(Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)
MALDEN - Carolanne Fredericks knows what the Orange Line cars sound like. She can hear each one of the 120 cars squeak, rattle, and roll 312 times each day. Beginning at 5 a.m. and for the next 20 hours, the 30-year-old cars thunder along the rails behind her backyard fence. She can see them from her kitchen. She can see them from her yard. And, 12 years after she bought what she thought was her dream house, she says the trains have all but taken over her life.
“It’s really been miserable,’’ says Fredericks, 49, who calls herself a prisoner in her own home. She bought the modest, two-bedroom Cape with her late husband, Louis Mitchell, in 1997 without realizing the MBTA line was situated on a berm just 25 feet away from her kitchen.
“I thought it was the commuter rail, which doesn’t run by the house every seven minutes,’’ she said.
For the first few years she thought she would just learn to live with it. She had worked preparing food in a local nursing home and school, and her husband, who died three years ago, was a Gloucester fisherman.
They figured they might get used to the subway noise and shaking foundation. But the trains ran on schedule, day after day and year after year, and that was enough to interrupt all of the normal habits people take for granted, such as sitting down to a quiet meal, talking on the phone, watching TV, listening to music, and sleeping.
About seven years ago, the couple got neighbors to sign a petition calling for the MBTA to do something to improve their quality of life.
The homeowners wanted sound barriers, similar to those erected near the Wellington subway station around that time.
But the T concluded that window upgrades would be the best way to lessen the sound, and eight homeowners were offered new windows.
In this neighborhood known as Edgeworth, where two- and three-deckers back up against the Orange Line and the subway can be heard in hundreds of homes, many were disappointed that they did not qualify. The upset homeowners included Fredericks, who was not given new windows.
Lydia Rivera, a T spokeswoman, said there are no plans to buffer the sound from the subway cars. “There is no longer a program for noise mitigation or window replacement due to severe budget constraints,’’ she said.
Fredericks disagrees with any suggestion that a person can become accustomed to living beside a rail bed. “People say, ‘Just get over it,’ and I tell them ‘You live here and you tell me what it’s like.’ ’’
Now disabled, she spends nearly all of her days inside and says she can’t afford new windows or to soundproof her house. She never opens her windows, fearing the dust from the subway cars. She has all but stopped entertaining because she does not want guests to be offended by the noise, and she now celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas elsewhere.
The trains, she believes, have contributed to her insomnia and hearing loss. “I used to have perfect hearing,’’ she said. But now she sets the volume high on her TV, stereo, and cellphone ringer.
Between 1 and 5 in the morning, when the rail bed is silent, she sleeps. But when the first subway car rattles along around 5:15, her troubles, she said, begin all over again.
Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
