A big test for the Green Line extension tracks came on an unseasonably warm fall day in October 2021. Stations along the routes to Union Square and Medford were still being built, lighting was missing, and passengers wouldn’t start riding trains there for several months.
The test took the form of a machine loaded onto the brand-new tracks. It would, among other things, scan and measure the width between the rails and flag any areas that were too narrow.
The results were startling. Nearly 400 sections of new track examined by the machine between Science Park and Union Square and East Somerville stations were narrower than the contract specifications, according to a copy of the scan report obtained by the Globe.
Experts say it should have been a high-decibel warning that the MBTA’s first attempt at expanding its subway system since the 1980s, a $2.3 billion project that took decades to bring to realization, was being built incorrectly. In June and September of this year, the agency slowed trains to a walking pace in some areas to avoid derailments because portions of the track were too narrow.
“When you’re building something new, you don’t want to build it on the ragged edge of safety,” said Allan Zarembski, a professor and director of the Railroad Engineering and Safety Program at the University of Delaware. “That means that the modest, smallest amount of degradation or wear, or change in system behavior, and you can find yourself in an unsafe condition.”
It’s unclear who at the T saw the results of the October 2021 report. But the extension opened last year, with thousands of passengers riding unaware on tracks narrower than they were supposed to be.
The Globe reviewed internal emails, track measurements, and contract documents, and interviewed current and former T employees since the track problems came to light earlier this year.
The review uncovered the October 2021 warning about track gauge problems during the construction phase of the Green Line extension, which the MBTA hadn’t previously acknowledged publicly.
Other warnings came in April 2021, when the T said a subcontractor found rails on many of the track curves being built for a rail yard in Somerville were too narrow, and shortly before the final phase of the extension opened last year, when emails obtained by the Globe revealed much of the project was narrower than the contract specifications. The T publicly announced the reason trains were slowed to 3 miles per hour in October: Plates that hold the rails in place were too close together throughout most of the project.
The plan to widen all of the narrow track wasn’t conceived until after media inquiries alerted general manager Phillip Eng to the problem about three months ago, the T said.
Eng has said he is trying to change some of the cultural problems at the T he believes allowed for this error to happen. The new managers who came on after the extension opened say they haven’t been able to untangle how things went so wrong.
“There’s a lot of hiding at the T, of keeping secrets, of not passing along bad news,” said chairperson of the MBTA board of directors Thomas P. Glynn, a former T general manager. “It’s part of the culture.”
A joint venture of several construction companies called GLX Constructors and made up of Fluor Corp., Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Inc., Herzog Contracting Group, and the Middlesex Corp. built the Green Line extension. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. The MBTA’s former Green Line extension program manager, John Dalton, and former general manager Steve Poftak, who both left the agency this year, also did not respond to requests for comment.
The Green Line extension is a project with a long and winding origin story. The effort to expand the reach of the MBTA’s subway system into Somerville and Medford descended from the Big Dig, the nearly $15 billion highway project that sunk Boston’s Central Artery underground and constructed the Ted Williams Tunnel under Boston Harbor. Over 16 years of construction, the Big Dig mega project, pitched as an engineering marvel, developed an ignominious reputation for astronomical cost overruns, leaky tunnels, and construction errors.
The Green Line extension was conceived as an antidote to the project’s environmental impact. But more than a decade after a legal settlement mandated its construction, plans for the subway extension were trapped on the drawing board.
In 2015, the project risked being scrapped altogether when the state calculated construction costs could run up to $1 billion beyond budget estimates. Then-governor Charlie Baker ordered a rescue mission.
The MBTA tapped a new leader to run the project — Dalton, an independent contractor who had worked for the Chicago Transit Authority. The T moved swiftly to cut costs, notably by simplifying designs for the seven new stations. The agency then executed a $1.08 billion contract with GLX Constructors to design and build the Green Line extension. The federal government agreed to pay for about half of the total $2.3 billion cost of the project, which included buying new Green Line cars and real estate.
The T paid Dalton $406,372 during his last full fiscal year working on the project, according to agency spokesperson Joe Pesaturo.
The state hosted a groundbreaking ceremony at what is now Union Square station on June 25, 2018, and the pressure was on to complete it by the end of 2021.
As with any subway project, the backbone of the Green Line extension was the track itself, built along a 4.7-mile right-of-way through Cambridge, Somerville, and Medford. The specifications for track construction were spelled out in thousands of pages of contract documents prepared by the T.
Under the contract, the rails had to be positioned 56 ½ inches apart, the width known in the industry as standard gauge. British engineer George Stephenson, the principal inventor of the railroad locomotive, pioneered the standard in 1829. It was widely adopted in the United States during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, when Congress designated it for the transcontinental railroad.
The T specified that Green Line extension tracks couldn’t miss the mark by much. Deviations from the 19th-century standard were not to exceed 1/16th of an inch, the contract said. The cushion was about the thickness of a penny, the ubiquitous memorial to Lincoln.
