---
title: "Running Boston’s Commuter Rail Now Costs Double, and the Next Contract Could Top $10bn"
description: "Three bidders are vying for a nine-year Keolis-sized headache as fuel, wages and electrification ambitions push the price ever upward"
author: "Penny Quirke"
published: 2026-09-28T04:01:00Z
modified: 2026-09-28T15:17:04Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/running-boston-s-commuter-rail-now-costs-double-and-the-next-f9d442
language: en
tags: ["infrastructure", "labor", "economy", "transportation", "boston", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Running Boston’s Commuter Rail Now Costs Double, and the Next Contract Could Top $10bn

*Three bidders are vying for a nine-year Keolis-sized headache as fuel, wages and electrification ambitions push the price ever upward*

By Penny Quirke · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/running-boston-s-commuter-rail-now-costs-double-and-the-next-f9d442

## In brief

- The T paid Keolis about $5.2 billion through June 2025, nearly $1 billion over plan
- Final bids for the nine-year successor contract are due Monday, with three groups competing
- Brian Kane of the T advisory board estimates the total could top $10 billion through 2036
- FY2025 payments to Keolis hit $640 million, more than double a decade earlier
- Keolis faces Mass Regional Rail, led by former operator veterans, and a Transport UK-TransDev coalition

Here is a question for the procurement-minded: what does it cost to run a commuter railroad? If you answered “$335 million a year,” congratulations, you are living in 2013, when Keolis estimated it would spend roughly that on average annually to operate and maintain the MBTA’s commuter rail. If you answered with a much larger number and a quiet weeping sound, you have been reading the invoices. In fiscal year 2025, according to the Boston Globe’s reporting, the T paid Keolis $640 million in total for operations, maintenance and capital improvements — more than double the payout of a decade earlier.

Now the bill is coming due all over again. Final bids for a new nine-year contract to run the commuter rail are due Monday, and by the end of the year the T will pick a winner from three bidding groups. Experts say that regardless of who wins, the price of operating the system is sure to grow dramatically through 2036. Brian Kane, the T advisory board’s executive director, has estimated the total could top $10 billion — which would make it the largest operating contract in Massachusetts history. The agency has its own independent cost estimate as a baseline for the bids but declined to share the total, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of hiding the gas bill behind the toaster.

How did a railroad get this expensive? Start with the arithmetic so far. The T paid Keolis nearly $1 billion more than planned through June 2025 — about $5.2 billion in all, and that figure doesn’t even include the hundreds of millions expected for the most recent fiscal year, which the T says is not yet final. Keolis’s original 2013 bid undercut the runner-up, the previous operator Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co., by 6 percent. The company then got off to a rough start in the 2015 snowstorms, lost money in its first year, and was paid between $298 million and $389 million annually through 2017. Costs have done nothing but climb since.

## Change orders, or how a fixed price stops being fixed

Some of the escalation is procedural and, frankly, fascinating in the way only contract mechanics can be. Over the last 12 years, the T paid out just over $100 million to Keolis for work beyond the scope of the original deal through so-called change orders — many tied to the agency’s 2019 commitment to eventually build a more expansive, electrified service. That money covered things like station maintenance and late-night service pilots requested by the T itself.

Then there is the pile-on. Keolis ended up involved in running the South Coast rail after its 2025 launch and in the federally mandated expansion of anti-collision technology. In all, more than 15 projects have been added to Keolis’s ledger since 2020, according to company estimates. The operator was once expected to spend $20 million a year on capital projects — replacing rails, upgrading signals, rebuilding platforms. That figure has ballooned to $140 million. A sevenfold increase in expected, budgeted, completely foreseeable spending, which is the rail industry’s way of saying “surprise.”

## Why the next bidder can only guess

Joe Aiello, former chairman of the now-defunct MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board, lists the culprits like a weather report: aging equipment, inflation, rising wages and the skyrocketing cost of diesel fuel. “Since the last bidding process, we’ve had COVID. We’ve had supply chain issues. We’ve had inflationary pressure,” he said, adding that he’s still “hopeful” the bidders “sharpened their pencils.”

Stephanie Pollack, the longtime transportation secretary under former Governor Charlie Baker, is not optimistic about the pencil-sharpening. “The biggest issue with the contract is whether anyone would come in with what they’ve actually budgeted,” she said. The T has already conceded some ground on this front, building a one-year validation period into the contract so the winning company can adjust its cost estimates after it gets a proper look at the fleet and tracks — a clause that rather assumes, on its face, that the first number is fiction.

Pollack publicly called out Keolis’s performance in 2017 and suggested severing ties when the original eight-year contract ended in 2022. Instead, the agency extended it twice, pushing Keolis into a 13th year through next June. To be fair, the service has steadied: on-time performance now runs above 90 percent. The summer did bring service cutbacks on multiple lines and 31,000 undersold special-event tickets, but the trains carrying World Cup tourists ran quickly and on time, which counts for something in the annals of Boston sports-adjacent transit.

## Meet the contestants

Keolis’s rivals are not exactly strangers. One is a group dubbed “Mass Regional Rail,” composed largely of the same people who ran the commuter rail for the decade before Keolis, including former T general manager Jim O’Leary; they have run similar service in Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland and helped stand up rapid transit in Puerto Rico. The other coalition pairs UK-based operator Transport UK with TransDev, a contractor on the Boston Public Schools bus system. Spokespeople for all three bidders declined to comment.

And some costs cannot be bid around at all. Existing union agreements give workers in many of the 14 commuter rail unions a wage hike in June 2027, roughly two weeks before the new operator takes over, and all three bidders have signed a pledge promising fair wages and additional sick time — good news for roughly 2,500 workers, and, as Asha Weinstein Agrawal of the National Transportation Finance Center at San Jose State University put it, a labor reality that can “constrain” both the T and the winner. Fuel costs fall on the T, not Keolis, and diesel prices have nearly doubled since last year, said Jeff Morales of the transportation firm InfraStrategies. His summary of the menu if the price climbs too high is admirably short: “You either pay it or cut service.”

Cutting service is the one thing the T doesn’t want. The agency has spent recent years expanding midday and weekend trains with considerable success; monthly pass sales lag the pre-pandemic era, but total commuter rail ridership has largely rebounded and outpaced similar systems nationwide. Meanwhile the big-ticket ambitions keep arriving: 163 new commuter rail cars are on order, the Fairmount Line electrification effort chugs slowly along, and the agency estimates fully electrifying the system — electric cars plus upgraded lines — could someday cost up to $20 billion. The next operator inherits all of it.

The stakes, as Kate Dineen, president of the Boston business group A Better City, told the Globe, are that the winner will be moving thousands of people on a system integral to the regional economy. “Everyone understands the imperative to get this right,” she said. The contract, recall, covers day-to-day service only — the winner is merely expected to simultaneously midwife a fully electric, frequent, all-day railroad for an era when fewer people commute downtown at all. Simple job. Bids due Monday.