At the MBTA's Wellington Yard shop, engineers give shiny new Orange Line train cars a final inspection before sending them out on the rails.

Bill Wolfgang, senior director of vehicle engineering, examines the interior of a car, hunting for anything out of place.

"I'm looking for loose panels. I'm looking for floor seams, separation of floor seams," he said. "I'm looking for seating that's kind of askew."

This car passed all its tests after arriving from the factory in Springfield, and will carry riders in a few days. The Orange Line's old cars have all been replaced with new, but it’s been a long journey to get here. And the T is still waiting for a lot more of these cars for the Red Line. Hundreds, in fact.

Eleven years and a billion dollars after the MBTA signed a deal with a Chinese company for new and improved train cars on the Orange and Red lines, the job still isn't done. The rollout has been plagued by malfunctioning equipment on the trains. Costs have risen and the initial delivery date of 2023 for many cars has been pushed out to 2027. And now President Trump's tariffs on goods from China could further complicate completion of the work.

Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, said in retrospect, the T could have saved time and money by going with a company that was already established here.

"Instead, we decided to go with an entity that had never operated in the United States before," he said. "They had to build a factory from the ground up and hire a completely new workforce. And that just added lots and lots of time and lots and lots of complexity to this process."

The deal has been controversial from the start, marked by a low bid from a foreign player, a political bet on jobs for western Massachusetts and a yawning timeline that's now spanned three governors and multiple transportation chiefs.

How the deal began

It was back in 2014, under Gov. Deval Patrick, that the state Department of Transportation awarded a $566.6 million contract for 284 new Red and Orange Line cars to what’s now called the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation. The company, known as CRRC, underbid three other contenders.

Although the train shells would be built a continent away, the deal was touted as a win by the state, because the Beijing-based company pledged to build an assembly factory in Springfield. The plan was for the plant to outlive the MBTA contract, making the region a railcar manufacturing hub.

“We really screwed up in letting the existing fleets go for so long without repair and without replacement.”

From the early days of the contract, there were questions around how state officials landed on CRRC.

Then-Gov. Patrick and his transportation secretary, Richard Davey, were on a Hong Kong trade mission while bidding on the T contract was underway back in Boston. Patrick and Davey met with CRRC officials during the trip.

A MassDOT spokesperson at the time would later say, "the details of the procurement were not discussed at that meeting, nor did the Governor play a role in deciding which company the MBTA recommended to the board."

One of the losing bidders on the contract, Hyundai Rotem, filed a lawsuit against the T, transportation board members and the governor, alleging they had conducted a “flawed and unlawful” bidding process, and that CRRC's bid was "unreasonably low." Patrick and Davey denied wrongdoing and the lawsuit was later dismissed.

Stephanie Pollack was the MassDOT secretary who inherited the project in 2015, under Gov. Charlie Baker's administration. In an interview, she recalled that there was excitement around the contract when CRRC broke ground on the Springfield plant.

It was a “two-fer,” Pollack said, giving people in the eastern part of the state "more reliable" Red and Orange Line service, while “folks in western Massachusetts would benefit from the jobs that would be created at the factory.”

Meanwhile, decrepit Red and Orange Line cars were trundling along well past their intended lifespan. Some Red Line cars dated back to the late 1960s, according to Kane of the T's advisory board.

“They were all starting to fall apart,” he said.

The Orange Line cars, in service since the 1980s, were in dire shape too. They hadn’t undergone a rebuild that was supposed to be done halfway through their lifespan, and were experiencing performance problems.

“We really screwed up in letting the existing fleets go for so long without repair and without replacement,” Kane said.

It was part of years of disinvestment in the country's oldest public transit system. The T needed new Orange and Red Line train cars, fast.

In 2016, before the Springfield factory even opened, the state ordered an additional 120 cars, aiming to replace the entire Red Line fleet. The extra cars would bring the total order to 404, and would cost another $277 million. They were to be delivered in 2023.

The rollout

Pollack said there was positive feedback from the public as designs for the new cars were unveiled the next year. And there was fanfare around the opening of the 204,000-square-foot Springfield facility.

But the first signs of trouble began in 2019. The debut of the first new Orange Line cars was pushed back for months, from January to August . Then, within weeks of entering service, the cars were abruptly pulled after a door slid open while a train was in motion.

