MBTA officials have announced that South Coast Rail is unlikely to meet its goal of opening this summer, less than a month after the agency quietly parted ways with the project’s highest-ranking manager.
At a public presentation in Fall River Wednesday night, a senior project manager for South Coast Rail, Jean Fox, said she could not provide an updated timeline for when passengers in Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton will be able to board trains to Boston.
In an interview after the presentation, Fox said the agency needs to complete a “deep dive” into where the project stands before publicizing a new opening date.
“Don’t put another date out if you can’t stick to it,” she said.
Fox and other MBTA officials also confirmed their former boss, South Coast Rail’s Executive Project Manager Jennifer Tabakin, no longer works for the MBTA.
Fox said MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng sought new leadership for South Coast Rail as construction winds down and a monthslong phase of safety testing begins.
“They’re really going in and making sure everything we did up until now is good. They want to verify what we’ve done,” Fox said. “If there’s any missing pieces that somehow were overlooked, they want to make sure those pieces are filled in.”
“That’s what we need to keep us going to get us over the finish line,” Fox said.
The long series of delays affecting South Coast Rail has inspired an “I’ll believe it when I see it” skepticism among many residents.
Deadlines for opening the commuter rail line have been changing since the 1990s, when former Mass. Gov. Bill Weld told Fall River’s chamber of commerce that South Coast Rail would be running by the end of the decade.
When it opens, South Coast Rail will revive passenger train service between Boston and Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton for the first time since the late 1950s, when a private railroad company that operated those branches closed them amid a mass shift to car transportation.
The MBTA has slowly rebuilt some of the region’s lost train infrastructure through expansions of its commuter rail service. Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton are the last cities within a 60-mile radius of Boston to be reconnected to the capital by train.
With a budget of $1.043 billion, South Coast Rail will reach those cities by extending the MBTA’s Middleboro/Lakeville commuter rail line along existing rights of way used by freight trains.
Some preliminary construction work on bridges for South Coast Rail had been completed as early as 1991. But the bulk of the construction work — building six new stations, two new train layover facilities and replacing 40 miles of tracks — did not begin until 2019.
As construction progressed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the MBTA projected South Coast Rail would begin carrying passengers before the end of 2023. MBTA officials later pushed that deadline back to the summer of 2024. But internally, even that deadline was soon dismissed as unlikely, according to documents obtained by The Public’s Radio.
On Dec. 28, 2023, a firm the MBTA hired as its owner’s representative for South Coast Rail filed a report that quietly acknowledged a different deadline. WSP, the owner’s representative, said internal schedules showed South Coast Rail’s opening date had already “slipped to October 2024.”
Wednesday night’s meeting in Fall River marked the first time MBTA officials publicly acknowledged the project was not on track to open this summer.
Several people in the audience pressured Fox for a new deadline by which passengers could expect to board trains.
“We need to definitively determine when we are going to open,” Ken Fiola, an economic development consultant who works closely with Fall River city government, said from a microphone set up for public comment. “We don’t want to have this project tarnished by this confusion, right?”
Fox said she could not provide a definite timeline yet. A spokesperson for the MBTA, Joe Pesaturo, gave a similar response when reached for comment.
“A new project executive has been tasked with evaluating all aspects of the project, including the schedule,” Pesaturo said in a prepared statement. “The MBTA will share more information once this review is complete.”
Future riders of South Coast Rail left Wednesday’s meeting with some unanswered questions about what the service will actually look like for them.
During the question and answer session that concluded the presentation, Fox said other departments at the MBTA are still determining how much fares will cost, what the daily schedules will look like, and whether trains will run on the weekends.