The narrow margin for error was unusually exacting, according to Zarembski, the railroad safety expert, former managers, and new ones who joined the T after the Green Line extension opened. They said the industry usually allows track gauge deviations up to ⅛ of an inch for constructing light rail, double what was sought in the Green Line extension contract. T leaders who joined the agency after the subway expansion opened said they don’t know why the contract specified such strict parameters. The plan they’re implementing for widening the track will reposition the rails to the industry construction standard.
The T has said all of the evidence uncovered so far points to an error in which the metal plates that hold the rails in place were attached to the wooden ties in the wrong spots. And so the rails, too, were off the mark. The T has identified the tie manufacturer as Stella-Jones Corp. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
The T said the first warning came in April 2021 from a quality control subcontractor that had inspected a rail yard in Somerville and found the rails on many of the track curves were too narrow, resulting in a failed inspection report.
The problem at the rail yard was publicly revealed by the T earlier this year and appears to have been appropriately logged and corrected, according to emails obtained by the Globe. Eng has said that at that point, about 11 months before the first portion of the expansion opened, the Green Line extension team should have paused to investigate whether there was a larger issue, but didn’t.
On the same day as the October 2021 report showing nearly 400 spots where the new tracks were too narrow, another report — based on measurements from the same device belonging to Boston company Railpod — found no areas where the tracks were too narrow.
The results show one of the reports flagged areas where the distance between the rails was narrower than the minimum industry standard for building track — 56 3/8 inches — and therefore narrower than what the contract required, the Globe found. The results show the other report appears to have examined the tracks against the T’s own standard for when slow zones are required because the rails are too close together. Under the T’s standard, any section of track where rails are narrower than this measurement — 56 ⅛ inches — aren’t allowed to carry trains unless they travel at no more than 3 miles per hour, a walking pace.
The standards differ by 1/4 of an inch, or about the diameter of a drinking straw, but in railroading, every fraction of an inch counts. A seemingly tiny error could and did put the system on the very edge of failing the safety standard, the T has said. The buffer was gone.
The report showing the tracks had no narrow areas raises questions the T has so far been unable to answer: Why was it produced given construction was still underway? Who saw it? Did T leadership lean on its findings without fully understanding its meaning? Instead of stopping construction to reconcile the two reports, the T seems to have continued building.
Pesaturo confirmed the two differing reports from 2021 are authentic and said the MBTA team handling the construction of the Green Line extension arranged for the machine to examine the tracks. But the T declined the Globe’s public records request for the documents and others examining the tracks, citing security concerns. The Globe has appealed the denial to the secretary of state’s office.
The T’s Maintenance of Way department gave the agency the OK to start running test trains at full speed in December 2021, according to an internal memo obtained by the Globe. The T plowed ahead, and the Union Square branch opened on March 21, 2022, to much praise.
Meanwhile, the T continued to work on the Medford branch.
A month later, the T examined the tracks again. The resulting report found no areas where the tracks were too close together, but didn’t specify what standard that finding was based on, according to a copy of the report obtained by the Globe.
Then in November 2022, with the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Medford branch of the extension fast approaching, another round of measurements, this time by Italian company MERMEC, again revealed a widespread problem, according to internal emails obtained by the Globe.
On the morning of Dec. 1, 2022, a top T engineer told Dalton, then the MBTA’s Green Line extension leader, that the track department had confirmed there were around 30 areas on the Medford branch that were narrower than the maintenance standard, according to internal emails obtained by the Globe. If the rails were not fixed before the ribbon cutting, trains would have to operate at low speeds, the engineer said in an email.
MERMEC and RailPod, the companies that have performed scans of the Green Line extension, did not respond to requests for comment.
The T’s deputy director of the Maintenance of Way department, which oversees track safety, wrote to Dalton and the engineer later that afternoon to clarify that in addition to the 30 or so areas that would require speed restrictions, the agency had another problem on its hands. Almost 24,000 feet of track on the Medford branch was narrower than the stricter standard set by contract, the deputy director said in an email. That’s about 70 percent of the total track on the Medford branch.
“This is outside reasonable construction tolerances and will need to be corrected,” the deputy director wrote.
Days later, a track engineer again raised the larger issue in an email: “The contractor may want to address these time permitting,” he wrote on Dec. 6, 2022.
Three days later, just before the grand opening, a T safety committee met to decide if the Medford branch could open for passenger service. At least two people at the meeting, Dalton and the top engineer, had been emailed about the widespread track gauge problems, according to internal emails obtained by the Globe. But minutes of the meeting obtained by the Globe don’t show a discussion of the tracks. The group deferred the vote about opening, citing pending station inspections, according to the minutes.
Hours after the meeting, the track engineer told Dalton and others that the narrowest areas of tracks had been widened. “Re-gauging of Urgent Narrow Gage locations is complete. All locations have been checked and are now within maintenance standards,” he wrote.
