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New Bedford Station swarmed with local leaders celebrating the start of South Coast Rail service on Monday morning. They smiled and shook hands, hugged and huddled under umbrellas. Even the frigid rain didn’t dampen their sense of triumph.
Officials lined up behind a microphone that malfunctioned through the entire ceremony, but the leaders spoke over the squeaky sound feedback to commemorate this decades-delayed project.
“This is about persistence,” said Mayor Jon Mitchell. “If we want big things, we’ve got to work together and keep at it.”
Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll and state Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt headlined the New Bedford event. Gov. Maura Healey and MBTA General Manager Phil Eng led a parallel kickoff in Fall River.
A who’s-who of New Bedford attended the kickoff at the station here. State Sen. Mark Montigny spoke to the crowd about the state money he helped to invest in the project. Every member of the city’s State House delegation participated (though State Rep. Steven Ouellette was at the Fall River kickoff).
About half of the City Council was there too, plus members of Mitchell’s administration and past mayors John Bullard and Scott Lang. Leaders in the city’s nonprofit and business sector were also among the several dozen people in attendance, including bystanders, official staffers, and reporters.
Speakers thanked governors past and present, state legislators, local officials, the MBTA team, and everyone outside government who advocated for South Coast Rail service.
Then, they crowded onto the platform as the 10:43 a.m. inbound train pulled up.
“All aboooooard!” Driscoll shouted into a bullhorn.
“Woooooo!” the crowd called back.
Officials in New Bedford and Fall River boarded northbound trains at their respective stations to meet in Taunton, golden-spike style, for the final ribbon-cutting. (The MBTA did hand out ceremonial spikes, though they were not golden.)
Hundreds packed the tent in the East Taunton Station parking lot. The stage alone had about two dozen officials and other VIPs on it, reflecting the massive scale of the $1.1 billion project.
“Getting the trains rolling after 20 years took a lot of advocacy,” Healey said from a podium.
The governor and other officials had a clear message: The commuter rail extension will spur opportunities across the state. It will give people from the South Coast, Boston, and beyond more choice in where they live, work, go to school, shop, and more.
But this ribbon-cutting wasn’t just about the tangible economic benefits, said Tibbits-Nutt, the transportation secretary. As train bells dinged in the background, she called the extension a symbol of access, connection, and hope.
“We owe it to the people who believed in this vision for so many years,” Driscoll said.
Eng, the MBTA general manager, touted the level of service his agency was delivering. The final schedule includes more trips than originally promised.
In a brief interview after the event, Eng said he could feel the “buzz” among South Coast residents at a Fall River diner on Monday morning.
“It feels phenomenal because of all the excitement and passion that I’m hearing and seeing,” he said.
Karen Antion, the project manager Eng hired last spring, said it feels “wonderful” to have delivered the service two months ahead of the timeline she laid out last year. The MBTA had targeted May 2025 as the launch date, but last month, the agency made a surprise announcement that the line would actually open on March 24.
In an interview, Antion said she accelerated the project by having the project team cover two shifts each day, seven days a week. And under her leadership, she said, activities that normally happen one-after-the-other were happening at the same time — for example, signal testing could happen on one line of track even as construction was still happening on another line.
The largest round of applause during the event went to Jean Fox, an early manager for the project who more recently served as its outreach director.
“People said we were never gonna get this built,” Fox said in an interview. “But we did.”
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org
