New Red and Orange Line Cars

themissinglink said:
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
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Additional coverage from Western MA news.

www.westernmassnews.com

CRRC furloughing 161 workers as Customs detains railcar shells, parts

CRRC Massachusetts has notified its workforce of an impending furlough on March 16 of 161 workers.
www.westernmassnews.com www.westernmassnews.com
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
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.
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Speaking of, I've been seeing ~8-10 of the new cars in the maintenance area of Cabot every day for a bit now (from Fairmount line commute window. It's hard to tell but it looked like a 4 car train half inside a maintenance bay, another 4 car train sat at that boarding platform outside, and a single married pair parked next to the building on and off. This has been every morning for a couple weeks now. It is weird seeing just how many new cars there are on property at Cabot now but so few in service. They regular run a new set as a 4-car train in service
 
Koopzilla24 said:
Speaking of, I've been seeing ~8-10 of the new cars in the maintenance area of Cabot every day for a bit now (from Fairmount line commute window. It's hard to tell but it looked like a 4 car train half inside a maintenance bay, another 4 car train sat at that boarding platform outside, and a single married pair parked next to the building on and off. This has been every morning for a couple weeks now. It is weird seeing just how many new cars there are on property at Cabot now but so few in service. They regular run a new set as a 4-car train in service
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Apparently a major problem is that the CRRC's are developing a too-soon rash of flat spots on the wheels, and they're trying both to figure out what's doing that and fix that while actively re-grinding a whole lot of wheel sets so the cars can stay in-service while they're figuring out the anomalous wear problem. Same thing happening on Orange, but the numbers surplus there with a full fleet means it's not as noticeable out in the wild. Red's gone over the last couple months from running 1-2 sets behind the rostered "active" numbers to 3-4 sets behind the rostered numbers at noticeable slippage in daily fleet availability, which is why the retirements of the #1 cars have been halted for months. This month was supposed to be the retirement date for the 01500/01600's on the worst-case CRRC recovery delivery schedule, and there's still 18 of them out there so it's likely they're going to have to wheeze through the whole winter before we get any relief.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Apparently a major problem is that the CRRC's are developing a too-soon rash of flat spots on the wheels, and they're trying both to figure out what's doing that and fix that while actively re-grinding a whole lot of wheel sets so the cars can stay in-service while they're figuring out the anomalous wear problem. Same thing happening on Orange, but the numbers surplus there with a full fleet means it's not as noticeable out in the wild. Red's gone over the last couple months from running 1-2 sets behind the rostered "active" numbers to 3-4 sets behind the rostered numbers at noticeable slippage in daily fleet availability, which is why the retirements of the #1 cars have been halted for months. This month was supposed to be the retirement date for the 01500/01600's on the worst-case CRRC recovery delivery schedule, and there's still 18 of them out there so it's likely they're going to have to wheeze through the whole winter before we get any relief.
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The experience riding the CRRC trains feels like a lot of slipping on acceleration resulting in it being very jolty rather than smooth. It feels like regular losses in power from a loss in traction so I'd guess that can be fixed with software? Though i figure if that was it they wouldve found a solution already.
 
Why in the hell can't they wait until the shells for all of the Red Line cars are made? This program has gone on way too far, waiting for the new trains to be finished!!!! This is what the MBTA gets for going with the cheapest plan!!!! You get what you pay for!!!! :mad::mad:
 
Jahvon09 said:
Why in the hell can't they wait until the shells for all of the Red Line cars are made? This program has gone on way too far, waiting for the new trains to be finished!!!! This is what the MBTA gets for going with the cheapest plan!!!! You get what you pay for!!!! :mad::mad:
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Blame the President and his dumb trade wars, not the MBTA/CRRC. There’s been way too many mistakes, but this one is not at fault of them.
 
CheapLeak said:
Blame the President and his dumb trade wars, not the MBTA/CRRC. There’s been way too many mistakes, but this one is not at fault of them.
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If the forced-labor allegations are true, that's definitely on CRRC. Full-stop. But, agreed, the Administration is not really interested in getting to the bottom of that, doesn't seem to be trying very hard at all to get to the bottom of that, and only seems to be doing this to make a show of hurting blue states.

I'll say it again: what CRRC should be doing right now is assigning all resources possible to the warranty repairs of the in-service cars if Springfield is short on shells to continue assembly. Because we have enough delivered on-the-property to retire the most-problematic 01500/01600's if only the daily service ranks of CRRC's were keeping up with the tally of officially rostered "active" bodies. They aren't, because the onsite CRRC techs and Cabot shop aren't keeping up with the anomalous early wear on the CRRC vehicles causing their daily availability to precipitously plummet. And thus the retirement of the #1 cars has been halted for 5 months now with no end in sight. We're likely going to get crunched on that hard this week when the shot 15's/16's choke to death on all this snow and cold causing the fleet shortages we've been teetering on for months on to finally start decimating service levels on a large scale. If they could run all of the CRRC's that are "active", that wouldn't be a problem. But the warranty mods are all sorts of fucked on their fast-slipping pace right now.
 