Pollack said yanking the new trains out of service so soon “was a real blow.”

More problems, ranging from mechanical to electrical, plagued the cars as they continued to arrive, causing the T to remove them from service for repairs. Then in 2020, the agency announced the contract delivery date would be delayed by at least a year , citing production issues at the Springfield plant as well as other pandemic-related slow downs.

Pollack said for her entire tenure as transportation secretary, “there was a lot of back-and-forth with CRRC” to grapple with the quality and timing problems and “ how we were going to get more and more of the Orange Line cars to go into service — but then to stay in service.”

Manufacturing train cars is a complicated business. Subway systems vary so much that cars have to be customized for every network. And in Boston, cars need to be modified for every line.

“If you customize something, it costs more and also you have a higher tendency to have issues,” said Sam Zhou, the T’s chief engineer. “Every tunnel is different, every line is slightly different, so it is hard.”

Mark DeVitto, the agency's director of vehicle engineering, said transferring technology from China to the U.S. complicated matters further. The T has about a dozen employees that work directly with CRRC, providing managerial and engineering support. DeVitto said he has made nine trips to China himself over the course of the project.

He acknowledged the delivery delays, but defended how the T has addressed the quality issues and the contract.

“Obviously, this one has had some challenges, COVID being one of them, which impacted the supply chain,” DeVitto said. “But I also look at the performance of these vehicles and, personally, that's one thing I'm very proud of.”

Quality and performance issues became rarer as more cars were built, but the delivery time was still way off track. Only a quarter of the cars had arrived by the time Gov. Maura Healey took office in January 2023. CRRC was racking up late-penalty fees of $500 a car per day. Healey assigned a team to review the contract, and determine if it should be salvaged or scrapped altogether.

In the end, the T decided to reset the deal with CRRC and move forward. It forgave $90 million in late fees that had accrued during the pandemic. And the MBTA agreed to pay up to $148 million more to cover increased material prices, shipping costs and tariffs from March 2020 through Dec. 31, 2027.

All told, the updated contract pushed the total cost over $1 billion —almost double the original bid — and the new due date for the cars was extended to the end of 2027 .

Fast forward to today, and the timeline and budget could again be threatened, this time by President Trump’s new tariffs on China. Zhou told WBUR the tariffs are causing “uncertainty” in the market, and the T is working with CRRC “assessing the impact, in terms of the cost and also to the production line.”

The first Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on Chinese goods, which primarily impacted the imported train car shells. Zhou said the new tariffs may be broader and potentially more costly, affecting the shells as well as “all the parts that CRRC is relying on from the domestic suppliers” in the U.S.

T general manager Phil Eng told board members in April that CRRC is “committed to continuing to deliver these cars. We know how important they are and we're managing to the schedule that has been set aside when we restructured the contract.”

CRRC spokeswoman Lydia Rivera, in an emailed response to WBUR’s questions, said the company isn’t currently anticipating further delays. But, she wrote, “Increased tariffs, including the uncertainty of recurring tariffs, will potentially impact CRRC MA suppliers’ delivery of parts, ultimately requiring operational adjustments.”

A promise in Springfield

Kane, of the T advisory board, said the state's effort to make western Massachusetts a hub for railcar manufacturing has been a bust. Other transit authorities have not flocked to the company to build cars. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which operates in Philadelphia, canceled a $185 million contract after the project experienced several delays .

The Springfield facility is busy as the MBTA and CRRC work to meet the promised deadline for all remaining cars on the Boston system.

All 140 trains running on the Orange Line today are CRRC cars, according to the MBTA. The remaining 12 cars are expected by September 2025. Only 32 new Red Line cars are in service, meaning CRRC has 220 more to add to the fleet.

For long-suffering T passengers, their daily ride is not about tariffs or contracts. It’s about having reliable train service, including updated cars that are clean and don't break down.

At Downtown Crossing, Philip Doherty of South Quincy waited recently for an Orange Line train. He describes the fresh cars as “ very new and fancy — and bougie I suppose, compared to the Red Line.”

If everything goes as scheduled, it’ll be two more years until the Red Line finally gets all its new cars.