For an instant last week, the disabled Braintree line of the MBTA seemed to lurch back to life.
“Attention passengers: The next Red Line train from Braintree . . .” the disembodied recording intones.
And then comes the faintest pause.
It couldn’t be. Could it? Shuttered in favor of shuttle buses since Feb. 10, the Braintree leg of the Red Line was not supposed to be carrying riders on its rails. Its 9 miles of metal and ties remained buried in snow and encased in ice at the end of last week.
Most T trains rumble through underground tunnels or on covered tracks. The Braintree branch — the longest stretch of exposed track in the T system — has been closed because it affords none of that shelter.
And so commuters huddle at the station, hanging on an announcer’s every prerecorded word.
A commuter rail train had chugged through Braintree moments earlier.
But those big cars are pulled by diesel locomotives: Strap a snowplow to the front, and a train like that has a better chance of making its own way through winter.
Red Line trains draw their power from the third rail. They clutch it like a nervous hiker crossing a tattered rope bridge. Without a steady grip on its 600 volts, the trains sputter and stall. In several feet of snow, that grip gets shaky.
The Blue and Orange lines get their power the same way, but their tracks are mostly protected. The Green Line sips energy from overhead lines — safe unless we get another 20 feet of snow.
There are measures in place to protect the Braintree line: Devices heat frozen switches and warm the third rail.
But interspersed along the tracks, they melt only the ice around them. They gleam in the snow like the dark patches in a driveway without enough rock salt.
And installing and running rail heaters for the full length of the track would be expensive not just to install but to operate.
“Short of having built a roof over the Braintree branch, this situation was unavoidable,” said Joe Pesaturo, an MBTA spokesman.
That worked for the Ashmont line.
“Anticipating this problem way back in the day, the Boston Elevated Railway covered the section from Fields Corner to Ashmont, because it was known to be an area of heavy drifts,” said Bradley H. Clarke, president of the Boston Street Railway Association.
But the expanse of the Braintree line never got the same treatment — and why should it?
How many millions, Clarke wondered, should we spend to prepare for a storm that comes once a century?
Instead, the T unleashed an army of workers with shovels and torches. But working near the third rail requires special training, officials explained.
The National Guardsmen who were aiding efforts elsewhere can’t just parachute in to start digging.
So to melt the mountains of snow, the T turned to Snowzilla. The hulking machine, on loan from New York City, squealed and ground its way down the tracks.
But Snowzilla’s weakness is easy to see: It is painfully slow.
“The operator will be a skeleton by the time it finishes its run,” said Clarke, who went for a ride on one last week.
The disembodied announcer’s pause lasts not nearly so long.
“Attention passengers:”
The pause, observed anxiously by a handful of beleaguered Braintree commuters, is even shorter than the first rides on the Red Line.
One-hundred-and-three years ago, 500 cars ran from Harvard to Park Street and back in 7
No, the pause is just long enough for slouched shoulder blades and sagging spines to twitch.
“The next Red Line train from Braintree . . .”
What? Service was supposed to be suspended. The wait for those words at Braintree Station was supposed to be measured in Snowzilla trips, not pregnant pauses.
But those seven words are enough to make a bleary traveler lurch toward an abandoned train platform.
And then, in an instant, it’s over.
“The next Red Line train from Braintree . . . does not take customers.”
At least until Friday. T authorities on Wednesday night issued a memo of salvation to riders.
The Braintree spur, they said, would start running a bit farther on Friday, to North Quincy.
Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.