Middlesex and Boston Street Railway

The Middlesex and Boston Street Railway (M&B) was a streetcar and later bus company in the area west of Boston, Massachusetts. Streetcars last ran in 1930, and in 1972 the company's operations were merged into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).

The company was first chartered as the Natick Electric Street Railway on August 10, 1891. The name was changed to the South Middlesex Street Railway in 1893. That company went bankrupt and a receiver was appointed May 6, 1903; the property was sold on August 15, 1907 to the newly formed Middlesex and Boston Street Railway. By 1910, Boston Suburban Electric Companies, a holding company, had bought the M&B.

In September 1964 the MBTA began subsidizing the M&B, and route numbers were given to its buses. (According to "A Chronicle of the Boston Transit System" (April 16, 1981) the subsidy agreement was signed on December 23, 1964.) The M&B was taken over by the MBTA on July 5, 1972, after a financial dispute over subsidies stopped service on June 30. The routes taken over were renumbered by adding a 5 to the beginning and were renumbered in September 1982 and some in 1996.

There is one streetcar and one bus preserved from this railway, trolley # 41, a former Lexington car, and bus # 192, a 1948 ACF Brill bus. They are both located at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The Commonwealth Avenue Street Railway, opened in 1895, was consolidated into the Newton Street Railway on January 1, 1904; the Newton Street Railway was merged with the M&B July 1, 1909. This line ran down the median the entire length of Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, from Norumbega Park at the western end (on the banks of the Charles River) to a connection with the Boston Elevated Railway's Commonwealth Avenue line at Lake Street at the eastern end (now Boston College, at the end of the Green Line "B" branch).

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