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In the 1600s if people from Chelsea wanted to get into Boston it would take them 2 days. So in 1631, Charles Williams made the first ever charted transit service in the country. Which had a ferry between what is now the North End and Charlestown. In the late 1700s a stagecoach was made to connect Boston and Cambridge. By the early 1800s a bigger stagecoach called the Omnibus, was making stops on routes they knew they were going to. In the later half of the 1800s, the region has horse powered cars on rails between Central Square and Bowdoin Square in Boston, which eventually led to around 20 company’s to form in 1887 to service the city. The competition and fares were a lot so the state legislature consolidated the companies into the private West End Street Railway.

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Boston now had one of the largest street railway operation in the country with more than 8,000 horses, but it wasn’t a good way of transporting all the horses needed food, and they were very slow because of being overworked and their poop was all over the streets. “Electric powered streetcars, by contrast, were pollution-free,” says the Allston-Brighton Historical Society. They were also a lot faster than horse powered cars as the electric cars go 10-15 mph while the horse powered cars would only go 5-6 mph. Another perk of electric powered street cars is that they could carry more passengers which would make the fares cheaper. In 1887 Henry M. Whitney the person who is credited for railway construction, went to Richmond, Virginia, where they were testing out electric powered street cars with the Union Passenger Railway Company. When his research was done, Whitney made an electric train route from Allston’s Braintree Street to Back Bay’s Park Square. It began service on January 1, 1889, and went to Allston Railroad Depot, up Harvard Avenue, left at Coolidge Corner to Park Square. This is now part of the Green Line’s C branch. Electric streetcar lines started popping up all over the city because of private investor and ventures. Simpler to those today.

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1897: The hemisphere’s first subway emerges

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1897: The hemisphere’s first subway emerges

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The electric street cars were so slow that the passengers said that it would be faster to climb onto the top of the stopped cars and walk to where they were going. Something needed to change and people started talking of a subway in the city, the Rapid Transit Commission suggested four elevated railway lines and a tunnel for street cars under Tremont Street. The subway started running on Wednesday, September 1, 1897. “Out of the sunlight of the morning and into the white light of the subway rolled the first passenger carrying car at 6.01” “The car was from Allston, and it approached the immense yawn in the earth by the way of Pearl st, Cambridgeport, and the Harvard bridge.” Most of the riders, especially the women were thrilled, “O, dear, isn’t it delightful!” Says one passenger “O, come, and let us ride it around again.” Says another. As Boston entered the 20th century, more subways emerged, as well as elevated railway lines.

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“El” was talked about a lot for a little bit, and it took the Boston Elevated Railway Company years to implement it. After a ceremony on January 20, 1899, the company built 7 miles of olive green elevated track, 10 different elevated stations, and 2 large multilevel terminals. The company also gained 150 cars. At 5 a.m. on Monday June 10, 1901, the main elevated line opened to the public between Roxbury’s Dudley Square and Charlestown’s Sullivan Square. The departure gongs were activated at 5:30 as the first trains left the station, setting off 86 years of El service in Boston. By 1909, El ran from Everett to Boston’s Forest Hills, with a section that went above Washington Street. El would be used with the subway and a large number of trolley lines. By 1930, almost 75% of the people traveling in and out of downtown Boston used public transit systems or walked. In comparison, in 2018 46% of people ether drove or carpooled in and out of the city, and 34% took public transit. El was expansive, connecting neighborhoods and providing more routes than there are today. By 1943, 325,000 people a day were riding El trains “By then, the Boston Elevated Railway provided service on 52 different street car lines.”

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The quasi-governmental Metropolitan Authority took over El in 1947, absorbing the entire Boston Elevated Railway system. The system was considered “a political subdivision of the Commonwealth,” and it served 14 cities and towns that were “metro Boston”: Arlington, Belmont, Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Medford, Milton, Newton, Revere, Somerville, and Watertown. But the mass transit was becoming too crowded, and Bostonians were tired of looking at the elevated trackers and proffered the the portions of the train underground.

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In 1957, the MTA expanded the  Newton Highlands Branch of the Boston and Albany Railroad, with service starting in 1959. Today this is the Green Line’s D branch, with service between Boston and Newton. During this expansion came demolition. By the mid-1960s, the Orange Line El was beginning to get tore down, eventually giving way to a subway line. The last El track was demolished in 2004. As the number of car travelers grew, alongside new traffic in 1960s, the MTA began to suffer financially as traffic got worse and more people were using trains. The MTA’s financial problems worsened as it tried to meet the demand. Following a study, lawmakers decided to combine all the railroads into one public transit system, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Which became a state agency in 1964. Soon after its start, the MBTA tried to get federal funding to modernize 10 different mass transit stations: Copley, Maverick, Prudential, Orient Heights, Government Center/Blue and Green Lines, Fields Corner, Colombia, Kenmore, Haymarket, and Arlington. There have been a lot more change to the T since then.

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Partially because of gas prices, T riders rose during the 1970s exposing the aging systems problems. On December 6, 1980, the T shut down for a day due to lack of funds. “The last train for Boston pulled out of Harvard/Brattle Station at 11:32 p.m.; attendants then stood in the doorways and told passengers that the service had shut down,” “No more trains” a T worker said, “For how long?” Asked a passenger, “Maybe forever” he answered. To stop this from happening again, the MBTA was put under the Massachusetts Department of Transportation umbrella. In the last 10 years, the troubled MBTA and its T stories have continued to unfold, most of this can be brought back to its age, its debt, its need of repairs, and the population growth of Mass. the most recent major problem came from a Red Line derailment in June, 2019, which was caused by a broken axel.