New Red and Orange Line Cars

There's supposed to be another new OL train appearing soon to join the first 2 already in use, I think between now & next month.
 
NETransit reports that 1414/1415 were delivered 2/20/20 to Wellington. Given that 1400-1411 are currently in service as the two trainsets, that means we now have four out of six cars necessary for a third trainset. 1412/1413 were delivered November 2019. That's 3 months between each married pair. At that rate... well it's not good...
 
HelloBostonHi said:
NETransit reports that 1414/1415 were delivered 2/20/20 to Wellington. Given that 1400-1411 are currently in service as the two trainsets, that means we now have four out of six cars necessary for a third trainset. 1412/1413 were delivered November 2019. That's 3 months between each married pair. At that rate... well it's not good...
Click to expand...

I think they're producing them at the expected rate and they're building up in Springfield. Also, it's not 3 months between each pair, it's 3 months between this one and the last one, in which time they had to develop a solution to a technical problem and retrofit the trains.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it doesn't make sense to just extrapolate these two points.
 
From the Globe:
With two of its highly hyped new Orange Line trains in regular passenger service, the MBTA had projected that a third train would join them by the end of February.

Alas: it did not.

Production of the new trains at a Springfield plant “slipped" in recent weeks, according to MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo. The T only received the last two of the six-car set on Wednesday; now the full train must undergo testing and a “burn-in” phase. Pesaturo said it would still take about another month for it to enter service.

No details yet on what caused things to fall off schedule, but Pesaturo said CRRC, the Chinese company building the trains, is making changes “to maximize the capabilities of its state-of-the-art assembly plant, improve performance and increase productivity.”

CRRC declined to address the reason for the delay but said it is adding 20 new employees to its production line this month.
 
Teh Glob sure does love itself transpo coverage with a skin-deep slice of PANIC!, no?🤯

Almost makes me long for the days when their whole editorial policy towards the T was to take that week's "This is fine" tweet from Pesaturo and expand it out into 300 words of filler. Almost.
 
tysmith95 said:
Will supply chain disruptions in China affect production?
Click to expand...

No, because the cars are a global hodgepodge of widely-sourced components from many, many countries. Rolling stock manufacturing sources way more heterogeneously across Planet Earth than other industries like electronics, so "Made in China" is in the packaging here not the parts. Your impulse-buy iPhone may be delayed because the factories are all in China and South Korea are squeezed by the quarantine blockages on shipping. Your average train assembly is being fed by parts from at least 3 different continents at once, and is multitasking assembly installations so if one component is delayed they can front-load work on another.

Obviously all bets are off--in pretty much any sector of the economy--if COVID-19 goes scorched-earth in a total global shitstorm. But we're a long, long way from that extreme level of across-board paralysis.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
No, because the cars are a global hodgepodge of widely-sourced components from many, many countries. Rolling stock manufacturing sources way more heterogeneously across Planet Earth than other industries like electronics, so "Made in China" is in the packaging here not the parts. Your impulse-buy iPhone may be delayed because the factories are all in China and South Korea are squeezed by the quarantine blockages on shipping. Your average train assembly is being fed by parts from at least 3 different continents at once, and is multitasking assembly installations so if one component is delayed they can front-load work on another.

Obviously all bets are off--in pretty much any sector of the economy--if COVID-19 goes scorched-earth in a total global shitstorm. But we're a long, long way from that extreme level of across-board paralysis.
Click to expand...

F-Line -- I just heard Tim Cook on Fox Business Channel -- you know what he said when he was asked about the Coronavirus and Apple production
Tim said that contrary to popular misconception the Iphone supply chain has very many branches with parts sourced from many countries including the US though final assembly happens in Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu China [a combined Foxconn workforce of 500,000]

Kind of like the Orange Line in reverse -- you get the final assembly done in China with parts sourced from places such as Woburn MA [Skyworks builds the key semiconductor components used in the radios] and Harrodsburg, Kentucky for Corning's Glass, memory from Sk Hynix in Korea, Intel in Arizona, TI in Texas, etc.

Almost makes you wonder -0- given the state of the global supply chain these days -- how about buying out the design for the Orange and Red Line cars from the Chinese -- and then building them from the ground up in the USA [with of course parts from some other places if necessary or preferential]
 
whighlander said:
F-Line -- I just heard Tim Cook on Fox Business Channel -- you know what he said when he was asked about the Coronavirus and Apple production
Tim said that contrary to popular misconception the Iphone supply chain has very many branches with parts sourced from many countries including the US though final assembly happens in Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu China [a combined Foxconn workforce of 500,000]

Kind of like the Orange Line in reverse -- you get the final assembly done in China with parts sourced from places such as Woburn MA [Skyworks builds the key semiconductor components used in the radios] and Harrodsburg, Kentucky for Corning's Glass, memory from Sk Hynix in Korea, Intel in Arizona, TI in Texas, etc.

Almost makes you wonder -0- given the state of the global supply chain these days -- how about buying out the design for the Orange and Red Line cars from the Chinese -- and then building them from the ground up in the USA [with of course parts from some other places if necessary or preferential]
Click to expand...

No...it doesn't make anyone "wonder" anything, unless that wonderment is: "How can I find an excuse to drag this thread transparently off-topic by giving an eighth's shit what Tim Fucking Cook has to say about something utterly unrelated?"

