Commuters on the Red Line’s Braintree branch got a speedy surprise last week. According to the MBTA, trains began traveling 50 mph on certain stretches between Braintree and JFK/UMass stations at the start of service early Friday morning.

T officials said it was the first time in over 20 years that any trains in the subway system had been allowed to go faster than 40 mph, thanks to months of work to upgrade the branch’s previously slow zone-ridden tracks. 

“We made a commitment to the public to continuously improve service and with a can-do attitude, our workforce delivered,” MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said in a statement, adding that the T is “giving our riders back precious time in their day.”

MBTA officials have said the Red Line’s Braintree branch — which opened in the 1980s — was originally designed to accommodate speeds of up to 50 mph, but was limited to 40 mph a couple of decades ago.

During the spring of 2023, average speeds on the branch fell below 15 mph, adding over 15 minutes to riders’ trips, according to data  tracked by the transit advocacy nonprofit TransitMatters. However, after a year-long campaign to lift speed restrictions across the subway system — including a 24-day closure of the Braintree branch — T officials hinted that they planned to restore 50 mph speeds. 

In January, they said that the faster trains could be just days away. However, those plans were delayed a number of weeks, after crews working on the “last bits” of track work “were pulled aside to address the different winter events that we were facing,” Eng told WBUR earlier this week. However, Eng assured that the T planned to run 50 mph trains on the Braintree branch “very shortly.”

Sure enough, it began with the first train that left Braintree station on Friday at 5:10 a.m., according to MBTA spokesperson Lisa Battiston.
Meanwhile, north of Boston, T officials are planning to eventually run Orange Line trains between Oak Grove and Assembly as fast as 55 mph starting later this year.

“That is a little further out,” Eng told WBUR. “We are working on increasing speeds on the Orange Line. There are certain areas where the distances between stations make sense, and this is just getting it back to where it was once before, but there’s no reason that we can’t, because the track infrastructure has been repaired.”

Andrea Perdomo-Hernandez contributed to this report, which was published by WBUR on March 14. The Reporter and WBUR share content through a media partnership.