The Red Line’s iconic seat fabric is for sale. Yes, really.

Most Red Line riders likely know the seat fabric: abstract lines, multicolored, fuzzy. Now, thanks to one persistent Massachusetts native with a soft spot for the T, you can buy the beloved fabric.

Thomas Underwood of Mansfield tracked down the manufacturer behind the Red Line’s iconic multi-colored seat fabric, and posted to Reddit last week asking whether anyone else wanted in on a bulk order. He expected it to gain traction with some crafters. Instead, over 130 people have signed up to buy the fabric.

“I knew that people would get excited about it if I shared it,” he said in an interview with Boston.com. “I didn’t think it would get quite this much attention.”

The 27-year-old rode the commuter rail occasionally as a kid, but said his love for the T took hold during his undergraduate years at Northeastern when he’d ride the Green and Orange lines, and later, the Red Line for an internship in Cambridge. 

After graduating in 2020, he moved to Los Angeles to start a PhD in biochemistry at UCLA. It was there that he got into crafting and began digging through the MBTA’s public data for fun, turning his interest in the transit agency into something tangible (he built a real-time desk display of the MBTA lines called CharlieBoard). That’s also around when he discovered Coby Unger’s “Choo-Choo Chairs” and started wondering where the fabric’s instantly recognizable multi-color pattern had actually come from.

He filed “a bunch” of public records requests with the MBTA, but still couldn’t find what he was looking for. So he switched tactics, cold-emailing upholstery shops in search of the fabric. Roughly three weeks ago, one of those emails — to British textile manufacturer Camira, which supplies fabric to the London Underground — struck gold. He found it: Vigor BAT314.

The company describes Vigor as “a color-filled, fun-packed, show-stopping collection” aimed at bus and coach interiors. The fabric is made of 83% wool and 17% nylon over a 100% cotton ground, and it comes in 61 colors.

“It was such a crazy rush,” Underwood said of finding the fabric. “I included a picture [in my email], and the sales rep immediately was like, ‘Oh, yep, we still make that. You can order it today if you want to.’”

But there was a catch: Camira doesn’t keep the fabric in stock. It would have to produce new fabric just for his order, with a minimum of 55 yards required — worth over $1,000, Underwood said. It was more than any individual crafter could reasonably use alone. 

That’s when Underwood took the idea to Reddit.

‘Let’s buy it together!’

Last week, Underwood posted to Boston’s subreddit under the title “I found the Red Line’s iconic fabric. Let’s buy it together!” His pitch was simple: “The Red Line upholstery is one of the most iconic designs in Boston, and for the first time, you have a chance to buy some of it! … I am organizing a group purchase so anyone can take home a piece of this nostalgic design.”

Within days, he had updated the post to say the group had already broken 50 yards in sign-ups. The response has only grown from there: as of Thursday, Underwood said roughly 132 people have requested more than 180 yards of fabric combined. The sign-up form has since closed, with a waitlist now in place for anyone still hoping to get in.

“I bit off more than I can chew at the moment,” Underwood admitted.

Plenty of people in the comments of his post offered project ideas of their own.

“I would absolutely buy a tote bag made out of this fabric,” one person wrote. “It would go very nicely with my tote bag of the Orange Line on fire,” they added. 

Another suggested the fabric would be “hilarious as a bike saddle. Cuz you’d still be sitting on the same fabric.” 

And one commenter said the fabric would “oddly … look nicely as throw pillows on my couch. It would match my sofa.”

Even those who weren’t interested in buying the fabric said they were grateful Underwood posted (“I don’t want any, but I’m happy weird s*** like this exists,” someone said), and others reminisced about seeing the fabric’s life cycle come full circle.

“I’m finally old enough to have seen something that people hated at the time age into a beloved cultural institution,” a commenter wrote.

Underwood is now working out how to actually get the fabric into people’s hands. He plans to be back in Massachusetts in December and is hoping to organize in-person pickup events, possibly through a local fabric shop, library, or a maker space, to handle the bulk of distribution before shipping or hand-delivering the rest. 

Not everyone who signed up is local, though: one buyer, to Underwood’s surprise, is in Nebraska. He said he plans to reach out personally to ask how they heard about the project.

A fabric with a fanbase

Underwood’s group-buy is the latest chapter in a small but devoted history of Bostonians using the Red Line seat fabric in crafts.

In 2022, Coby Unger, then an associate instructor at MIT’s Hobby Shop and now a teacher at Olin College, salvaged seats from decommissioned Red Line cars and turned them into furniture he called “Choo-Choo Chairs.” 

A year later, another crafter posted a matching top-and-skirt set to Reddit, made not from the original material but from a printed reproduction pulled from photos of the seats.

Like Underwood, Unger is drawn to the fabric precisely because it’s a little bit ugly.

“It is objectively not that good,” he said. “The design is of a specific era that I think we’ve generally gotten past, in terms of design and esthetics. But it’s so nostalgic,” he added.

With an overhaul of the fabric seats underway by the transit agency, Unger said he has struggled to accept the change. 

“They’re way cleaner and way comfier, and I still hate them,” he laughed. “They’re objectively better in every way and I still don’t like them.”

Unger says he’s planning to join Underwood’s group order himself, calling it a great project he’s excited to see develop. And when told the fabric is 83% wool, he said he “definitely should make a vest then. So cozy!”

‘Ugly nostalgia’

Underwood himself is still deciding what to make with his fabric, and is toying with the idea of a bomber jacket with fabric elbow patches. Whatever people end up making, he said he wants to set up a way for the group to share their finished projects once the fabric is distributed.

For him, the appeal of the fabric comes down to nostalgia more than anything.

“It has that ugly nostalgia to it,” he said. “If you’ve been in Boston in the last 20 years, you remember this fabric. You remember that it was kind of gross. You remember that it was just another part of the commute. But we love that commute.”

Annie Jonas is a Community writer at Boston.com. She was previously a local editor at Patch and a freelancer at the Financial Times.