MBTA South Coast rail service begins, after decades on the siding

A long-awaited project to expand the MBTA Commuter Rail is finally a reality: Monday marks the start of South Coast Rail service.

MBTA General Manager Phili Eng called it a truly monumental moment. Taunton, Fall River and New Bedford were the only major cities within 50 miles of Boston without commuter rail access to Boston. But that changed Monday. Passengers from those areas will now be able to take a 90-minute ride to and from Boston's South Station.

There are six new stations connected as part of this project:

• Middleborough*
• East Taunton
• Freetown
• Fall River Depot
• Church Street Station (located in New Bedford)
• New Bedford on Acushnet Avenue

*This is a new station replacing the current Middleborough/Lakeville station. The existing Middleborough/Lakeville station will be renamed Lakeville and commuter rail trains will no longer stop, though it will still service the seasonal CapeFLYER trains.

All six stations are fully accessible.

After 800 safety functions were tested on the trains, the Federal Railroad Administration gave the approval last week to begin service.

On weekdays, trains will run every 70 minutes. There will be 32 direct trips to or from South Station. On weekends, trains will run about every two hours, and there will be late-night, service, with the last southbound trains leaving Boston around midnight. See the full service schedule here.

The project is decades in the making.

The region has lacked rail service for the past 65 years, and the new line joins a string of others into Boston. At a celebratory ribbon cutting event in Taunton on Monday, Gov. Maura Healey and her administration expressed excitement for the project and said it was a sign of what is possible across the entire state.

"In a state as economically diverse Massachusetts where people commute from rural towns to cities and everywhere in between, rail represents much more than a ride. It is a symbol of access, it is a symbol of opportunity to mobility to each other," Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said.

For some, it has been a longtime dream in the making.

Sen. Mark Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat and former president of the Fall River Chamber of Commerce, has served in the Legislature since the 1990s. As Montigny reflected on the "political capital spent" over the years on commuter rail, he told the News Service Friday that "it's the strangest emotional feeling" to prepare for opening day.

In 1994, a year after he joined the Senate, he secured nearly $3.5 million in a bond bill for a study exploring the environmental impact of extending commuter rail service to New Bedford and Fall River, plus $1 million for a feasibility study to bring commuter rail to New Bedford via Taunton, his office said.

Montigny, now the Senate dean, counts a litany of other legislative victories tied to South Coast Rail. For example, there was the law directing the MBTA in 1997 to start the design and permitting process for tracks stretching from New Bedford and Fall River to Myricks Junction in Berkeley; the 2000 law instructing the MBTA to use the Stoughton commuter rail route to extend service to New Bedford and Fall River, buoyed by $225 million in bonding capacity for the southern part of the route; and the 2008 law where he secured an additional $30 million in bonding capacity. And $2.3 billion in South Coast Rail improvements, championed by Montigny and the regional delegation, made it into the 2014 transportation bond law, his office said.

Within days of taking office, former Gov. Mitt Romney told Montigny that he did not support South Coast Rail, the senator said. By around 2010, Montigny said he had hit a period of "complete pessimism" as the project dragged on under multiple governors.

"I started to become pessimistic to the point where, if you called me around then, I would have said, I don't have faith, as my mother would say, that it's coming in our lifetime," Montigny said.

He said he became "cautiously optimistic" under former Gov. Charlie Baker, whose administration agreed to a two-phase approach for South Coast Rail in 2017.

"Remember, he was secretary of A&F, so I worked with him on some of the original stuff," Montigny, a former Ways and Means Committee chair, said of Baker's tenure under Weld and former Gov. Paul Cellucci. "So he thought it was kind of funny, here I am somehow still here…How did this take my entire adult life?"

South Coast Rail's bumpy journey, featuring several groundbreaking ceremonies but no actual rail service until now, has come with ballooning costs. The MBTA has also had to delay the project due to a lack of funds.

In 2002, when the MBTA was projecting a 2007 opening date, total costs were estimated at $600 million, according to The Herald News. The price neared $1 billion in 2005, before climbing beyond $2 billion in 2014.

Amid all the setbacks and false starts over the years, Montigny has aired his frustrations to governors and transportation chiefs. In a letter to Weld in 1993, Montigny said, "I am writing to register my distress at the MBTA's failure to make a priority of the Commuter Rail Extension to the New Bedford Area."

"Governor, I am sure you remember the Fall River Chamber of Commerce luncheon in 1990, when we discussed this issue in depth. We were seated at the head table when you expressed your support of an extension to Southeastern Massachusetts to me personally, and repeated it to universal applause," Montigny wrote as he lamented the lack of progress since a feasibility study in 1990.

Weld had famously challenged Montigny to sue him if commuter rail was not in place by 1997.

"While we appreciate the need to control state budgets, the commuter rail extension project is too fundamental to our recovery as an economically viable region to be omitted like any other MBTA project," Montigny continued in the letter, which his office shared with the News Service. "Southeastern Massachusetts is depending on this more, perhaps, than any other prospect."

Montigny joked Friday that cannot hold Weld to a lawsuit, though he learned over time to stop giving his constituents "false hope."

"I'm not saying it was easy for Baker, but really it only needed a governor to say, 'We're doing this,'" Montigny said. "And Baker absolutely initiated it, and Gov. Healey picked it up."

He added he would "give equal thanks" to Baker and Healey.

South Coast rail service will be free through the end of March and service will be fare-free on weekends through April. After that all stations will be Zone 8, charging full fare at $12.25 and a reduced fare of $6.