Boston, MA - MBTA Ashmont-Mattapan Hi-Speed Line

How could I not ride this line? I'm FROM here.

I used to ride PCCs similar to, or exactly like these when I was a kid.  They were painted green back then as I grew up on the D branch of the Green Line and my mom would take me into preschool at Copley while she went to work at the French library a couple of blocks away in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Unfortunately, this is what has become of most of the old Green Line PCCs.

There was even a train driver we called "The Singing Conductor" who sang each stop through the intercom. Occasionally he would let me stand up front, ring the bell, and open the doors. Yes, a 3 year old driving a 21 ton train. Hey, it was the 70s.

Back to a more recent past...

As usual, we went back to Boston for the holidays to revisit our roots. I planned on taking the Red Line from Alewife (closest stop to where we were staying) all the way to Ashmont in Dorchester, then grabbing a roundtrip ride the Ashmont-Mattapan line, or the M-Line as it is casually known. As many holidays are, especially when visiting old friends and family, things got busy and things didn't look great for riding the M-Line. Fortunately because of the horrible weather that had been going on, JetBlue (best airline) was offering free changes to tickets. So why not stay another week?

A look at the Red Line. Alewife is top-left. Ashmont-Mattapan is bottom-middle.

A couple of days before our flight, we decided it was time. We jumped on the Red Line and headed out. About an hour later, we arrived at Ashmont and waited....and waited...it's about 20 degrees, so 5 minutes feels more like 30. At last, there it was. 

The M-Line after it dropped us back off at the Ashmont station.

It's a strange line because it runs the seam of two very different neighborhoods. On the right side of the car (traveling outbound) you have Dorchester and Mattapan, two historically working class and sometimes impoverished areas of Boston. On the left is Milton, MA, an upscale town where families rake in an average of $131,000 per year. Kind of Boston in a nutshell though. Something as narrow as the Neponset River can be the difference between the struggle and the good life. Crazy place I grew up in.

This was my favorite so far of the three cities. One, it's home. Two, this train isn't a tourist attraction like the San Francisco and San Pedro. People use it to get to work and home. It runs through a graveyard and the backwoods next to the river. So I guess this just felt the most genuine and brought me closer to 1979 than the others.

BONUS:

On our way back we jumped off the Red Line at Park Street and headed over to the Boylston (Green Line) stop. I wanted to see if they still stored 2 old streetcars there, a PCC and an even earlier generation MTA car. Indeed they were. They're enclosed on an isolated track so there was no way to take much of a closer look, but they were still worth the detour.

An old MTA Boston Elevated Railway car behind a fence at Boylston.