On the move: A day on the Orange Line

They have blue hair and Baroque cellos. They wear do-rags and big hoop earrings. They are late. They are tired. They nap behind sunglasses and desperately need a bathroom.

It's the waiting that kills them. The unexplained delays. Sometimes, while riding the T, they could just scream. But that's not acceptable here. Keep your voices low and your eyes on the floor.

Next stop, Downtown Crossing.

The Orange Line is on the move.

The subway that connects the northern suburbs to downtown Boston isn't the region's longest T line nor the busiest. It wasn't the first, nor is it the sexiest. The Green Line was Boston's first subway. It gets history's nod while the Red Line seems to get most of the attention these days. It is Harvard and Fields Corner, MIT and Mattapan.

Both the Red and the Green lines have more riders and miles of track than the Orange Line, an 11-mile stretch between Jamaica Plain and Malden.

Yet sit for awhile on the Orange Line (say, an entire work day), talk to the people who ride in these cars (we mean really invade their personal space), and what you find is a crosssection of metropolitan Boston at a small -- but still significant -- turning point in the city's decorated history of mass transit.

Ridership is on the rise for the first time in four years, according to a report released this month by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

It jumped by roughly 4 percent in the third quarter of 2005, as compared with 2004, and preliminary numbers suggest that trend continued throughout the year, leaping 3.6 percent over 2004 fourth-quarter totals.

''I don't think the T can take 100 percent credit for that," says Dan Grabauskas, the MBTA's general manager. Sure, he says, reliability, safety, and convenience all influence decisions to ride or not to ride.

But in the end, he says, his is a world of ''tectonic shifts." Terrorist attacks, hockey strikes, gas prices, and unemployment rates all affect ridership, says Grabauskas. In the post-9/11 world, for example, the MBTA reported three consecutive years of decline.

But then something happened, something shifted. The numbers started going up again last fall and some regular riders on the Orange Line say they could feel the change: bigger crowds, fewer seats, and more stress at the end of the day as they tried, sometimes fruitlessly, to slip into a train car coughing up people.

Many other riders, though, felt nothing. Feel nothing. They are numb to the crowds. This is simply a daily routine.

9:01 a.m.: Carlton Grant, 44, of Mattapan, boards the train at Forest Hills bound for Back Bay and another day working for John Hancock. His tie is crisp. His look, all business.

9:46 a.m.: Paul Nadeau, 45, gets on at Malden Center, bound for Chinatown. It is the last leg of his long commute from Nashua, and what he really wants right now is a bathroom. He tries to nap while balancing what's left of his coffee.

10:34 a.m.: Sandy Larson boards the train and settles into a seat next to her son, Dante Minutillo, 3. They like the Orange Line because it is fast, and warm, and Dante can stand up on his seat and look out the window. He is learning to read the names of each station, Larson says. But on this morning, he is quiet, eating crackers in a crowd, until they reach their destination.

''This is Mass. Ave.," Larson finally tells her son. ''Off we go."

By day's end, if statistics are any guide, Dante will be one of 165,000 passengers to take the Orange Line, which, using six-car trains, will make 156 round trips from Forest Hills to Malden. That averages out to about 88 people per train car every one-way trip. Or, basically, a whole lot of people sitting there, reading a newspaper, grooving to their iPods, or just staring off into space.

They may never truly meet, these people. But they share a commute for awhile and, many, an odd sense of ownership for it. Whether they are bound for a Dollar Store in Malden or the Prudential Center in Back Bay, these trains take them where they need to be. And just as being a Red Sox fan gives you the right -- perhaps even the duty -- to complain about the team, being a commuter means you get to question -- and even despise -- the way by which you travel in this city.

10:37 a.m.: Angel Henderson, 19, boards the Orange Line at Ruggles, bound for Malden Center. Typically, he has something to read to pass the time. But not this morning. Which may or may not explain his state of mind at the moment. "What's so fun about the train?" he snaps when asked about his commute. "All you're doing is riding it.

11:32 a.m.: Heng Lian, a 21-year-old student at Roxbury Community College, boards the train at Ruggles, planning to go just one stop to Roxbury Crossing. But this train is an express, bound for Forest Hills. Roxbury Crossing comes and goes and all Lian can do is watch it disappear in the window. She's stuck on the train for another 15 minutes.

1:35 p.m.: Cindy Duong, an eighth-grader at Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston, sits in an empty car at the Forest Hills stop. She's waiting for the train to head north to Roxbury Crossing and relieved not to see the drunks she sometimes finds here. ''They're kind of scary," Duong says.

When the Orange Line began ferrying passengers in June 1901, its debut was cause for celebration. Hundreds of people gathered in Roxbury at 5 that morning, hoping to be among the first to ride what was the city's second subway. Called the Main Line El, this elevated train could bring passengers from Sullivan Square to Dudley Station in about 20 minutes, roughly half the time it took to make the trip by car, and it linked up with the nation's first subway, today's Green Line, built four years earlier.

The cars were made of wood, and there were problems. The first train to rumble into Dudley Station was delayed after its air brakes locked, Brian Cudahy wrote in his 1972 book chronicling the history of Boston's train system. But even that couldn't bring people down, namely not Charles Cutter, the first to purchase a ticket that morning at Dudley Station. ''As a good luck gesture," wrote Cudahy, ''his nickel was returned."

These were the early, exciting days of mass transit. They did not last. The thrill of waiting for a train at 5 a.m. has long since passed for most people. But what's clear from spending time on today's Orange Line, which was relocated 19 years ago to the Southwest Corridor, is that many people still feel as if they have a stake in the system. Everyone has a complaint.

1:57 p.m.: Corey Ribeiro, 35, wishes the conductors would explain the delays that sometimes derail the train, rather than letting the people sit and stew in silence.

2:39 p.m.: Massiel Grullon, 19, wishes people wouldn't talk about her blue hair as if she can't hear their conversations.

3:07 p.m.: Devin Mcvae, 26, wonders why the cars can't be cleaner. ''It's dirty, man," he says. ''Especially at night."

And then there is Terry Good.

Good, 62, boards the train at Malden Center just after 4 p.m., hoping to make it to South Station on the Red Line by 4:30 to catch the commuter train that will take him home to Medway.

It is a two-hour trip and Good is already worried about missing his connection.

''I'm late," he says, looking out the train windows over the icy-cold Mystic River, heading south.

It is almost rush hour now. Soon, at Downtown Crossing and other stops, people will be falling all over themselves to get inside the crowded train cars. There will be pushing and, from time to time, a little shoving.

People will complain some more, and one woman will admit she is haunted by the train.

Monica Douglas, of Dorchester, says she can't ride the train, especially the Red Line, without thinking about her son, Geoffrey, 16, who was fatally shot while riding the T in 2001.

Good, meanwhile, is calm among the crowd.

''I could give you an endless list of complaints about the T -- all the things you would expect about timeliness and cleanliness," he says. ''You can go on and on about what's wrong. But bottom line: It does the job."

One way or another, Good knows he will get home tonight, either on his 4:30 train as planned or on the next one.

Here's the thing: There's almost always another train on the way. It's just a matter of making it to the platform, a moment that Michaela Farley actually looks forward to every afternoon.

Farley, a senior at Arlington Catholic High School, says the T is part of who she is, part of living in Boston.

She even chose to write about it in an essay while applying to college this year. She never gets tired of the faces she sees on the train.

''The silent car is full of familiar strangers," she wrote in her essay, ''faces I see each day but names I will never know."

Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@globe.com