When was the "A" Watertown line closed for good

Just out of curiousity, when was the decision made to premanently close down the "A" line? Was it the 80s or around 1994?

The line was suspended due to car shortages in 1964, and the tracks were ripped out of the street in the mid 90's. The Watertown yard remained open to service trolleys until the tracks were ripped up.

Are you sure that it was suspended in '64. I thought it was 1969.

MBTA1 wrote:Are you sure that it was suspended in '64. I thought it was 1969.

Yup it was in 69

Regular revenue service to Watertown ended on June 21, 1969. Occasion fan trip charters ran over the line into at least the early 1980s.

MBTA1 wrote:Are you sure that it was suspended in '64. I thought it was 1969.

1969...although the T did a bunch of mini-suspensions throughout the 1960's because of the car shortage. The permanent "temporary" suspension happened not too long after the line reopened again after another suspension. This is exactly how Arborway went...it went in and out of service throughout the early 80's, then came back and everybody thought it was going to stay, then the T pulled the rug out by never bringing it back after reconstruction of the Northeastern incline was complete. The trackage in Union Square and the Oak Square loop were reconstructed during the 1980's as the T made an insincere show of restoring service. Had the Boeings not run into so many problems causing the car order to be curtailed they might've had enough cars to have had no excuses not to...but wasn't meant to be. Restoration was constantly touch and go right up to 1994 with a lot of ignored non-binding initiatives (just like Arborway!). The complication with this line was the town of Newton, which was much more lukewarm about restoration...in part because of the dangerous Mass Pike crossing where the trolleys went the wrong way against one-way mult-lane vehicle traffic (many think the T designed the rebuilt tracks that way on purpose to kill the line). But they still came pretty close to getting revenue service back to Oak Square loop as a first step to complete restoration.

When the last initiative finally failed in '94, wires and some of the tracks came down IMMEDIATELY...the rest were gone in 1998 when all of the streets in the Brighton section of that corridor were reconstructed. Up until then the line was still completely functional right up to Watertown Yard and there were non-revenue (mostly overnight) moves pretty frequently as cars were push-pulled to the yard for body work (which was concentrated at Watertown). There were operational (if badly decaying) PCC's stored in the yard the whole time, and they did most of the movements...although the two pole-equipped LRV's made occasional trips out there as well. There were even Type 7's sent out there, although they had to be towed pantos-down because the old overhead was incompatible. Nycsubway.org has some nice pictures of fantrips on the line in the 70's and 80's, including one in an LRV.

After '94 the T kept a small pocket track active and electrified past the Packard's Corner junction for about a block until some stupid local businesses on Brighton Ave. lobbied to get even those wires taken down and those tracks paved over within the last 3 years...depriving the B line of the only place between Blandford St. and Chestnut Hill Ave. to stuff a disabled train. Petty stuff. They replaced the trolley poles for that pocket track with stupid flagpoles in the middle of the median. I actually saw a distressed-looking LRV go park on that pocket track around '97 right before the start of service at 5:00am...was walking home and crossing Packard's Corner, and the dang thing just kept going straight and didn't make the turn up Comm Ave. Scared the hell out of me. Of course the Brighton Ave. tracks were still completely intact back then so it looked like a potentially active trolley line...but I think the wires were only energized for a couple car length's. I don't think it was ever used except in dire emergencies because it was street-running trackage just before a major intersection.

Wow! thanks for the info. That was great. Did the residents of Brighton, Newton or Watertown oppose the restoration at all? I actually heard somewhere that newton wanted to bring it back at some point.

rhodiecub2 wrote:Wow! thanks for the info. That was great. Did the residents of Brighton, Newton or Watertown oppose the restoration at all? I actually heard somewhere that newton wanted to bring it back at some point.

