The line of track that brought Green Line service into Somerville opened in late March, 32 years after the state promised to extend the service. Customers will have access to free shuttle buses during the closure. Service will resume on Sept. 19, the MBTA said.
The opening of the Medford branch of the Green Line extension has also been beset by repeated delays. It was slated to begin carrying passengers in December, then May, then this summer. Test trains began operating on the new branch on May 14, the MBTA has said. The MBTA didn’t specify the date in late November that it expects the service to be available.
The Medford branch includes five stations: College Avenue, Ball Square, Magoun Square, Gilman Square, and East Somerville.
Since a Green Line collision in July 2021, the T has experienced a litany of troubles: An escalator malfunctioned at Back Bay Station causing a bloody pileup and injuring nine people, a commuter rail train killed a woman in her car after a crossing signal in Wilmington malfunctioned, another two Green Line trains crashed and derailed injuring four people, and a man was dragged to his death by a Red Line train at Broadway Station after his arm got caught in a subway door.
The death brought intense scrutiny from federal transit safety regulators who began a nearly unprecedented inspection of the subway system in mid-April. The Federal Transit Administration is expected to release its final report about the T this month.
In June, the FTA said it found that the MBTA didn’t have enough dispatchers to safely operate its subway, so the agency cut service on the Orange, Blue, and Red lines by more than 20 percent. Federal inspectors also said the T needed to fix and upgrade large swaths of its subway tracks.
Material from previous Globe stories was used in this report.
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @lauracrimaldi. Taylor Dolven can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @taydolven.