New Red and Orange Line Cars

So do we just just start a new procurement now to replace the new orange line in 10-15 years instead of midlife overhauls? Might as well get a head start on it.
 
I see a bunch of new Red Line complete trains sitting at the South Station yard but have yet to ride one in the 2 years since they started arriving. Do they actually run them for revenue service? The '70s and '90s trains are crumbling as they run (or the doors are falling off)...
 
Arch101 said:
I see a bunch of new Red Line complete trains sitting at the South Station yard but have yet to ride one in the 2 years since they started arriving. Do they actually run them for revenue service? The '70s and '90s trains are crumbling as they run (or the doors are falling off)...
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There are usually only 3 or 4 new trains running on the Red Line, but sometimes I've seen them run 5 new trains at the same time. Currently, 3 new trains are running according to the TransitMatters New Train Tracker.
 
Arch101 said:
I see a bunch of new Red Line complete trains sitting at the South Station yard but have yet to ride one in the 2 years since they started arriving. Do they actually run them for revenue service? The '70s and '90s trains are crumbling as they run (or the doors are falling off)...
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Last time I rode on the Red Line, I had a new train in both directions, though I wouldn't typically expect that. Overall, though, as an infrequent RL rider, I've probably ridden more new trains than old over the past year.

Per TransitMatters, there are three new trains running right now, and 13 old, so that's close to a fifth that are new.

New Train Tracker

Live tracking of MBTA's new Orange, Green, and Red Line trains brought to you by the TransitMatters Labs team.
traintracker.transitmatters.org traintracker.transitmatters.org
 
themissinglink said:
There are usually only 3 or 4 new trains running on the Red Line, but sometimes I've seen them run 5 new trains at the same time. Currently, 3 new trains are running according to the TransitMatters New Train Tracker.
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They have enough accepted cars for 8 sets, but for the longest time the warranty repair backlog meant that actual running numbers were minus 1-2 sets off the "active" rostered availability. If it's now averaging minus 3-4 sets off rostered availability then we're seeing some noticeable slippage in the pace (or lackthereof) of warranty repairs that's probably starting to pile them up idle in Cabot Yard.:(

Next month was the scheduled retirement date for the 01500/01600's on the worst-case CRRC schedule of only 2 married-pair deliveries per month (it was 2 months ago if they'd actually kept to their intended "recovery" schedule), and there's no freaking way we're going to meet even that half-assed target at the rate things are going on both the deliveries and the in-service numbers.
 
At the risk of sounding alarmist...does the T have any contingency or plan if the feds refuse to release the components being held at customs or if CRRC concludes there is no point in finishing the Red Line deliveries off and walks away? Because both of those things seem like real possibilities right now and the old vehicles are falling apart rapidly.
 
jdrinboston said:
At the risk of sounding alarmist...does the T have any contingency or plan if the feds refuse to release the components being held at customs or if CRRC concludes there is no point in finishing the Red Line deliveries off and walks away? Because both of those things seem like real possibilities right now and the old vehicles are falling apart rapidly.
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I'm not sure what kind of contingency you could have, apart from dumping money into emergency overhauls, which nobody wants to do until you have certainty there's no choice but to not scrap.
 
NETransit rosters updated for New Year's...

The last Orange pair was finally delivered in December. 144 cars, 4 in testing, 4 out-of-service awaiting repair for derailment damage.

Red's up to 52 cars, 6 in-testing. The December pair delivery is still listed on the site as "planned", so it's unclear if that actually happened or if CRRC whiffed again on its pathetically slow recovery target. As noted previously, the line isn't running anywhere near as many cars as are listed "active" because of cars being held for increasingly backlogged warranty repairs. No 01500/01600's have been retired in months...the 15's are still at 14 cars and the 16's at 4 cars. 6 01700's are being held at Cabot for accident damage, so they're starting to get strained on availability of the "good" old cars too. Interestingly, previously retired car 01754 got barged over to Moon Island instead of being scrapped and is now being used by Boston Fire for emergency training.
 