Newton had some NIMBY's...but I think their biggest issue was that problematic Mass Pike crossing (whose construction necessitated one of the line closures in the 1960's, and which was only in revenue service for a little while). If you've ever driven over that thing (it's near Route 16) you'd wonder how a trolley could ever survive going against the flow of traffic. Brighton had some of the merchants who wanted their delivery trucks to double-park, just like J.P. does. Support was more uniform among their residents, although they were kind of failed by Boston's politicians not getting behind them fully enough. After 25 years without trolley, though, there simply weren't enough people who remembered what service was like to sustain support other than the few real gung-ho people who were organizing for restoration (and coming close a few times to get it done). There was slightly less urgency in that corridor because the 57 bus isn't as problematic as the 39 is in the E corridor. It runs limited between Kenmore and Packard's Corner and thus doesn't get quite as far slowed-down or provide asinine duplicate service like the notoriously slow 39 does. That probably took enough of the edge off the general frustration people who didn't remember the trolleys had with the bus to keep them from getting as outraged as some of the J.P. folks did. The T was just able to out-wait, out-delay, and out-live the restoration supporters...and the fact that politicians weren't watching over them quite as closely on Watertown let them get away with the same sort of underhanded things they're doing on Arborway, but without getting sued for it.

Case in point...until 1985 the T had two yards to hold the PCC fleet, Arborway and Watertown. Arborway got most of the active service cars and generally the cream of the crop, while Watertown stored some of the extras and some of the more falling-apart operational cars, and was the major service facility for the fleet. A lot of the non-revenue moves along the A trackage were to exchange cars with Arborway yard. Well...when Arborway was shut down the track connection to the rest of the system was severed. The E incline was rebuilt, and then Arborway yard was severed as new Forest Hills was built and the street-running trackage was replaced for the full length of the line in '86 and '87. The track connection was restored, but Arborway yard never got new wires hooking it back onto Centre street (to this day there are no poles to be seen there). Well, that "best and brightest" PCC fleet just stayed there entombed in the yard and got the living hell vandalized and weather-decayed out of it until the cars were useless and had to be sold off. Meanwhile, the Watertown secondary PCC fleet wasn't so hot to begin with...so those cars couldn't run either.

Gee...you know, the smart thing a transit agency trying to conserve its shortage-wracked car fleet could've done was move all the working active-service cars out of Arborway before the track connection got severed for 2+ years and take those back to Watertown (a full-time maintenance facility where they wouldn't be as much sitting ducks in the yard)...and maybe move some of the junk from Watertown to Arborway if it needs to be stored somewhere it can rust without supervision. There might've been enough working PCC's left that way to actually enhance Green Line service on the other lines while they were waiting for the Type 7 order to come in and rescue the problematic LRV's...and then enough after the Kinkis were active to restore either Arborway immediately or more likely put Watertown on the fast track (because that was the system's primary PCC maintenance facility). Who'da thunk? Instead the PCC fleet was almost a total loss except for a few working cars they salvaged for Mattapan service...and the fleet's demise was actually one of the reasons cited as to why Heath and Arborway weren't restored in 1987. Criminal...absolutely criminal.


It really is too bad service couldn't go to Oak Square. When you think of how many people live in that corridor and especially how many college kids, how much urban renewal is going on there, and the fact that there's a major medical center that used to have a Green Line stop right in front of it...there should've been rail transit. The A had higher ridership than the B before it went away, and it was very effective at balancing out the load on the B. The B wouldn't be nearly the crowded, sluggish mess it is today if its parallel sibling were still in operation to absorb the crowds. You could even do something on the Comm Ave. reservation like extending the Blandford third track all the way out to Packard's Corner and express the longer B on it during rush hour while letting the shorter A handle local traffic. And the street-running is less problematic there (at least out to Oak Square) than it is on the E in Jamaica Plain. There is and always was a median on Brighton Ave., and there are places in other small parts to put a quasi-reservation. The only place it would've been difficult was on the last leg from Oak to Watertown...but that was lower ridership anyway. One of the proposals Newton floated to at least get the line partially restored was to string up a second wire and extend the Watertown TT lines to Oak Square. That would've worked. Now there's no rail transit whatsoever there...and the T finds itself needing some equivalent either from some convoluted light-rail upgrade to the commuter rail or from an Urban Ring BRT line. They had their transit in Brighton, and they blew it. It sucks. There are so many great places out that way I would've gone to more often all these years if I could just get a freakin' one-seat ride instead of taking the bus or packing like sardines on the B and walking half a mile.