Rebooting the supply chain for theoretical 'because reasons' wasn't the question. Could the railcar supply chain be disrupted by a pandemic was the question. "Not easily" was the answer, because the pandemic would have to be bad enough to pinch off 3 continents' worth of shipping...and if it were that bad we have a whole freaking lot more serious overall things to worry about than a minor Orange Line parts delay. Absolutely nothing was prompting the forced tangent on the whimsical world of consumer electronics assembly.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
No...it doesn't make anyone "wonder" anything, unless that wonderment is: "How can I find an excuse to drag this thread transparently off-topic by giving an eighth's shit what Tim Fucking Cook has to say about something utterly unrelated?"

Rebooting the supply chain for theoretical 'because reasons' wasn't the question. Could the railcar supply chain be disrupted by a pandemic was the question. "Not easily" was the answer, because the pandemic would have to be bad enough to pinch off 3 continents' worth of shipping...and if it were that bad we have a whole freaking lot more serious overall things to worry about than a minor Orange Line parts delay. Absolutely nothing was prompting the forced tangent on the whimsical world of consumer electronics assembly.
Click to expand...
F-line -- this was your statement which triggered my response
Rolling stock manufacturing sources way more heterogeneously across Planet Earth than other industries like electronics, so "Made in China" is in the packaging here not the parts.
Click to expand...

Don't use an analogy if you are not familiar with the other end of it
I simple offered something Tim Cook said with was apropos to the issue and delivered that very morning
You can go off in your vituperative expletive-laced way without then contributing anything to the discussion

Back almost 20 years ago when Intel was making essentially all of the Pentium Microprocessors at Fab 17 in Hudson MA -- the wafers were tested in Hudson and then they were packed in shipping cases and sent by air to Penang Malaysia for dicing, and final assembly as Pentium Processors. That division of labor and global distribution of tasks in the semiconductor industry [and many other components of the electronics industry for both industrial and consumer products] has been the rule for most of the era of the Integrated Circuit.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
No, because the cars are a global hodgepodge of widely-sourced components from many, many countries. Rolling stock manufacturing sources way more heterogeneously across Planet Earth than other industries like electronics, so "Made in China" is in the packaging here not the parts. Your impulse-buy iPhone may be delayed because the factories are all in China and South Korea are squeezed by the quarantine blockages on shipping. Your average train assembly is being fed by parts from at least 3 different continents at once, and is multitasking assembly installations so if one component is delayed they can front-load work on another.

Obviously all bets are off--in pretty much any sector of the economy--if COVID-19 goes scorched-earth in a total global shitstorm. But we're a long, long way from that extreme level of across-board paralysis.
Click to expand...
And where are the various branches of the supply chain? Do none of them trace back to China? I’m not suggesting its apocalyptic, but all you need is an essential 1% to be missing from the supply chain for production to encounter issues.
 
swtat said:
Click to expand...

Page 8 of the PDF. Itemization of every system vendor and point of origin for assembly.

China; Pennsylvania (x4); Japan; Japan; Pennsylvania; China; South Carolina (x2); Pennsylvania; China; Massachusetts; New York; Illinois; New York (x2); South Carolina; Missouri; Czech Republic; Pennsylvania; China; California; Massachusetts; Georgia; Oregon; New York; Pennsylvania (x2); Nevada; Pennsylvania (x3); South Carolina (x2); Pennsylvania; Massachusetts (x14); New York; Illinois; New York (x2); South Carolina; Missouri; Pennsylvania; California; Massachusetts; Georgia; Oregon; South Carolina; New York (x3); Pennsylvania.

Obviously does not dive enough levels in to source the components' constituent parts and where they come from, as the vendors are on the hook for timely delivery. This is just where all the systems are waybilled from en route to CRRC for integration. But it looks like the place we have the most to fear from coronavirus choking off the Orange Line supply chain is:

Greater Pittsburgh

I think it's safe to conclude we have just a wee bit more to worry about here than a few late OL cars if Pittsburgh gets reduced to post-quarrantine exclusion zone hellscape...so with all things being relative this doesn't rate real high as a procurement concern.
 
www.bostonglobe.com

MBTA takes new Orange Line trains out of service - The Boston Globe

A spokeswoman for the MBTA confirmed that two six-car train sets had been taken offline, and the “exact cause of the issue is currently under investigation."
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com


MBTA

✔@MBTA
https://twitter.com/MBTA/status/1234780655822757888

The new Orange Line trains have been temporarily taken out of service. Inspectors identified a fault with the bolsters which is being corrected to ensure the vehicles are reliable & safe for the duration of their service lives. We expect to return them to service later this week.

87
5:00 AM - Mar 3, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Click to expand...

86 people are talking about this
 
shmessy said:
www.bostonglobe.com

MBTA takes new Orange Line trains out of service - The Boston Globe

A spokeswoman for the MBTA confirmed that two six-car train sets had been taken offline, and the “exact cause of the issue is currently under investigation."
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com



86 people are talking about this
Click to expand...
I noticed they weren't running the PM Peak yesterday and thought something was up... They said back by the end of this week (which MBTA time means maybe early next week) but that's still a pretty quick turnaround...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top