series: MBTA – My experience on Commuter Rail

This is Part 2 of series: MBTA, a collection of ideas on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

When I visit new cities, I typically make it a point to visit a bunch of different transportation modes. Luckily for me, Boston is home to a plethora of transportation modes – from the famous T, there’s also buses, ferries, and the elusive Commuter Rail.

For most tourists, there’s very little reason to ride Commuter Rail, especially since it’s evidently catered towards commuters, and not tourists. Nonetheless, I had the opportunity to ride Commuter Rail during my trip, as Apple Maps told me it would be slightly faster than taking the Red Line into Boston.

My Experience

Station

Porter Station is a busy train hub for Porter Square residents, with local shopping and Lesley University nearby. It’s also home to the longest set of escalators on the T, which takes a solid two minutes to ride up to surface level. Although the Red Line station is grandiose in a brutalist-80’s type of way, the commuter rail station is a sad shack in comparison. Located below Massachusetts Avenue, the platform is your typical American commuter rail station, consisting of a couple of benches and a small shelter on the platform. The accessibility area was located right at the station entrance, which I really did like. There was also a direct connection to the Red Line station, which is great for transfers.

Train Ride

I took the Fitchburg Line, train #421 from Porter to North Station (1 stop). Mid-day, the train runs hourly from some Boston suburb to North Station, although I’d have to assume frequencies improve during rush hour. The train is scheduled to take 14 minutes to North Station, which is faster than the 30 minutes it would have taken to take the T.

The fare system in Boston is wack, but in this case, my seven day pass covered the trip. Did you know that you can’t use CharlieCards (the Boston version of OMNY) on commuter rail? Once Charlie (the second-generation system) rolls out this should be possible, but it’s also the year 2025, and you could take regional trains using similar transit cards for the past 30 years now. You can validate your ticket using a CharlieTicket (a paper version of a CharlieCard that somehow has more capabilities despite being disposable) or mTicket.

The train ride was pretty monotonous, but when the train pulled up, only the accessible door at the front opened for passengers? It was kinda strange since the trainset was five coaches long, but not a big deal. The northbound train came five minutes earlier, and all the passengers scattered around the platform had to run to the accessibility coach to get on board. I noticed that the doors were a manual set, very strange in 2025, but not unheard of (see Paris Metro).

I’m not a train foamer, but the coach set used was a super old car, with a 3/2 seating configuration. The third seat looked like it was tacked on. I’m not going to lie, it was a bit strange, but the coach was pretty clean overall, albeit extremely dated. No bugs though, so what can you do. The train took the scheduled amount of time and was pretty monotonous.

North Station

When we got to North Station, we had to wait for the conductor to manually open the doors (still very strange to me). North Station is your standard terminal, with long platforms to the large waiting hall indoors. I like North Station because it’s connected to the Green and Orange lines, as well as TD Garden (I don’t care too much about hockey), but it’s great for concertgoers. The MBTA has also installed fare gates at North Station, which means commuters need to tag off at the gate. I like this a lot, because it increases fare compliance without the need to install gates at all of the stations.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed my time on MBTA Commuter Rail, although the rolling stock is pretty bad. I would say it has really good bones, but I’m concerned if the MBTA could ever transition into a true regional-style rail system like the Paris RER. Commuter Rail ridership had the strongest recovery out of all the MBTA modes, so there’s plenty of potential for Greater Boston to rebuild its historic transit network.

It does have one major problem I hate, which is the fare ticketing system. The Commuter Rail does not support CharlieCard, and will also not support the next generation of fare payment, Charlie+. It baffles me that the networks are not integrated – seems like such a large oversight that doesn’t seem to have any particular reasoning. I understand it was originally supposed to support Charlie+, so I’m hoping that later rollouts will support Charlie+.

Please watch out for Part 3 of series: MBTA, a collection of ideas on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.