Baker insists T do its homework
Wants answers on derailments
Gov. Charlie Baker said the MBTA needs to do its “homework” and find out whether the cause of this week’s Red Line derailment could be hiding elsewhere in the T’s heavy rail system, which has been plagued by nearly 30 derailments in three-plus years.
T officials say they were still investigating the “root cause” of Wednesday’s mishap, when a six-car Red Line train momentarily jumped the tracks during the morning commute, spraying passengers with shattered glass and spewing smoke as it entered South Boston’s Andrew Station.
Yesterday, Baker called the incident “unacceptable.”
“They (T officials) need to do some homework on why this happened and figure out if there is some issue that needs to be considered along the rest of the lines and rest of the tracks to make sure we don’t have some terrible situation like this lurking somewhere else,” said Baker, whose re-election campaign this fall could ride, in part, on the T’s performance.
“For decades people neglected making the investments that should have been made in the core system,” Baker later said, adding: “I get the fact what riders had to put up with yesterday was unacceptable.”
No one was injured in the incident, and a T spokesman said it was the first derailment involving passengers on a heavy rail car — which run on the Red, Orange and Blue lines — since December 2009.
But overall, it marked the 28th derailment since the start of 2015, the Herald reported yesterday. There were 10 in both 2017 and 2016, all of which involved maintenance vehicles or out-of-service cars in train yards, according to T data.
The count far exceeds data reported to the Federal Transit Administration, which T officials said only recently expanded its reporting requirements to include incidents involving maintenance vehicles.
But derailments had already been an issue for management. The T reported eight to the feds in 2016, the most of any agency in the country, and it included seven on the Green Line.
Through October of last year, the most recent federal data available shows the T reported nine total derailments. That marked the second-most nationwide, trailing only the 26 the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority reported in the same time frame.
The Herald reported this week that the Department of Public Utilities had also warned the T in a November report that the Green Line was “stretched to the limit” and in danger of more cars jumping the tracks without an infusion of cash and workers.