Your Green Line Station Will Probably Be Closed From Saturday Through August 16

The MBTA will shut down the central trunk of the Green Line, and significant portions of three of its branches, for 9 days starting on Saturday.

The closure will shut down the central core of the Green Line between North Station and Kenmore Square. There will be no service on any of the C branch through Brookline, and the E branch will be closed between Mission Hill and North Station.

Only three segments of the Green Line’s outer branches will remain in service: the Green Line extension segments from North Station to Medford/Tufts and Union Square, the D branch between Riverside and Kenmore, and the B branch from Boston College to Babcock Street in Allston/Brighton.

Bus shuttles will serve most (but not all) of the closed branch stations west of Copley Square on the B and C branches. Inbound shuttles will continue past Copley station to take riders to the Back Bay Orange Line station, and allow transfers to the subway and commuter rail.

On the E branch, riders should plan to ride the 39 bus along Huntington Avenue, which also ends at Back Bay station. The 39 will operate fare-free during the 9-day closure.

The T won’t offer any shuttle service to any of the downtown and Back Bay stations in the core of the Green Line, between Copley and North Station. Riders accustomed to using any of those stations will need to hike to the nearest Orange Line station instead.

The closure will also complicate tourists’ access to Fenway Park, where the Red Sox are hosting two games against the Athletics this weekend, and where Chris Stapleton is playing two concerts next weekend.

Attendees to those events should consider riding the Framingham/Worcester line to Lansdowne station instead.

Getting it over with

The high-impact closure will allow the T to advance work on two major projects: accessibility upgrades on the C branch, where the T is building new stations with handicap-accessible train platforms along Beacon Street in Brookline, and the installation of new signal equipment inside the central Green Line tunnel.

In a press release, the MBTA said that closing the C branch and the central tunnel at the same time will allow them to “make these improvements on a faster, accelerated timeline during one coordinated service outage, instead of multiple shutdowns on many different dates.”