History
In 1845, the Old Colony Railroad opened between Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and along with it opened Crescent Avenue Depot. In 1926, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, which had succeeded the Old Colony, closed its Shawmut Branch and sold it to the Boston Elevated Railway. The BERy built an extension of the Cambridge-Dorchester Line subway along the former railroad branch, and on November 5, 1927, Columbia station opened next to Crescent Avenue.
Commuter service on the Old Colony lines was ended in 1959, but subway service to Ashmont via Columbia continued. On August 26, 1965, the Cambridge-Dorchester Line rapid transit service was renamed as the Red Line. The color was chosen because the line then ended at Harvard University, whose school color is crimson. In 1971, the Braintree (South Shore) Branch of the Red Line opened, running past Columbia, but not stopping at that station.
On December 1, 1982, the station was renamed as JFK/UMass, although most station signs are subtitled as Columbia. A new platform for the Braintree Branch (South Shore Line) was opened as part of a general reconstruction on December 14, 1988, and henceforth all Red Line trains have stopped at the renovated station.
Commuter rail service on the Middleborough/Lakeville and Plymouth/Kingston lines was restored in September 1997, but the commuter platform at JFK/UMass did not open until April 30, 2001. Several rush-hour Greenbush Line trains began to stop concurrent with that line's restoration in 2007. Not all commuter trains on the lines stop, however, because the station is in a single-tracked bottleneck section of the otherwise double-tracked route.
Read more about this topic: JFK/UMass (MBTA Station)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)