A moving MBTA Green Line train ran into an out-of-service train parked at East Somerville just after midnight on February 9, 2025, and five people went to the hospital: four train operators and one passenger. Here’s what it means, in plain terms: Boston’s light-rail workhorse had a collision on its newest stretch of track, and most of the people hurt were the ones driving the trains.
That passenger was admitted to hospital and later released, the transit authority said in a statement, with a reported neck injury. While it scrambled to line up shuttle buses in place of trains, thousands of passengers were left working out how to get home. The authority’s words were blunt: “Incidents of this nature are unacceptable, and the T is committed to learning what happened here and taking any steps necessary to prevent it from happening again,” with a pledge to work alongside the National Transportation Safety Board and “closely review their findings.”
Investigators arrived quickly. The NTSB, the independent federal agency that examines transportation accidents, opened an on-scene investigation the day of the crash, and the Federal Transit Administration, which inspects the system’s safety, was notified as well. It was the second incident in four months to draw the board’s attention, coming after an October 1 derailment near Lechmere station, and both occurred on the same portion of the Green Line Extension, the Extension’s Medford/Tufts and Union Square branches.
The context is hard to ignore. A 2022 Federal Transit Administration report listed more than 50 problems the T was ordered to address across staffing, workplace culture and operating policies, finding daily operations squeezed by bigger capital projects. Training for operations and maintenance staff was described as “under-resourced, decentralized … and relies significantly on on-the-job training, which is informal.”
Since April 2023 the authority has been run by Phillip Eng, a longtime New York railroad engineer brought in by the Healey-Driscoll administration, and progress has been real: Red Line slow zones cleared, and the Extension’s too-narrow tracks fixed shortly after opening. But a report released in November put the full repair bill for aging infrastructure at $24.5 billion. Think of it like a car driven years past its service date: fix one system and the next one starts knocking. The practical upshot for riders is a network being repaired and breaking down at the same time, now with federal investigators taking notes.
Sources
- Green Line train crashes into out-of-service train at East Somerville stop Feb. 9
- Investigation finds speeding, ignored signal to blame for MBTA crash costing $6.6M – NewsBreak
Sources
- Second derailment in days sends T into chaos – The Boston Globe
- At least 10 people injured in Green Line derailment near Kenmore
