Last of the T's rolling rec rooms roll right out of the area
By adamg on Thu, 07/18/2024 - 4:15pm
![Last two old-school Orange Line cars moving out from Wellington yard](https://www.universalhub.com/files/styles/main_image/public/images/2024/lastorangecar.jpg?itok=kMtvu4JC)
Photo by MBTA.
The MBTA snapped the last two 1980s-era Orange Line cars getting hauled out of the Wellington yard to a scrapyard yesterday.
The T reports cars 1280 and 1281 were part of a set of 120 cars built between 1979 and 1981 with then fashionable faux wood paneling (alas, the T did not spring for the disco-ball option) and rode the local rails until 2022, when they were retired during the famous month-long Let's Fix All the Things program (that did not, in fact, result in in Fixes for All the Things) on the Orange Line.
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43 Years
If the current crop of trains last as long (they won't), people will be riding them until 2067.
Prediction
I predict that by 2030, there will be talks on replacing them.
Things are not build the way they used to be built. We see this today in everything from computers to home appliances to cars.
Same can be said about trains. I have zero faith these will last more than 10-15 TOPS.
The CCP Rolling Stock cars are chintzy.
The new Orange Line cars: are not the same hight as the platforms, the protruding monitor over the priority seating spaces exclude people who are barely above the average American height and people with hats, the parts are flimsy, it’s shameful we couldn’t produce them in North America, the spring loaded jump seats have unforgiving corners to crush people’s appendages and I’ve seed old folks fall hard when the spring back up as they try to sit down as the train lurches forward, they are almost as lurchy as the old (penultimate) 71 and 73 trolleys, their computer can’t be configured to speak which side to exit at Forest Hills “Doors will open on the left…..or right” how is that ADA compliant? I do love that they don’t have the gawdawful- is it wet/is it dry graffiti-proof pseudofabric seats, but they are flat and I slide with acceleration. We could have done better. I don’t know if it was the empty “it takes a village” rhetoric and cozying up with China foreign policy agenda at the time, or who were the winners with this deal.