It IS Trump's fault. Come on, guys, who is snowing who? He's too busy trying to own things!! Now he wants to own Greenland! Who does think he is? When he ran for the 2nd time, he pledged to make this country great again, He ransacked it with all this wanting to own things & now people are being laid off at CRRC. I tell you, 2028 can't get here fast enough, now he talked about breaking the constitution by wanting to run for a 3rd time!!!! He's gone nuts!!!!!! :mad: :mad:
 
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F-Line to Dudley said:
We're likely going to get crunched on that hard this week when the shot 15's/16's choke to death on all this snow and cold causing the fleet shortages we've been teetering on for months on to finally start decimating service levels on a large scale. If they could run all of the CRRC's that are "active", that wouldn't be a problem.
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This prophecy seems to be coming true now. :(

TransitMatters live tracker shows half of the line's load is being taken up by the CRRC's right now and overall service levels have taken a steep hit due to lack of availability of the older cars. There's only 1 set of 15's/16's/17's running...all 11 others are Bombardiers and CRRC's. I wonder if they've pressed back into service the CRRC's that were sitting idle at Cabot for warranty mods, flat wheels and all, from lack of other serviceable bodies. The in-service ranks of them seem to be higher today than they've been recently.
 
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YAY- I finally got a new Red Line train today! Then, it sat for so long in Quincy Station that I finally walked over and grabbed a commuter rail train.....
 
I've been watching the TransitMatters train tracker periodically throughout the afternoon. Red's only been running a maximum of 12 sets (one of them a 4-car set) ever since the huge service meltdown this A.M., including 12 right now at the height of P.M. rush. 6 CRRC sets, 4 Bombardier, 1 set of all-01700's, 1 mix of 01700's/01600's.

Normal peak loading is 22 sets. We're seeing little more than half the regular service today because of all the sidelined cars. Bleak.
 
14 Red Line trains running now, after they tried (and mostly failed) to get by on only 9 for the PM rush yesterday. So...yay...the apocalypse is still awful but somewhat less than total today?

CRRC's have been floating 40-50% of the schedules today, as all 3 classes of old cars are completely ravaged with cold-weather ailments. I would've thought the AC-traction 01800's would fare better than this since they don't have the same infamous snow-inhaling motor blowers as the DC-traction 15's/16's/17's (a problem endemic to all of the agency's DC-motor cars, including the old Orange and Blue fleets), but apparently not...they've been KO'd en masse too.
 
StreetsblogMASS said:
Per TransitMatters new trains tracker, looks like three of those sets are 4-car trains, so they're using the same number of cars (36) as they would with 6 full-length trains.
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Same deal this afternoon. CRRC availability this week seems to be at a hard cap of 36 cars, which they're just fileting to stretch the fleet. There's 2 6-car and 1 4-car set's worth of "active" cars AWOL at Cabot for those backed-up warranty repairs, about 30% of the rostered fleet.

The service 'rebound' (such that it is...we're still 5-7 six-car sets shy of "normal" capacity) today is almost entirely due to the refactored 4-car CRRC sets and more Bombardiers returning to service. The 01500/01600/01700 in-service numbers are totally unimproved from early in the week with just 2 trains' worth out there (though the cars seem to be different today...no 16's, a couple more 15's). Today and tomorrow would probably be peak awful for the oldest cars' air compressors, which are notoriously frail in frigid temperatures and have been responsible for many of the disabled trains this week (not enough pressurized air = brakes don't release and train can't move).
 
NETransit updated...

All Orange Line cars have been accepted into service, and the 2 recent derailment-damaged cars have been repaired and put back into service. 150 active cars, 2 out-of-service (the derailment-damaged pair from several years ago). Actual in-service availability lagging considerably due to the backed-up warranty repairs, but that's not affecting service since they're at an overall car/set surplus until the signal mods are complete allowing shorter peak headways.

60 Red Line cars accepted into service, no cars left in testing. Actual in-service availability lagging considerably because of the warranty deadline with all the 4-car sets and reduced overall set numbers out there. CRRC delivered only one pair in January, none so far in February...so we're seeing major delivery slippage already. Unclear how many shells Springfield is still working on due to the Customs embargo, but it's unlikely that they're completely/totally tapped out at just 60 cars. There's probably at least a few left, although they've already furloughed a large percentage of their workforce so whatever's left for assembly is probably going at a crawl. No old cars retired since summer, and that's not likely to change for many months to come with what service decimation has happened this winter.
 
If the Red Line situation got dire enough with more and more forced retirements of the old cars, could/would they ever use Orange Line sets to temporarily supplement the Red Line?
 
ball_square said:
If the Red Line situation got dire enough with more and more forced retirements of the old cars, could/would they ever use Orange Line sets to temporarily supplement the Red Line?
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Can't. They're narrower and shorter than Red Line cars and wouldn't be anywhere close to safe to berth at a platform with the step-down and the pronounced gap. The T did use several sets of retired Orange 01100 cars on Red from 1981-87 as work cars, but those were strictly on the overnight maint/trash pickup shift and were only berthed by trained crews.

66 new cars delivered was the original CRRC target for the retirement of the 01500/01600's (of which 18 are still active). If the warranty repair dead line at Cabot weren't so long and so frustratingly not being tended to, we probably would be very close to retiring the 57-year-old #1 cars by now...or even (with the 4-car trains concession) already be at that retirement milestone and not be in too too bad a shape with the just the 01700's and 01800's to nurse along. But even with 60 new cars rostered, they're not running more than 60% of the active fleet because of all the ones flagged for warranty repairs because of anomalous wear. CRRC techs and the T are collapsing at troubleshooting and correcting the flat-wheel problem and other minor/moderate bugs, so the cars simply aren't available when they need them most. Somebody needs to be asking why CRRC isn't putting all hands on-deck at Cabot (and Wellington for that matter, since the Orange in-service ranks are being hit by the same warranty problems) while it's furloughing almost all of the Springfield workforce.
 
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