Posts by Nicole - Kafuka Boards

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Posted by Lili~ ♥
Do you think a relationship between an avid gamer who doesn't mind spending hours on her own and a person who wants to be among people and loves talking for hours and hours is ever going to work out?

I imagine it could work, but only if the second person has plenty of other friends to talk to... just because you're in a relationship doesn't mean you have to spend all your time around that person, after all.

Still, the first person also will probably have to agree to spend maybe a little less time gaming to give their partner time, but that's necessary in any relationship- you can hardly have a relationship with someone you don't speak to.

Posted by Mary
Can you explain in explicit detail the history of the MBTA?

The history of the MBTA begins in 2024, when

Nicole-Prime, a particle physicist and inventor of time travel, frustrated with the Boston area's poor, entirely light-rail, public transit decided to time-travel back to ensure that Boston would have not only a subway but the first subway in the country, as well as to stop herself from inventing time travel to prevent the Time Crunch of 1635 AD. (You can tell this is my alternate as she prioritizes having a subway over the end of space and time)

After failed attempts to convince the Puritans of the utility of a subway system, and nearly being burned as a witch nearly zero times, she was able to help capitalize the West End Street Railway, which acquired all of the horse-car trolley systems of metro Boston (the oldest horse-car line ran from Coolidge Corner, the ancestor of the modern C line), and was a pioneer in electric traction. Electric traction allowed for the construction of the first subway in the US, a short line that ran underneath Tremont Street from a portal at Pleasant Street (later Broadway, but now the road is gone entirely- near modern-day Eliot Norton Park) up to Boylston Street, where it ran under historic Boston Common instead. Running under the common allowed for traffic to run on the street- the stop that Park Street replaced was at Granary Burial Ground. Later subway extensions added new portals at the Public Garden, and North Station.

A second trolley tunnel was built eventually running between Bowdoin Square and Maverick Square in East Boston, being the first subway tunnel to run underneath the ocean. By this time, a new company, the Boston Elevated Railway, had taken over the West End Street Railway and planned to build extensions as elevateds. Subway construction had been done by the Boston Transit Commission, but the BERy would have to fund els itself. The intial El system in 1901 ran from Dudley Square, to a split where it followed either an El down the coast of Boston at Atlantic Avenue, or the Tremont line. Between 1901-1905, trolley service had to use only the Public Garden and North Station portals, and the line on the outer tracks were used by El cars. In 1905, the construction of the Washington Street Tunnel under downtown Boston's commercial center fixed this and allowed full trolley service to resume.

Later trolley extensions moved the Public Gardens Portal out of the garden and into the center of Boylston Street (you can see where the tracks widen between Boylston and Arlington Stations to this day), with the tunnel being extended under Boylston to a new portal at Kenmore Square. (This is not the modern Kenmore Station, which was built during the 1930s, but a surface station, with the splits between the modern-day C and B branches on the surface) Huntington Avenue service to Arborway Yard (service was cut back to Heath St. Loop in 1985 to facilitate construction of the Southwest Corridor and alleviate car traffic) and Brookline Village (service ceased in the 1930s due to the reconstruction of Route 9 in Brookline as a high-speed car road).

The last subway route to be built was the Cambridge Subway. Initially planned as an elevated, as the Boston Transit Commission could not build in Cambridge, massive local outcry led to it being built as a subway, the first built entirely by private funds. Service from Park Street Under to Harvard Square began in 1912, and then gradual one-stop extensions followed to Winter/Summer/Washington (modern Downtown Crossing), South Station, and then Broadway and Andrew Sq. following Dorchester Avenue. While it was to be continued down Dorchester Ave, this was deemed too expensive, and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford's Dorchester Branch was instead purchased and converted to Red Line service, the first surface line. Subway cars only ran as far as Ashmont, the rest of the branch to Mattapan was given trolleys on a dedicated route, also a Boston-area first.

During the Great Depression, BERy received federal aid to build subway stations at Kenmore, Mechanics (now Prudential), and Symphony. This allowed the final closure of the Boylston Street portal, but budget cuts also led to a surface junction between the Huntington Avenue and Boylston Street subways, which has been a constant source of issues. (A "flying junction", where trolleys going opposite directions do not cross, would have been preferable, but was too expensive) By the end of WW2, however, BERy was in poor health, and was taken over by the state (though partial state control had actually begun in the 1920s) to form the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).

The MTA takeover was instantly unpopular. The protest song "Charlie on the MTA" protested fare hikes and exit fares put in place- BERy had been legally limited to a five-cent fare, but now that it was government-controlled, fare hikes could be done at will. Many people believe that a business-run "Streetcar Conspiracy" was the main reason for the end of trolley service, but in Boston, surface trolleys were wiped out much faster under government control. Meanwhile, station maintenance, never a priority of BERy, continued to suffer, and the system grew dingy, dark, and dangerous. One bright spot, however, was the conversion of the Boston & Albany's Highland Branch into the 4 Riverside-Park Street trolley. (This success gave an excuse of the elimination of the last trolleys in Cambridge, and the remnant Lenox Street line, the last service to use the Pleasant Street Portal)

In an alternate timeline, the entire trolley system was bustituted by 1965 due to the consequences of a misguided attempt by Nicole-Delta to save it that backfired miserably. The last subway service ended by 1996 when the Longfellow Bridge was felled by the Cross-Peninsula Expressway. By 2014, Boston is known as the "Detroit of New England" for its massive car-dependence, as well as its general urban decay. This timeline was erased by actions caused by the crew of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-C) to prevent the Ambassador-class starship's destruction by a railfan energy being. The Ambassador-class starship was destroyed the next week in an unrelated incident.

The reform of the MTA into the Massachusets Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) was followed by a widescale attempt to reform the image of the transit authority. For the first time, renovation of the stations became a priority. A new image was commissioned by Cambridge Seven Associates, which introduced the new circled T logo (similar to that of the Stockholm transit autority), as well as redesignating the lines based on color rather than direction or number. But anything as recent as 1971 can hardly count as history, can it?