Arch101 said:
I finally rode a new Red Line car for the first time this morning. MUCH nicer than the 70s cars. I really like that Red, Orange and Blue all have a similar vibe now.
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It's taking forever with the Red, but I absolutely love how reliable the Orange Line is nowadays (take it daily). The Blue has been the most reliable and solid for years.
 
Speaking of taking forever, could we get Andrea Campbell's okay for a few no-bid contracts for the Mattapan Line like the one Bob Kraft got? This is year 8 of a 10 year project and we only have a 15% design
 
Does anyone know how the new cars look before & after repairs from the derailment damage? :unsure:
 
www.masslive.com

CRRC will lay off workers because U.S. customs still blocking car shells from China

The MBTA said it stays laser-focused on answering questions from customs officials: “we remain confident that car shipments will be allowed to resume”.
www.masslive.com www.masslive.com
CRRC-MA will lay off employees for two months starting March 16 because needed subway-car shells from China are still held up at ports by American customs.
CRRC’s news release says 161 employees will be laid off. They are 57 members of Sheet Metal Workers Local 63, 76 members of Electrical Workers Local 7 and 28 nonunion supervisors and other white-collar workers.
Chinese-owned CRRC, which has 406 workers at its plant in East Springfield, announced Friday afternoon a 60-day notice. The plant makes subway cars for Boston’s MBTA and for the Los Angeles Metro ahead of the Olympics.
[...]
Friday, the MBTA said it understands U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service’s need to verify the documentation, and the MBTA will continue to work closely with CRRC MA to identify the use of alternative international suppliers of the materials and components needed for the cars.
The T said CRRC is also identifying alternative sources of materials. “We all want to avoid or minimize any potential impacts on the plant’s labor force, which has been producing high-performing subway cars,” Eng said in his statement.
CRRC said it hopes that its parts and shells will be released so it can recall the furloughed employees.
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Should have done/started some sort of fast-tracked procurement process years ago for the Red Line when things were already going from bad to worse on the entire deal.
 
bakgwailo said:
Should have done/started some sort of fast-tracked procurement process years ago for the Red Line when things were already going from bad to worse on the entire deal.
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When it's a procurement of 250 cars, there's nothing that can be "fast-tracked". Procurements are enormously complex processes and typically have half-decade gestation periods at minimum, and with inflation and further industry consolidation afoot in the years since the CRRC deal was inked the bath the T would take on the new deal's unit price would be apocalyptic. In the end it's pretty much taking a similar amount of time for the same general product at enormously higher price.

It's still the best of a not-great set of options to continue nursing this order to completion any way they can. If CRRC is short on shells to continue assembly, then maybe what they can/should do is redouble their efforts to the warranty repairs on the cars that are in-service. Red's not running nearly as many sets of new cars as they have "active" and accepted on the property because of anomalous wear profiles on key systems on the CRRC cars that have been in-service the longest. It's piling them up in Cabot Yard waiting for the techs to have a look at them and how to correct the issues, and it's pretty much halted the retirements of the fast-failing 01500/01600 cars that need to be gone ASAP. While the warranty repair process is by its very nature overly cautious and doesn't necessarily foretell anything bad about the cars' overall reliability (i.e. it's a "normal" part of the teething process), CRRC is starting to fall well behind a pace that'll keep the in-service ranks stable and that's yet another problem that they're mismanaging. We'll at least be on an island of quasi-stability for the time being if they have enough in-service cars to retire the 01500/01600's...but we're not close to that yet the way they're stumbling on the warranty front.

Note: The wear/warranty issues are affecting Orange as well. It's just that with the order complete they're swimming in a surplus of cars until the signal mods are complete for enacting the peak headway improvements, so the effect of having so many "active" cars parked at Wellington for warranty mods isn't as noticeable to overall service reliability. But it has meant that repairing the 4 derailment-damaged out-of-service cars has been hopelessly far backburnered.
 
