Most skip the drive, leading to delays on overburdened T

The last time the Red Sox won the World Series, fans celebrated on a Saturday. Yesterday, revelers from Fitchburg, Worcester, and other suburbs shared the trains in and out of downtown Boston with weekday business commuters, packing passenger rail cars and subways so full that some riders had to wait on platforms up to an hour for later trains.

Most fans avoided driving, because many downtown streets were closed to cars, and city trucks towed 82 left parked overnight. With fewer drivers exacerbating rush hour traffic, it had all the makings of a historically busy day on the commuter trains and subway lines.

"We had what we call crush loading; there was no room for anybody else," said John Ray, director of railroad operations for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

"It was rush-hour sized crowds on all of the subway trains right through noontime," said Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the MBTA. The T carried an estimated 1 million riders, compared with a usual daily total of 650,000, he said.

Suburban train station garages and parking lots were full. Long lines clogged T station ticket kiosks while rookie riders figured out how to buy Charlie Cards. Some T lines spilled into bus lanes, forcing transit police to let riders on free to avoid safety hazards.

The South Station commuter rail terminal, normally full of workers in business attire, was a sea of red and blue Sox apparel after the parade.

"We went to Back Bay, and the line was like ridiculously long, so we walked all the way here," said John McDonald, 20, a college student who was eating a hot pretzel at South Station while waiting for a train to Worcester after the parade. "It was still madness."

Normally, about 72,000 riders use commuter rail service in and out of town. Ray expected yesterday's total would easily surpass 100,000 riders each way.

One group of passengers coming into Boston on the Worcester-Framingham line in the morning came perilously close to missing the parade after mechanical problems stalled their train near Newtonville station. Passengers were supposed to arrive at 9:40 a.m., but had to wait for another train to pull them into town, more than two hours late, Pesaturo said.

Most passengers on that train got off at Yawkey station, near Fenway Park, and caught the parade, Pesaturo said. Another train into the city from Fitchburg early yesterday was stalled for 40 minutes behind a broken freight train.

After the rally, passengers had to wait for later trains when several afternoon coaches reached capacity, said Scott Farmelant, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company, which operates the commuter rail.

He said the company was using every rail car in the system but still did not have enough space.