The Red Line will be out of service between Park Street and JFK/UMass starting on Thursday of this week (May 2) and continuing until May 10 for track improvement work. The repairs were originally scheduled to begin on Wednesday, but MBTA workers needed to extend work on the Blue Line two more days.

Additionally, T officials said, there will be no Red Line trains after 8:30 p.m. between Ashmont and Park Street from May 2 to May 9, but free shuttle buses will be available.

Rail service on the Red Line will also be suspended between Broadway and North Quincy on the weekend of May 11-12 in order to accommodate demolition work for the Dorchester Avenue Bridge Replacement Project and the Track Improvement Program. Free shuttle buses will also be available.

The upcoming service changes will be the longest time the Red Line has been shut down since last October, when the entire Ashmont branch was out of service for a 16-day “surge.” Most of these shutdowns are aimed at giving work crews time to eliminate “slow zones,” areas where the tracks are too weathered for one reason or another to allow travel at high speeds.

During the October surge, MBTA general manager Phillip Eng told the Reporter, “I feel good about the ongoing effort. It’s an urgent matter from a public perspective. It’s also urgent because this is some of the oldest track infrastructure that we have. We wanted to accelerate this sooner, but we took more time to plan this properly.”

As of April 29, there were a total of 54 speed restrictions on the Red Line. That’s about half as many as there were before the October surge, when there were 106. For this upcoming work, the MBTA will “replace tracks and ties to alleviate speed restrictions along the line while crews maximize the outage by performing signal work and station amenity upgrades, including new lighting, painting, tiling, power washing, and more,” according to the MBTA’s website.

More information on the upcoming service disruptions can be found at mbta.com/RedLine.