It started as one of those impossible late-night ideas you throw out half-jokingly. On Putz at MIT, one of the prized possessions of the main study lounge is the metal MBTA system map that hangs from the wall. We all spaced out staring at it countless times, thinking about a particularly tricky 6.122 problem. But this time we asked: how long would it actually take to ride every train line of the MBTA? Some cursory research led us to believe we might be one of the first to attempt this, but while writing this we learned there’s a website dedicated to completing the feat (albeit with slightly different rules).
After deciding upon a reasonable specification of the question (ignoring bus lines like the Silver Line, banning using other modes of transit than the trains themselves and walking), some napkin math told us it was doable in a day. The final routing was a fun nerd snipe: we solved it (with some coding help from ChatGPT) like a modified Chinese postman problem, with edge weights (times between stops) pulled from Google Maps.
For a while this stayed as something we’ll do “someday.” Our MIT schedules were quite busy and it was easy to find a reason why the time wasn’t right. But finally, it seemed we would have a lull in workload the weekend of March 28, 2026, and decided it was now or never.
Armed with a used Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS25 we purchased, a gifted Samsung DV50, two packed lunches, and a printed map of the “optimal” route we designed, we met at the Park St station at 8 AM. Based on our Google Maps stop time approximations, we guessed it would take us about eight hours to end the run back at Park St, but we really had no idea (spoiler: it took until 9:22 PM, for a total time of 12 hours and 22 minutes, only 54.6% longer than expected!). Maybe it’s cope for being so suboptimal (we’re actually 1.726 competitive 🤓), but we think documenting the journey so thoroughly did slow us down quite a bit (see below), yet we cared more about it than achieving the absolute minimum time.
Rules:
- Visit every (stop, line) pair (so every platform of every stop), taking a photo at each stop.
- For the heavy rail trains that already pause at each stop, this was pretty simple. But the Green Line light rail trains stop on request like a bus, and photos taken from inside the moving train come out too blurry, or illegible due to the postered windows. We had to press the stop button, dart out for a photo, and dart back in before the doors closed at every stop (there are a LOT of Green Line stops), which slowed us down a good bit.
- Must only use the train and select amounts of walking (e.g. between Ashmont and Cedar Grove)
- We decided against counting the bus lines, including the Silver Line as:
- they are less reliably scheduled
- there are a lot of them, likely stretching the run to over a day
- they’re not trains!
Highlights:
- Matt, the MBTA employee we met at the end of our run, who is also featured in our first Park Street photo (Hi if you're reading this!)
- The Green Line operator who was confused by our semi-erratic behavior (requesting every stop yet never getting off), until we explained our mission and she gave us time at each stop.
- The weird old-timey trains in Mattapan, with signs with typos “To insure operators vision stand behind standee line”
- Lunch on the Green Line. We had just finished the Green Line’s E branch, so we didn’t need to be hypervigilant about missing stops. Most people had gotten off, it was sunny and each stop brought in a nice breeze, and we were passing the Museum of Fine Arts.
- Our random conversations with each other (there are only so many people who you can talk to for 12 hours and not hate them afterwards, so in a sense this was a bit of a trial by fire for our friendship)
- Random conversations with other commuters. The frat bros fetching beer, the man who told us about his insurance problems, the fellow Leatherman multitool owner, the No Kings protestors bringing their signs back from a picket
Non-highlights:
- Spencer ended up getting very sick for a day or two afterwards, likely due to NOT USING HAND SANITIZER LIKE I TOLD HIM TO
- Missing a few stops, and only getting photos as we passed by, or blurry ones
- Running low on battery, or running out of battery a few times. We brought extra camera batteries, but one was quite unreliable.
- Parts of the Green Line were quite crowded, and many of the trains have only semi-transparent advertisements on their sides, so we would frequently have to fight through crowds to get a shot of the station name.
- We missed Copley, and had to stop at Arlington and go back