MBTA General Manager Philip Eng made a stunning admission Thursday, telling reporters the Green Line extension is riddled with so many defects — far more than previously disclosed — that workers will have to reposition the rails along much of the 4.7-mile stretch.
“I wish I had known earlier,” said Eng, who joined the MBTA as general manager in April. “Because then I think we would have tackled this.”
It’s the most glaring setback yet for the $2.3 billion project, which stretches to Medford on one branch and to Union Square in Somerville on the other, and fully opened less than a year ago. Here’s a timeline of key moments in the fraught life of the project.
1990: The first stirrings of an extension
State officials that year announced a large-scale mass-transit plan that included extending the Green Line from Lechmere, in Cambridge, to West Medford. The estimated cost at the time was a comparatively paltry $600 million.
2005: The Conservation Law Foundation sues
The Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental advocacy group, sued the state that year for stalling, but later settled when the government agreed to an initial 2014 deadline for the extension.
2007: Another postponement
State officials in August 2007 postponed the Green Line extension for another two years to seek federal funding. Then-Governor Deval Patrick and other officials said the funding could save taxpayers roughly $300 million, and was therefore worth the wait.
2012: Construction starts in Somerville
Construction began in Somerville in December 2012, which included reconstructing the Harvard Street Bridge in Medford and Medford Street Bridge in Somerville.
2014: A $1 billion assist from the Obama administration
The federal government in December 2014 pledged nearly $1 billion to help finance the extension, the cost of which ultimately came to $2.3 billion.
In endorsing the project, federal officials noted the extension would introduce rail service to communities that did not have it.
“The state is positioned to do its part, the federal government is positioned to do its part, and there ought to be no obstacle to getting this done,” Patrick said in 2014.
2015: Cost estimates spike, jeopardizing project
The MBTA announced in August 2015 that the extension could cost up to $1 billion more than previously anticipated.
Then-state Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said T officials vastly underestimated the price in part because engineers the agency hired based their calculations on prices of large T projects completed during the earlier recession.
Officials at the time also cited a new contracting process for the project that required the MBTA to negotiate the price of each portion of the multiphase project as it went along.
And most troublingly for transit advocates who’d long yearned to see the extension come to life, state officials said the cost spike meant they couldn’t rule out the possibility of scrapping the project altogether, even though they’d already spent millions and would face additional expenses if they gave up on it entirely.
2017: The feds approve new cost estimate for the project
Spoiler alert: The state did not kill the project, and in April 2017 the expansion cleared a crucial milestone when the federal government issued an approval of the new cost estimate that cleared up uncertainty about whether the extension would move forward.
The Federal Transit Administration “does not want to say no,” said then-Congressman Mike Capuano, a Somerville Democrat. “They want to say yes, but they have an obligation to make sure everything lines up, especially after the first go-round, where things didn’t line up.”
2022: The extension’s Somerville, Medford lines open
The first trolley car full of passengers rolled down the tracks from the new Union Square station in Somerville just before 5 a.m. on March 21, 2022.
Nine months later, on Dec. 12, hundreds of excited riders showed up on a dark, chilly Monday morning to catch the first trains at the long-awaited opening of the Green Line Extension’s Medford branch.
A nearly overflowing E Line train pulled away from College Avenue Station, also referred to as Medford/Tufts, at 4:52 a.m. that morning, packed with jubilant activists, Tufts students, and regular commuters headed to their jobs.
The line had previously been slated to open in December 2021, then pushed to late November 2022, before Poftak announced the Dec. 12, 2022 opening date.
Thursday: Eng issues findings about track defects, says some at the T knew as early as April 2021
On Thusday, Eng said the extension opened with defective tracks in place even though some at the T knew as early as April 2021 that plates made the track gauge too narrow and didn’t meet construction requirements. He cited an inspection report at that time from Terracon, the firm hired by the project’s construction companies to do quality control.
“We should have paused, we should have questioned and reviewed,” Eng said. “And we should have determined if we had a larger-scale issue.”
Instead, construction carried on and the project opened last year with thousands of narrow-gauge areas outside construction specifications, internal emails obtained by the Globe show. Any deviation from the contract specifications requires the builder to get an exemption, Eng said, and he isn’t aware of any.
The extent of the track problems became public last month when the T forced trains on the extension to travel at just 3 miles per hour along much of the new tracks, prompting questions about how the infrastructure had failed so dramatically after less than a year in operation.
The T said it fixed all of those areas last week and eliminated the speed restrictions.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.