New Red and Orange Line Cars

datadyne007 said:
<dancing banana>
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You rang?

dancing_banana2.gif



On a more serious note, at least it's a step in the right direction.
 
Springfield's NBC affiliate ran a piece on the progress of the factory in Springfield:

Factory to build MBTA railcars in Springfield

Changchun has $566-million contract to manufacture rail cars for MBTA Red and Orange Lines

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – The MBTA’s subway cars will likely be manufactured at a factory in Springfield.

Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno and representatives from the Chinese Company CNR Changchun Railway Vehicles had a closed-door discussion Wednesday about permits and what’s next.

...

Kevin Kennedy said they expect to go through the permitting process this year and are on track to start construction early next year.
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It seems like everything is on schedule right now.
 
I'm anxious to see what the final design of the cars will look like!
 
Are there signal system upgrades coming to increase Red & Orange frequencies to go with the new orders?


F-Line to Dudley said:
Wynn's not increasing the frequency. The new car order is. Since 1987 the OL has been running at much lower headway than it did before 1987 because that was when they went to 6 cars...but didn't expand the fleet beyond the same 120 cars as today.

1987: 120 ÷ 4 = 30 trainsets available
Today: 120 ÷ 6 = 20 trainsets available (16 sets required for peak)
2019: 152 ÷ 6 = 25+ trainsets available

I don't know what the peak-hour trainset requirements were 28 years ago, but if you keep the same assumption of 80% of available fleet goes on-duty for the peak shift that means a luxurious 20% increase in service density.


All Wynn is doing is extending the operating hours of the peak shift past 7:00 by chucking in enough money for them to staff up with more operators after the shift change. The service increases themselves come from the new cars.
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Orange doesn't need any signal upgrades to get better headways. It's equipped to do more than it is today. It's just been short on cars for 2-1/2 decades ever since the move to 6-car trains created the artificial shortage, so feed it more bodies and it does more. Red's fleet size isn't increasing at all. Base order is 1:1 replacement for the ancient circa- 1969-71 01500/01600 series cars, option order is 1:1 replacement for the circa- 1988 01700 series cars. Service levels are stet before and after.


Signaling's a whole different animal that's led more by state-of-repair. Red's Braintree Branch ATO system JFK-Quincy Ctr. dates to 1971, Quincy-Ctr.-Braintree to 1980, Harvard-Alewife to 1981, and Ashmont-Harvard to 1988. Orange's ATO system Forest Hills-Haymarket dates to 1987; Haymarket-Oak Grove to 2004. Blue's mechanical trip-arm + wayside signals system is of widely varying age but old early-20th c. tech that's very maintenance-intensive and very weather-susceptible. New CBTC signaling has the primary advantage of being more software than hardware, with mass simplification of the trackside signaling hardware and most of the train control functions moved into a back-office server room. So any state-of-repair work rising to a level big/invasive enough as replacing miles of decaying copper with new fiber is going to mean they take the CBTC plunge instead of rebuilding the old. If they have to send guys in hardhats to trench new fiber, they're going to simplify the whole works while they're at it. So the CBTC server room gets set up regardless. What you choose to do with train spacing happens entirely in code in that server room...every time you want to change the train spacing.

As far as Blue and Orange are concerned, they can be programmed any which way in the server room and it won't change TPH. It takes more cars to take advantage of that. For Blue there's not much demand to do that. For Orange, these +32 cars are immediate enough relief that supplemental orders are not going to be at top of the list for another 15 years. The resignaling happens independent of that...because the copper and mechanical junk out in the field is getting old and worn (and Haymarket-north having newer fiber means it can get cheaply modded when the rest of the line's redone instead of needing a another do-over).

Red's more complicated. Harvard curve still sets the ruling limit on TPH to point where that can't increase much, so more cars and super-dense spacing don't pack more runs. However, the downtown signal block layout isn't keeping up with the sharply increasing dwell times from overload at Park/DTX/SS. Because it's all-'hardware' it's in a frozen layout, still living by future-growth assumptions about downtown made way back in the mid-80's that proved to be way off on the low end. So there's epidemic bunching and schedule unreliability at peak--where notions of 'average' headway starts to lose all meaning--and a positive feedback loop at those crowded stations further worsening dwell times. Problems closer to what's plaguing the Green Line than simply the straight-up 'not enough TPH' issue on Orange. Going CTBC lets them roll back all that recent attrition and toughens Red's overall resiliency against dwell-induced decay. It's a "capacity" and "headway" improvement inasmuch as the crowds are distributed and the avg. headway actually means something on a stopwatch for swallowing those crowds before nobody on the platform can move. All of which bails out the bulk of Red's problems with only incidental TPH change and no real trigger for buying additional cars.
 
The other day, I was on an Orange Line Train, & the car that I was in, the thing was so bloody hot! They are supposed to take cars out of service that have no a/c in the summer and no heat in the winter! :mad:
 
Was it during rush hour? If they already have one set out of service for the rush, then they have no spare sets for peak service...
 
BostonUrbEx said:
Was it during rush hour? If they already have one set out of service for the rush, then they have no spare sets for peak service...
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This was mid day during non-peak hours, around noon or a little after. I was on the way home from my lawyer's office.

The car was so hot inside that you'd almost swear that the heat was on! :mad:
 
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Jahvon09 said:
This was mid day during non-peak hours. I was on the way home from my lawyer's office.

The car was so hot inside that you'd almost swear that the heat was on! :mad:
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It may have just broken down. I've been on trains (Red and Orange) that have stopped and reset the system (their words... I have no idea what they really did unless that's how they actually handle it) because the AC shut off.
 
Jahvon09 said:
This was mid day during non-peak hours. I was on the way home from my lawyer's office.

The car was so hot inside that you'd almost swear that the heat was on! :mad:
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There are few experiences worse than being on a packed Red Line car on a hot summer day and the AC is not working.
 
mass88 said:
There are few experiences worse than being on a packed Red Line car on a hot summer day and the AC is not working.
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Yes! Being on a crowded MBTA bus in the sweltering heat of the sun on a torridly hot summer day and the a/c isn't working. :eek:
 
mass88 said:
There are few experiences worse than being on a packed Red Line car on a hot summer day and the AC is not working.
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Yes!

Being on a crowded MBTA bus in the sweltering heat of the sun on a torridly hot summer day and the a/c isn't working. :eek:
 
Pluses:
* I'm just fine with a boring-looking railcar, as long as it runs
* Comes with new floating ROW

Cons:
* Tiny rollsign
* Does not match platform height
 
The EGE said:
Pluses:
* I'm just fine with a boring-looking railcar, as long as it runs
* Comes with new floating ROW

Cons:
* Tiny rollsign
* Does not match platform height
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Given that the rollsign is the one of the only parts of this that might be based on actual specs...

I don't think it matters too much on the Orange Line. There's no branches. You know where the train is going by the platform signage. It matters a little for the Red Line, but only at Alewife, since that's the only place that passengers see Ashmont and Braintree trains at the same time. Why, oh why, do they not show only that platform's train on the departure time sign...
 
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