It feels like elaborate sandbagging to justify Siemens Chargers as the prudent long term solution.
They already did that with the seating capacity of these KISSes. 93 seats per car means you'd need an 8-passenger car KISS set (meaning 9 cars total with the battery pack) to seat as many as a
minimum-allowable 4-car Kawasaki/Rotem bi-level set (and the Providence Line never runs the minimums, not even on the far off-peak and weekends). And guess what, KISS sets are only factory-orderable for a maximum of 7 cars and the seatless battery car is one of them. Caltrain's post-electrification ridership explosion has already created problems for them with the straight-EMU KISSes. They had to drain lots of options to expand the whole base-order fleet of 6-car straight-EMU sets to the maximum 7 cars, and they are still running rush hour sets that are standing-room only where the previous larger capacity push-pulls weren't. Overstuffed in spite of increasing frequencies. Caltrain is actually in kind of a bad spot as the ridership continues to aggressively grow, because they've increased frequencies about as much as their track infrastructure will allow and have no more moves to increase per-set capacity. They're just going to have to deal with standing-room only peak trains as a way of life because they miscalculated their loading very badly vs. the ridership draw of the 25% improved schedules. It's going to choke off their growth pretty quickly when people start getting turned off by the overcrowding conditions and the increased boarding/alighting dwells for such severely over-capacity trains start dragging down their rush-hour OTP. Caltrain planned their per-train capacity pretty freaking stupid, so it was a giant risk to try to emulate them. And a gianter risk to emulate them without any forethought whatsoever because of the "take it or leave it" nature of the lease terms that prohibits them from altering the seating capacity with customizations (lest it cost them even more money per-car). Fairmount, being so unlike the other lines with a lot of intermediate-to-intermediate trips, less of a rush-hour bump, and much more even-keeled all-day loading, is probably the one and only line in the whole system where these cars' very small capacity could actually work across the entire schedule.
So the stuff the T ordered is basically unusable on
all other lines on the system because of the onboard capacity limitations. And they know it now, which is why they're overplaying the battery loco purchase + existing push-pull fleet as "better" for Providence, even though the push-pull schedules (diesel or battery) are about 20-22% worse than an equivalent EMU-run schedule and forego the ridership bump Caltrain is getting from their EMU'd schedules. Even if you lashed up 2 Fairmount BEMU sets back-to-back (inconveniently walled off from each other because the middle-facing cab cars don't have pass-thru doors) for 8 total cars/6 passenger cars, you'd only end up with a about 3 Kawasaki/Rotem's worth of total capacity. Which is not nearly enough for even an off-peak Framingham or Salem/Beverly short-turn, and probably not even enough for a Needham or Reading turn
except on the off-peak. They're literally only a fit for Fairmount's loading, which means the odds of the 96 option cars (again, still at $20.5M per) on the lease being drained are almost nil because there's just no other place anywhere the T roams where the loading within battery range fits the available set capacity. They went
so freaking extremely bespoke they backed themselves entirely into a corner, such that the only way to keep greenwashing other lines like Providence was do go
extremely freaking bespoke all over again with the batt loco order. Unforced error begatting unforced error. "Portability" didn't factor into their analysis at all, no matter what BS pap they were spreading about these KISSes someday being usable on other lines. If it did, they'd be evaluating cars in more intermediate capacity range like the 2x2 (but not semi-longitudinal) seating Alstom MultiLevel EMU's that aren't so skewed to parking suburban butts like a 3x2 Kawasaki/Rotem sardine can, but also not so skewed in the opposite extreme with excessive standee room like the Caltrain KISSes that they're unusable at any sort of mean Purple Line peak loading. A loading analysis would've red-flagged to them that Caltrain fucked it up and that ordering their cars verbatim would bring problems, but of course they didn't do that at all.
At some deep dark subconscious level, they now know they dun fucked up bigtime and bought something that's unusable at a systemic level. But the PR--on both battery purchases--is in the lying-through-their-teeth-and-see-if-anyone-notices phase (which, sampling comments from the Reddit masses, seems to be working for them more often than not). And that's what happens in the middle of a catastrophic planning mistake: the unforced errors begat a whole succession of
more unforced errors that feed off each other and feed a bubble of bullshitting that eventually bursts. That's where we are with the dueling battery purchases...they're amplifying each other to complete catastrophe, which is how a couple billion dollars ends up going up in smoke without any internal self-checks. The fallout is going to create generational planning trauma, because in their efforts to save face they'll just be like "Well, we tried batteries...what else is there?" and do no self-reflection on
how they approached batteries. Even on things like the botched capacity analysis that isn't about batteries per se.
It's bad. All very very bad.
www.etany.org