Has anyone anywhere moved from a procurement process of "some large number of cars every several decades" do something where deliveries are relatively ongoing? Maybe with incremental improvements along the way? What are the dynamics driving the way it's currently done?
 
mjbellantoni said:
Has anyone anywhere moved from a procurement process of "some large number of cars every several decades" do something where deliveries are relatively ongoing? Maybe with incremental improvements along the way? What are the dynamics driving the way it's currently done?
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Buses are pretty much always done that way, since there's minimal customization involved for individual orders except for the most superficial livery. The problem with doing it for rail--and especially the MBTA's subway systems--is that everybody's grand mesh of specs nets very different cars for individual orders. Even in cases where there's a modular common "family" of cars offered forming the basis of the orders. When you dig into the weeds of differing signaling systems, turn radii, electrification systems, and so on you virtually never end up in a state where the "showroom model" is exactly what gets sold. And that makes it very hard to do anything but discrete cumbersome procurements where the assembly line has to be moderately-to-heavily modified before changing to a different customer's order. Even stuff in mainline rail world like the Siemens Charger locomotives and Venture coaches that have been in-production pretty much continuously over a decade have enough order-by-order specs customizations that they can't sell a completely 100% common make.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
When you dig into the weeds of differing signaling systems, turn radii, electrification systems, and so on you virtually never end up in a state where the "showroom model" is exactly what gets sold. And that makes it very hard to do anything but discrete cumbersome procurements where the assembly line has to be moderately-to-heavily modified before changing to a different customer's order.
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I wonder how the modification effort gets distributed between design, fabrication, and assembly.

Toyota was famously able to get to the point where they could build different auto models on the same line at the same time. Is it theoretically possible for train manufacturers to do that, or is it not possible, no incentives, etc.
 
mjbellantoni said:
I wonder how the modification effort gets distributed between design, fabrication, and assembly.

Toyota was famously able to get to the point where they could build different auto models on the same line at the same time. Is it theoretically possible for train manufacturers to do that, or is it not possible, no incentives, etc.
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It's definitely MUCH less efficient in the U.S. because we're so much more sparsely populated with train systems than the rest of the world, and ubiquitous "Buy America" requirements usually mean there has to be a smaller factory configured only one way at a time instead of a massive, more flexible factory. It's not nearly as bad in Europe, for instance. But it's still a lot more cumbersome than it could be overall because of the very real problem of specs fragmentation between systems and the overhead that imposes on flexibility of manufacture/assembly.

I still don't think you could ever get a perfect world of procurement flexibility anywhere on a T non-bus order, though, because of the particular needs of the system. Even more generic Commuter Rail requires significant customization if only for the fact that most worldwide available non-bespoke/common-design buying options are foreign-derived and need to go through significant FRA-compliance mods to even be available for sale here in the first place due to scarcity of train systems on this continent.
 
mjbellantoni said:
Has anyone anywhere moved from a procurement process of "some large number of cars every several decades" do something where deliveries are relatively ongoing? Maybe with incremental improvements along the way? What are the dynamics driving the way it's currently done?
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I think the closest you get on this continent is NYCT - at the end of the day, they only have two "fleets" of rolling stock - the A (IRT) and B (BMT&IND) divisions and over 6700 total cars, so they're kinda always buying something - plus, my understanding is that NYC Subway actually designs the cars separately from the construction process. As far as I'm aware, all of the NTT trains were and are first designed by the MTA (internally?) and then put out to bid to be built. its why we knew what features the R211 was going to have before Kawasaki even bid on it, and how the R160 As and Bs are basically identical since Alstom and Kawasaki built their orders basically simultaneously. The R262/R268 is designed despite not knowing who will build it, and is basically an iterative improvement on the R211.
 
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