Since the plasma sheet boundary layer has been identified as a site of fast streaming plasma, suggestions have been made that the features which have hitherto been taken as signatures of the formation of a neutral line in the near-Earth tail during the expansion phase of substorms can be interpreted differently in terms of the boundary layer characteristics. In order to determine if such suggestions are viable we have analyzed the ISEE 3 data obtained during one of its tail traversals at the distance of 80 RE. It has turned out that at this distance, which is intermediate between the near tail and the distant tail, the plasma sheet boundary layer does not represent a clearly definable entity in terms of the plasma flow characteristics, and thus it is fundamentally difficult to explain substorm observations at this distance in terms of any boundary layer model. Indeed, observations are quite consistent with the formation of a near-Earth neutral line during the expansion phase. The presence of the boundary layer at the ISEE 1 orbit (apogee: 23 RE) but not at 80 RE suggests that the neutral sheet acceleration region which extends from the distant tail terminates somewhere between 80 and 23 RE. It is further noted that the correspondence between activities in the inner magnetosphere and in the tail may not be absolute one-to-one. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1988