Plans had been in place to build the relocated Orange Line next to the highway, much like the El is Chicago, and the cancellation of the highway projects delayed the opening of the Orange Line relocation by almost a decade. An interesting fact is that the New England Medical Center station was built in the late 1960s for just this extension but due to the delay did not open for service until 1987!
After long public battles, Governor Francis Sargent declared a moratorium of all highways to be built inside Route 128. These highway projects would have displaced many people and left huge elevated highways through the centers of Roxbury and Cambridge. Where about Ruggles station is today would have been a large highway interchange where I-95 would have met up with another unbuilt highway, the Inner Belt. The Southwest Expressway was an extension of I-95 up into Boston from Canton along the commuter rail line. Meanwhile in the early 1970s, the Southwest Expressway helped usher in the death of the southern part of the El. The original plans had the line running to a park-and-ride station at I-93 in Reading but opposition from residents along the line stopped it at Oak Grove and commuter rail service was added for the rest of the route. The Orange Line from Community College to Wellington was built with a third track (which is rarely used now) intended for express service from Reading to North Station and was the only express trackage ever built for the system. The El from North Station to Everett was torn down and the northern part of the Orange Line as it is today was built from Haymarket to Oak Grove in Malden. But instead of building elevated track, it was decided that it would be better to tear down the track, which was considered a blight to the neighborhoods through which it ran, and build a new line along the commuter rail track to Reading. In the early 1970s there were plans to extend the Orange Line. The outbound and inbound platforms are almost a block apart and on top of each other and there is a long walkway in-between. The strangest of all these platforms is at State. That is to say if you were to look down the track from the platform you are standing on you would see the other platform. The platforms of each station are built not directly across from one another, like in most subway stations, but diagonal. The underground portions of the Orange Line are just as curious as the elevated tracks. If you go by the Charlestown bridge you can see there is a center structure where the trains used to run and if you look at the pavement you can see where the supports once were. It ran from Everett, though Charlestown, over the Charlestown Bridge, turned toward North Station, and then descended underground before Haymarket Sq.
The old Orange Line was known as the Main Line or “El” because most of it was on elevated track. If you were to compare today’s Orange Line with yesterdays, there are few similarities. The Orange Line has changed more since it was first built than any other transit line in Boston.
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