After a series of delays, the Medford branch of the Green Line extension finally has an opening date: Dec. 12, MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak said.
Poftak said the long-awaited Phase 2 branch, which will travel through Somerville to Tufts University in Medford and include five new stations, will open at the start of service, at 4:45 a.m.
“Our original hope was to be opening towards the end of November,” Poftak said at Thursday’s MBTA Board of Directors meeting. “We had some additional work that we wanted to get done.
“We also wanted to be sure that we were doing everything we needed to do, not only on the Medford branch, but across our system. We wanted to make sure that we did it safely and that we did it properly.”
Planned for decades, the $2.3 billion Green Line extension will add light rail service up through Somerville. The Union Square branch opened in March, but the much longer Phase 2 branch to Medford, with four new stops in Somerville, has seen multiple delays.
It was initially set to open in 2021, a date the T pushed back to first late summer, and then to late November. The Union Square branch was shut down from Aug. 22 to Sept. 18 for “final-phase construction work.”
Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn said hundreds of Tufts students and thousands of residents, particularly those who live in the Hillside neighborhood and south Medford, will utilize the city’s new Green Line stop.
“The city and our residents have worked on this for two decades,” Lungo-Koehn said. “This is a huge deal for Tufts University and all of our residents here in Medford.”
Currently, Hillside and south Medford residents have to drive, take the bus, travel a few miles to Wellington for the Orange Line, or head to Somerville to take the Red Line from Davis station. There’s also a commuter rail in west Medford, she said.
Lungo-Koehn said late Thursday afternoon that she’s been involved in “non-stop” meetings regarding the GLX Medford branch since taking office three years ago, but only became aware of the Dec. 12 opening date “within the last 24 hours.”
“I think everybody is extremely frustrated with the delays. The last few weeks have been extremely frustrating because they kept saying the end of the month,” Lungo-Koehn said, adding that she preferred to focus on the “positive news,” of the T setting a date.
Poftak said the T has been “working hard to get ready” for the opening, which included running Medford branch test trains every day for “a number of weeks” and getting two new traction power substations located along the branch up and running.
According to Conservation Law Foundation, both new GLX branches are a result of its lawsuit regarding Big Dig emissions.
“It’s long past time for residents of Somerville and Medford to have access to reliable rapid transit,” said Staci Rubin, CLF vice president of environmental justice. “We’ll be holding the T accountable to make sure there are no more delays to this project that has spanned decades.”
