Meanwhile, while the New Red/Orange Cars thread starts losing grip on reality. . .
Third-from-last Type 9 delivery arrived on the property last week for testing. CAF only has 2 units left to deliver. 16 in-service, 6 in-testing. Overall they're noticeably more frequent these days on the general rotation. Last Sat. I noticed them taking up about 1 out of every 4 B Line trips over a couple-hour span along Comm Ave.
With 202 active cars, the GL fleet is now the largest it's been since the last Boeings were retired 13 years ago. Max-size roster is 219 when figuring 8 more Type 9 acceptances, 2 Type 7 rebuilds that are short-term idled for shop work, and 7 Type 8's that are sidelined long-term from unavailable parts (to be fixed when midlife fleet component refresh program goes out to bid).
We're now sitting pretty much on the fleet uptime threshold for giving 3-car trains another go. Trialing it on the D and/or B could be something they seek to do on experimental basis quickly after completion of the ongoing track replacement blitzes and temp bustitutions. Mid-Fall schedule revision after the state's passed through all its most crucial biz-open phases would be the ripest time to try it, because they can do the data collection and tweaking while the system is still operating very unstressed by the in-progress ridership recovery and operating under a shorter/simpler dispatching bench with service truncated temporarily at North Station.