T riders get to vote on paint schemes for new trains; no word on vote to retain wood paneling on the Orange Line

I picked that for Orange and Red. Would have been nice to have a parallel design for the Green, though.

Those are my choices.

It's very '90s - which is still decades newer-looking than what we've got now, but not something I'm wild about.

The one Adam has selected looks like it's sprayed with Propulsion Gel from Portal. This is a fantastic idea -- the trains will finally move quickly!

This is my favorite design too but I think in time it won't look as nice and the designs with the orange on the bottom of the car will do a better job indicating which line the train is on. (Helpful to those from out of town.)

That painters get paid nearly in the six figures, yeah? I'd say the less surface area to paint the better. Search for "Rail Maint Red Cabot" as the department under the MBTA's payroll (job title: painter) here:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/databases/payroll?database=9&ye...

Not bad pay for what amounts to industrial spray-painting.

In most of those cities, they can't really have cars painted for each line, because cars can run on pretty much any line at any time. (New York City has two loading gauges, London 4 or 5, Chicago 1, etc.) So while most of those cities have color-coded lines, it doesn't make sense to paint cars for a certain line and really preclude their use on other lines.

In Boston, however, the loading gauges are different for each line. Basically what happened was that the Green Line was built for trolleys and was immediately over capacity, so the Orange Line was built for the elevated trains (which were longer but still rather narrow), and that was over capacity, so they built the Red Line which was pretty much the largest subway car around in 1912. The Blue Line was converted from streetcars to rapid transit cars in 1924.

In any case, now and in the future each line will run different rolling stock (and, no, converting everything to run one type of cars would either require a significant reduction in capacity with narrower cars on the Red Line or inconceivably complex tunnel work, plus there are no track connections between lines anyway). And since the cars are all segregated, they can be painted in the colors of the line.

Which is useful. If you're a tourist, and you're getting on the Blue Line, it's nice when the car that shows up is blue. If you were designing the system from scratch, you would certainly design all the cars with the same loading gauge with each line having a track connection (like DC did). But that wasn't the case. The color-coded cars are a small consolation.

Instead of a unified system, where any train can operate on any line, The Ⓣ has kept every line distinctly different from each other, such that trains must be custom-designed, specifically for each individual line. The reasons it got that way, go back to design constraints that evolved over the past century.

There are lively discussions among Railfans that explain the many individual restrictions and other details — for example, Blue Line cars are shorter than Orange Line cars because they need to wrap around the tight loop at Bowdoin. Orange Line cars are smaller than Red Line cars because they need to fit through the ancient Washington Street tunnels.

When the modern Orange Line was constructed in the 1980's, there was an opportunity to make it compatible with the Red Line by reconstructing the Washington Street tunnel, and replacing the stations at State, Milk, Summer, Winter and Chinatown. I'm sure the high cost and disruption involved, caused that option to be discarded at the time.

When the Red/Blue connector is eventually constructed, the Bowdoin loop will be eliminated, so it's a shame (in many ways) that hasn't been done by now, as was promised in the Big Dig mitigation.

Fixing all the incompatibilities would have cost a lot of money, but it would have saved a lot more in the long run. Universal trains (and tracks) would cost much less to procure and maintain, than four highly specialized designs.

So, if they must be different, why not give each train its own personal color?

bus-style seating drastically cuts capacity of the cars, and considering the already existing capacity crunch on the GL, that seems like a poor choice. The better choice would be to decrease the starting and stopping: better for riders, for the mechanicals, and eliminating some stops would speed up the line (by a lot). Add in Transit Signal Priority, and you've got yourself a quick, smooth ride. (Relative to what's there now at least).

1, 2, 3, if anyone was interested.