The MBTA is borrowing two huge jet blowers from the New York City subway to help clear tracks this weekend.
"We don’t have the capability to run service and clear snow at the same time," said MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo. "That’s why we’re waiting until the weekend when, you know, it’s not the regular commute for us to suspend service and get in there and do a real good job of clearing out the snow that built up there over a seven- or eight-day period.”
In the MBTA control room on High Street in the Financial District, a huge wall of monitors in the MBTA control center shows a brightly colored schematic of the subway system, showing where all the trains are headed. Friday morning, the focus was on the Orange line, which saw "significant delays at this time of 20 to 30 minutes."
Pesaturo says that’s because a train broke down on the tracks, probably because of the cold, and then a second Orange line train ran into a problem switching tracks to get around it.
“When it was using that crossover, that’s when it experienced a lot of snow that had built up over the rail," he said. "And we think that it got into the undercarriage of the train and impacted the propulsion system.”
The T managed to get that train out of the way and get the system moving again, but with 35-year-old cars on the Orange Line, the cold and snow are likely to remain a problem.
“That’s why we’re going to suspend service for Saturday so we can get in there once and for all and just blow this snow away before we get some more snow Sunday and Monday,” he said.
Pesaturo says that’s why the T needs the jet blowers from New York to supplement its own "Snowzilla" blower. The T will have to stop running some trains to do that, so significant parts of the Orange and Red Lines will be replaced by shuttle buses. The idea is to clear out the snow before more of it rolls in over the weekend and into Monday.