I don't see what was the big deal about having one block of contraflow trolley traffic in Newton corner. It's no different than the contraflow lane for Silver Line buses on Washington Street, and that seems to work OK.

Then clearly you've never tried coming off Washington Street into Newton Corner and trying to merge through 3 or 4 lanes of rush-hour traffic so you can get onto the Pike wesbound. It's bad enough with just cars, so I can't imagine trying to do that with a trolley coming straight at me.

I'm a native son of Brighton, and when I was a kid I always wished service would come back eventually (I used to love seeing the guys who pushed a little hand-car along the tracks in the annual A-B parade), but I never understood how it would work at that intersection.

I was looking at Bill Volkmer's Boston Trolleys in Color: Volume 1, which has fantastic photos of PCCs passing right through my neighborhood in the '50s and '60s, and wondered what could have been if I'd taken the train to school every day instead of the 57 bus. Traffic sometimes gets heavy during rush-hour on weekdays in Brighton Center, though, so street-running is just hard to get away with in this day and age and on Boston's not-so-wide streets.

Just look at my screen name...lol aline1969

Anyway...Fred Maloney was the lead man in charge of the group..."Brighton,Newton,Watertown for better transit" Fred would put up pro transit flyers on the metal line poles and he said business owners would tear them down, badnesses That is why I hate with a passion... the bakery in Brighton center, they were big time anti trolley. They rather have double parked cars. Well double parking blocks resue equipment more than a moving streetcar!!! I always hated that place...then in 1999 they put four large prints in their window of streetcars in brighton center. I blasted the owner saying you absolute loser. Just like the bike shop owner on south street in JP, that guy is for the birds too, idiot.

The Mass Pike overpass in Newton Corner really was interesting for inbound Watertown cars... basically they just went through there slowly on the track closest to the curb and hoped the autos heading in the other direction stayed out of the way. But back in the 1960s the concept of street running trolleys wasn't as foreign to Boston drivers as it is today. People knew what the tracks were for and that the big orange things couldn't stop on a dime.

I moved to Brighton in 1969 and had a chance to ride the line a bunch of times in its last months. I agree with Mr. F-line that the service didn't die of natural causes, it was murdered by T management and the NIMBYs, just like Arborway two decades later.

As someone who lives on the Allston/Brighton line, I definitely see the benefits of more light rail service to improve the neighborhood. I live on Comm. Ave on the B line, so whether or not there were an A line wouldn't affect me much, but I do understand what it would do for the residents of the rest of my neighborhood. Most of the people in Brighton have cars that congest the neighborhood badly. If you aren't sure of this, try driving down Harvard Ave between Brighton Ave and Comm Ave at rush hour. Even a few more people on a train would make a difference, and it would make the neighborhood more attractive.
Is it any coincidence that the streets within a few blocks of the B line are nice than those far from it?
Others in the forum have shown clearly that Newton would be opposed to more rail service, why that is, I'm still not sure. However, why not just screw them? Have the A line just run to Oak Sq. It's a very densely populated part of the city.
If the MBTA argues based on finances, I can't imagine that rebuilding tracks along Brighton Ave would be particularly expensive considering all the money they waste on things like the Silver Line. I also think that we all understand that an "equipment shortage" was a bunch of baloney. Perhaps the best thing for the MBTA would be a favorable public opinion. The few businesses who may complain at first could easily be dealt with by a good public relations firm.
The bottom line is that the Green Line is a venerable, well-used transit line by our city and has the potential to be an example for the rest of the country for efficiency and service if only the managers at the MBTA would realize it.
It's always amazed me how the Green Line management seems to have a great deal of self-loathing. That is, their attitude is always to scale back whatever they do, never to increase or to improve.

At least the Watertown Line riders were given Mass Pike express bus service as part of the bus replacement. For many riders on the outer end of the line, this was probably an improvement over the PCC service and the express buses have been well patronized over the years. I think it would have made sense to restore the A line to Oak Square and continue to run the 501 and 504 express buses, with the 57 cut back as a Watertown-Oak Square connector with free transfers to the LRV's.

Jim D.

I noticed when the Watertown line got suspended, the MBTA immediately took it off the maps. The Arboroway line which was on the maps until the mid 90s.