing turned out to be in even worse shape than the diesels the T already has. So the T says it will only be leasing the remaining three to fill in until brand-new locomotives start rolling into town late next year.
The company that shipped the locomotives up here, MotivePower of Idaho, has a $115 million contract to build those 20 new locomotives for the T.
Meanwhile, at 9:45 a.m. today, MBTA workers will affix big new Ts to the sides of one of the newly repainted, working locomotives in a ceremony at North Station. It'll then be pressed into service to haul riders up to Newburyport:
T GM Rich Davey affixes new loco logo. Photo from the MBTA.
Lisa Medina reports that MBTA General Manager Richard Davey boarded the Red Line at Park Street this morning only to find coffee sloshing on the floor. So he picked up one of the car's spare Metros and put it down on the coffee, no doubt because, as all good T employees know, the Metro is extra absorbent.
And then, Medina adds, a woman picked up one of the coffee-drenched sections and began to read it.
Steve Miller noticed these forlorn cupcakes on the Red Line this morning.
Around 8:30 p.m., Julie Gendrano tweeted from the Orange Line:
Oh my. Someone just entered my Orange Line car completely naked.
Pics or it didn't happen? But of course! Gendrano says to look for the "flesh colored blob" in the photo below. He got off at Downtown Crossing.
File this under "You're never too drunk to tweet" and perhaps "Some things are better left un-tweeted." A student at one of Boston's finer institutions of higher learning tweeted the following between 12:03 and 12:26 a.m. today, on her way home on the Red Line after a night out on the town:
The #mbta accentuates your drunk. Seriously.
Drunk on the #mbta is worse than the opening shift and worse than that class you wish you didn't have.
Just vomited all over the red line. Take that, #mbta.
MBTA Transit Police tweet passengers on an Orange Line train outside Wellington had to be evacuated this afternoon after several track fires broke out near the station.
The machine this morning with new wood bars: Yeah, somebody finally tried to rob it.
MBTA Transit Police report a Dorchester man smashed the glass front of the Best Buy vending machine at the Forest Hills T stop around 11:10 p.m. last night, put some goodies in a bag he had, then got arrested after he apparently returned for more.
Police say that on his second visit to the machine, officers were already in the station, investigating the smash-and-grab and that one began to chase Jamal Smith, 23.
According to a police report, Smith ran out of the station towards the overpass - and right into the path of an oncoming bus. Fortunately for both him and the officer following him, the alert driver managed to slow and not hit either, the report says.
According to the report, Smith made it to South Street and St. Mark Street on the other side of the overpass when a wooden stockade fence he tried to scale collapsed, dropping him to the ground and making enough noise for the pursuing officer to zero in on his location. The report says Smith surrendered only after the officer drew his gun, and that the officer recovered a pink folding knife from the vacant lot where Smith was arrested.
According to the report, on booking, officers found a shard of glass in Smith's rear pocket that matched the tint and width of the Best Buy glass.
Innocent, etc.
McKenzie Lawton tweets from the Red Line (of course):
This girl on the train has a rat as a pet and it's hanging out on her neck.
The MBTA will expand the number of three-car trolleys on the Green Line on Monday - and will start running them on the E branch for the first time, which also means the return of triple-trolley service to Lechmere.
The T restored some three-car service on non-E lines last year. The expansion means the number of tripled-up trains will increase from 13 to 32 on weekdays.
In a statement, T General Manager Richard Davey said:
Channel 7 reports the operator of the second car in a two-car Green Line train was suspended after a rider took some cell-phone video of her doing her nails while the train was in service.
But since things are rarely that obvious, well, say something anyway. The MBTA launched a new "if you see something, say something" campaign with the help of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who spoke outside South Station, so we don't know what would have happened if there had been bag checks inside and she tried to get on the Red Line:
The MBTA is running shuttle buses between Cleveland Circle and Coolidge Corner due to a "power problem" at Cleveland Circle.
Kevin Aries happened to be right there when the problem occurred, around 7:30 p.m.:
May have just witnessed a small explosion on the live wires above the tracks at Cleveland Circle. Looks like a piece of the wire fell down onto the tracks.
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