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)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)