LAST TRAM STANDING
Mattapan trolleys battle development, decades
By JULIA REISCHEL
Two rows of bright orange antique trolley cars lie at the end of the Red Line's Mattapan extension. Sixty years ago, before the widespread expansion of subway and bus service, hundreds of cars just like them crammed Boston's streets. Of those hundreds, 10 remain. They're usually confined to the Mattapan High Speed Trolley Line, a 2.2-mile track that winds south from Ashmont, through Dorchester and Milton, to the end of the line here, at the corner of River Street and Blue Hill Avenue.
But these days, the 60-year-old cars (known as PCCs, which stands for Presidents' Conference Committee-a nod to their design-by-committee origins at a 1929 gathering of railway heads) are sitting idly, hidden behind a busway and a moonscape of construction.
The Mattapan Line is the only continuously operating system of PCCs left in the country, although Mattapan-Ashmont trolleys have been off-line for over a year. The T began jettisoning PCCs in the name of progress in the 1950s and 1960s; today, stretches of their track have been razed to make way for an enormous construction project at Ashmont, a gentrification-happy makeover that includes a new T station and a 116-unit condo development, the Carruth, abutting the Red Line tracks.
While Ashmont is being rebuilt, the trolleys have been moldering at the Mattapan carhouse, which finds itself besieged by more construction at the Mattapan station. In their place, the T has been running a temporary "trolley shuttle" (an MBTA bus). Neighbors have become disgruntled; some worry that the "temporary shutdown" might become permanent. After all, the Arborway Line in Jamaica Plain met its fate that way.
The T says that it plans to return the PCCs to service sometime in the fall, though Joe Pesaturo, an MBTA spokesman, won't be specific. ("The fall," a date bandied about often, seems optimistic; the Carruth won't be open and occupied until January, and signs at Ashmont announce that the station, which will serve the trolleys as well as the subway trains, won't be complete until 2009.) In the meantime, Pesaturo says, the trolleys are being retrofitted with air conditioning, trackside stations are being rebuilt, and many of the electric poles along the way are being replaced.
Still, on the storage tracks in Mattapan, the PCCs look forlorn.
Walking between the rows of trolleys, Keith Miranda, the foreman in charge of the PCCs' latest rehab (they were refurbished in 1998 and repainted in their historical colors: cream and "traction orange"), points out the improvements, which seem to be progressing slowly. One car has new insulation. Another has a made-to-order set of fasteners for its doors, which used to have a habit of slamming shut without warning. A new air conditioning system is being designed to replace the current open-air fans.
Miranda is one of a handful of experts the T keeps on staff largely to handle the historical PCCs. Half the time, he's stuck at other carhouses throughout the system, where he repairs buses and Green Line cars, and he jumps at any chance to work with the Mattapan trolleys. He maneuvered his way onto the latest Mattapan trolley job, because, he says, "it's actually fun." But he skirts questions about the history or significance of the Mattapan Line, saying that the people who know the most about these trolleys don't even work at the T. They're civilians who belong to the loosely-affiliated Boston group of railroad and trolley enthusiasts known as "railfans."
Railfans tend to divide into two distinct groups: fans of city transit trains like subways and trolleys (which are collectively known as "electric traction" devices), and admirers of so-called "main line" railroads, such as Amtrak trains, freight trains and the commuter rail. There is a Boston-based group for each sect: the Boston Street Railway Association (BSRA) and the Massachusetts Bay Railroad Enthusiasts (Mass Bay RRE), respectively. Technically, the PCCs should fall squarely into the interests of the BSRA, members of which are sometimes called "trolley jollies" (a label they haven't cottoned to themselves). But the historic line has attracted interest from people across the railfan community.
Miranda says that a man named Vic Campbell routinely asks questions that he can't answer. "Vic's called me a couple of times to say that the lights aren't on," Miranda says. "They're asking me what the gear ratio is. That's their life."
"That's something the T is supposed to know," responds Campbell, a tall, bearded 67-year-old who favors plaid shirts and a green baseball cap. Campbell is Mass Bay RRE's tour leader. He normally leads historical excursions on outmoded railway cars and tours of ancient lines, and trolleys are a bit outside his purview. But he has a special interest in the trolleys -- he grew up in Dorchester and lives in a house that looks out onto the tracks at Ashmont station. "We're waiting with bated breath for service in October," he says, chuckling sardonically.
Gerry O'Regan, a 52-year-old who also grew up riding the trolleys, is the treasurer of the BSRA and another PCC fan. "I'm one of the few people who can ride in one of those PCCs in Mattapan who can get out and tell the operator what's wrong with it," he boasts.
Campbell and O'Regan don't doubt that the trolleys will eventually return, but they say that it's not the T's historical zeal that has kept the PCCs running.
"There is certainly an historical bent to keeping the cars on the line," O'Regan says. "But the T hasn't been very good with restoring historical objects. Until 1967, the [Seashore Trolley Museum in Maine] had to bid on cars as scrap to get them."
While other cities, like San Francisco and Philadelphia, have sought out and bought antique PCCs to use as tourist attractions, the MBTA has been scrapping PCCs for more than half a century. As light rail and buses replaced PCCs, the T would dump the leftovers in Mattapan (which began using PCCs in place of an even older trolley model more than 50 years ago). The cars at the Mattapan carhouse are the last ones standing -- refugees that migrated to Ashmont as the T shut down its other trolley lines. But their sanctuary wasn't safe, either. "There have been efforts by the T every 10 to 20 years to get rid of the trolley line," Campbell says.
In the 1960s, the T considered repurposing the tracks as an extension of the Red Line. In 1981, a nearly broke MBTA suggested replacing the line with buses. And in the 1990s, the agency again looked into possible alternatives to the high-speed line, including having a "guided busway" on the track bed, putting heavier cars on the tracks or abandoning the system entirely. All three times, the surrounding neighborhoods and the town of Milton protested vigorously, and the trolley line was preserved. It was a pleasant surprise, as, even in the face of neighborhood opposition, the agency is accustomed to getting its way. "They shocked everyone," Campbell says.
Campbell suggests that the line's proximity to the home of former House Speaker Tom Finneran might have had something to do with the T's unusual reverence. But if neighborhood support and connected politicians were all it took to get the T to build or preserve a subway line, Somerville would have its Green Line extension, Jamaica Plain would still have its streetcar, and the South End and Dudley would have a subway, not a bunch of buses painted silver.
O'Regan has a more practical explanation: Despite their considerable age, the PCCs are still efficient and cost-effective. "The line tends to work better with those cars than the modern equipment," he says.
Without electronics or even much hardware, the PCCs are simple machines: "Just an on/off switch with a bunch of resistors in the middle," Miranda says. They're easy to maintain and cheap to fix. More than anything, this is probably the key to their continued survival.
"The primary reason the PCCs have survived at Mattapan is the infrastructure of the line itself," says Jonathan Belcher, a railfan and transit historian. "Modern light-rail vehicles, like those on the Green Line, draw more power than PCCs, so they need a more elaborate power distribution system. They weigh more than PCCs, so bridges on the line would need to be beefed up to handle newer cars. They require more sophisticated maintenance facilities than PCCs, so even more capital would have to be spent upgrading the repair facilities at Mattapan to handle newer cars. So far, it has remained more cost effective to keep on rebuilding the PCC cars than to make all of the other changes necessary to operate newer cars."
In other words, the 60-year-old PCCs are in many ways better and cheaper than any other alternative. That's a fact the entire MBTA should notice, O'Regan says, because it's true system-wide.
"They step away from the original designs, and the transit service gets worse," he says. "If they had left what they had in place, it would still be working today."