Eng has said that the Green Line extension was safe to operate at full speed when it opened.
The MBTA certified the project as safe to open, and the T’s state safety regulator, the Department of Public Utilities, agreed, according to a spokesperson for that agency. The Federal Transit Administration, which chipped in $1 billion for the project, said the agency certified the T had followed correct procedures, according to a spokesperson. Determining track gauge is not part of the FTA certification process, the spokesperson added.
Eng has said he had “no indication” that there was a rush to open the project on behalf of Baker, who has said through a spokesperson that his office was never informed of the track gauge issues.
Still, the last minute repositioning work before the opening was a shortcut that proved insufficient, Eng said. The T fixed only the most egregious problems without getting to the bottom of why most of the new track did not meet contract specifications.
Eng said widening all of the track to conform with the contract before the opening would have prevented what eventually came to pass: slow zones and shutdowns for repairs that inconvenienced riders.
Because the tracks were built so close to the edge of the T’s maintenance standard, the machines that measure the width between the rails have a hard time distinguishing between what is safe and what requires a speed restriction, Eng has said. Sometimes areas of track previously gone unnoticed by the machine were identified as too narrow and required speed restrictions.
“On one run [of the machine] . . . perhaps it’s OK, another one . . . you need to take immediate action,” he said in October. “And that’s not what I want as an owner. And that’s not what the public deserves.”
For big construction projects such as the Green Line extension, the ribbon cutting ceremony is usually not the finish line. A punch list tracks what still needs to be finished before the contract is closed out.
Current T leaders say getting the tracks to where they were supposed to be was not, at that point, treated as a priority; it was not even on the punch list.
In April, when Eng started as general manager of the MBTA, he knew there were a lot of problems with the beleaguered agency.
He knew the $1 billion project to build new Red and Orange Line cars was years behind schedule; he knew the monthlong shutdown of the entire Orange Line for repairs in 2022 inexplicably resulted in worse track conditions; he knew the installation of Green Line collision prevention equipment that the T was first ordered to provide in 2009 still hasn’t debuted; he knew the $1 billion “fare transformation” system that has moved forward in other cities was stalled here.
But, he said, no one ever told him about the big problem with the new bright spot in his subway system: the Green Line extension.
And the issue would only get worse. A new set of measurements in June found more areas along the Green Line extension were too narrow for trains to operate safely at full speed, according to Eng who said he didn’t learn about the problem until months later, in September.
On June 23, the T implemented slow zones on both branches, ordering trolleys not to exceed 3 miles per hour, a walking pace, in different areas totaling 600 feet of the Green Line extension, according to T data. Still, the agency fixed only the narrowest areas, and left most of the tracks narrower than what the contract required. The Globe didn’t report on the June slow downs and didn’t become aware of them until September.
That month, another machine was back on the tracks uncovering more unsafe areas.
By the close of service on Sept. 20, trains were crawling along sections totaling more than a mile, or about 12 percent, of the total extension track, according to T data.
The bad news had finally reached Eng’s desk six days later in the form of inquiries from the news media about why so much of the brand-new track was so defective less than a year after the project fully opened.
Eng put Rod Brooks, one of four top transportation executives he brought in this year, in charge of figuring out what went wrong. Brooks has 32 years of railroad experience, according to the T, starting as an assistant signalman and most recently working as senior vice president of operations at Long Island Rail Road.
Internal emails obtained by the Globe indicate that no one had adequate answers for Brooks about how widespread defects brought to the attention of T leaders in December 2022 had been left unaddressed for months or why earlier warnings appear to have been missed or ignored.
Several sweeping recent reviews of the agency from independent experts and the FTA have found deep dysfunction.
Reports from an outside expert and the T’s own safety department released in this year found the T’s Maintenance of Way department had been so incompetent at one of its most basic duties — recording and repairing track defects — that the agency did not have an accurate accounting of the areas of the subway system that needed fixing.
The entire agency was neglecting day-to-day operations, maintenance, and safety, according to a report from the FTA last year and a 2019 report from a panel of independent experts.
In October, Eng let go of two managers who had been involved with the project’s construction and named a new leader for the Green Line extension. The changes followed Eng’s major shakeup of the agency’s executive ranks in September.
The T began closing down the Green Line extension early in the evenings each night in late November so that the builders could work on repositioning most of the new track. The work involves unscrewing bolts from tie plates, filling the holes with epoxy or wooden dowels, and then drilling new holes and securing the plates at the correct gauge.
The T initially hoped to have the work completed by Dec. 10. But it wasn’t done in time. T officials announced Thursday they plan to suspend service between North Station and both branches of the Green Line extension in January during two weekends and close the same sections early on 12 nights to continue the work.
Taylor Dolven can be reached at taylor.dolven@globe.com. Follow her @taydolven. Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi. Got a problem? Send your consumer issue to sean.murphy@globe.com. Follow him @spmurphyboston.