Many streetcar routes that had operated to downtown (some into the Tremont Street subway) were curtailed to Dudley, where two elevated loops offered cross-platform transfers to Main Line trains, using platforms on both sides of the northbound track.

Other streetcars – largely on crosstown routes that did not terminate at Dudley – stopped at street-level platforms underneath the elevated station.

[4] When the Washington Street Elevated was removed, the MBTA originally promised to run light rail service over its former route.

After 15 years of debate and changing plans, the Washington Street section of the Silver Line bus rapid transit system opened on July 20, 2002.

It ran between Dudley and Downtown Crossing, replacing the 49 bus (albeit with increased frequency and other rapid-transit-like features).

[10] Under draft plans released in 2008, a spur of the Urban Ring would have run on Washington Street from Melnea Cass Boulevard, using the existing Silver Line platforms at Dudley.

[12] The closing of the Washington Street Elevated in 1987, which also closed the Dudley Square elevated station, prompted a 2012 review; the Roxbury-Dorchester-Mattapan Transit Needs Study, recommended for some form of proposed replacement rail service to access southern Metro Boston neighborhoods—one option being studied within this review would re-use the Tremont Street subway's now-unused southern Pleasant Street tunnel coming from the Green Line's Boylston station to eventually run a light rail line to, and likely beyond Nubian Square to the south.

The new light rail service proposed in the 2012 review, to replace the rapid transit access the Elevated previously provided, could go from Nubian Square as far south as the Red Line's Mattapan station, with a northern turnaround terminus at Government Center.