Green envy

The MBTA introduces its new $2 million train. No, it doesn't suck.

by Jason Gay

Green is the color that T riders love to hate. Whether it's slow trains, flooded tracks, or cramped interiors with fewer seats than a Moroccan restaurant, the Green Line often seems like a doddering grandparent, still dickering with bygone technology while its Red, Orange, and Blue peers have graduated into the 20th century.

So imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago, when, standing on the platform at Kenmore station, I was met by a train that looked like something from the set of The Matrix. Wrapped in stainless steel, splashed with massive panel windows, and sleeker than a Gucci pump, this wasn't, as the saying goes, your father's Green Line car. I had to drive it.

Forty-eight hours later, on a gray Friday morning, I'm on my way to Newton's Riverside train depot for a tour. There I'm met by Gerard (Gerry) Morse, the T's deputy director of vehicle engineering manufacturing. An affable man with a head of thick brown hair, Morse is a 17-year T veteran, yet he maintains a child's love for transportation gadgetry. "In our business, we get excited about this," he says. "The public, not so much."

URBAN EYE

Squawking heads

The new Green Line car is linear and sharp, not chubby and curvaceous like its predecessors. Enlarged windows the size of the barracuda tanks at the aquarium give it an airy, wide-open feeling. Electronic route signs have displaced the old illuminated banners on the cab's sides and front, and next to every door is a large blue handicapped-access button encircled in tiny flashing bulbs.

The biggest changes, however, are in the train's interior, which has been redesigned to better accommodate handicapped passengers. To start, all the seating has been rearranged, and some full seats have been abandoned for stool-like seats and benches. Even more radical, passengers now board the train at street level instead of climbing those little stairs. The thing is, the interior must still accommodate the train's raised wheel well, so the east and west sides of the cab stand nearly a foot and a half higher than the street-level center. This is a tad jarring at first: if you're standing in the train's middle, you can't help being freaked out by the people standing high above you to the right and left. It feels as if you're on the set of Solid Gold or something.

The new cars are made by a real melting pot of manufacturers, Morse tells me. Much of the exterior -- the "shell," he calls it -- is built in Italy by Breda Construzioni Ferroviarie, which explains the fashionable design. The train's midsection was completed in Sicily. Its gearbox motors were made in Pittsburgh; the brakes, in South Carolina; the seats, in Chicago; the air-conditioning system, in upstate New York.

"This is a custom-made vehicle," Morse says. "Unlike buying a new Buick, where there are, like, three million [manufactured], there are only 100 of these."

But that's enough to give the Green Line a substantial facelift. At the time of our tour there were only three new Greenies in Boston -- two that run regular routes with the rest of the fleet, and a third that is used for tests. Eventually, Morse says, the line will receive roughly one train a week until the end of 2000. (For you T-o-philes, that means they're going to be phasing out the old Boeing trains, as well as some of the aging Japanese-made Kinki cars.)

Before we leave the yard at Riverside, Morse offers to let me take the controls. Here is a partial list of activities that are more difficult than driving the new Green Line train: using a remote control, peeling an orange, unbuttoning a shirt, buttering toast, petting a dog, turning off a faucet, and snapping your fingers. To accelerate, you simply grab a lever on the left-hand side, twist, and pull; if you release, the train brakes automatically. That's it. (In fairness, it's a totally different ball game to drive a train through busy city streets, among people and automobiles, than in an empty rail yard.)

So driving the new train isn't exactly Formula 500 racing. But there's plenty to amuse you here; Morse is especially keen on the new train's CD-quality automated-voice system, which replaces those old frizzly intercoms that sounded worse than a Burger King drive-through. All the stop announcements are done by Frank Oglesby, a T human-resources manager who is now the official voice of the Green and Red Lines. (For T-o-philes: the woman who says "Mass Eye and Ear" at the Red Line's Charles/MGH stop is Kelly Ganley, Morse's administrative assistant.)

Our trip through Newton and Brookline and on into Boston's bowels is mostly seamless. The new train rides smoothly and seems more spacious than its predecessors: even when it's packed, it doesn't feel like a can of Prince Albert. The passengers don't seem to mind the multi-level seating or even the stool seats, which take some getting used to.

Still, some things stay the same. When the train arrives in Boylston station, a middle-aged gentleman, clearly under the influence of alcohol, demonstrates the efficiency of the street-level entry system by stepping inside the car and immediately falling face down. Morse, with assistance from some of his T colleagues, helps the man to his feet and over to a bench. Two-million-dollar trains or not, it's never easy being Green.