Don't forget that with the Conn River line upgrades and (hopefully) Western Mass rail upgrades to come with the potential East-West CR line being touted in the State Senate right now, Springfield is in a really good spot for shipping cars out to surrounding areas. Not saying it makes a massive difference, but being located relatively close to all these rail improvements which wont be at capacity for decades is a really nice asset to have for the Springfield plant.
New Red and Orange Line Cars
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Glad to hear there's still a lot of room for optimism.
Jahvon09
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Same company, but different Plant location for Chicago's CTA.
The erection of the planned plant in Springfield, MA seems to be opening the door for other Cities / transit agencies to have new rail cars made in or near their cities.
I rode an orange line train the other day that had a brand new floor - it was much brighter vinyl pattern than the depressing stuff on all the orange line trains and reminded how utterly depressing the orange line is by dint of its dark faux wood paneling and brown color schemes... I'm really hopeful that the new cars use brighter colors and am confident they will. Just having a different floor made the entire aesthetic experience remarkably better.
Jahvon09
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I'm pretty certain that the new rail cars for the Orange and Red Lines will have many remarkable features & improvements over what is in use now.
You're right about the present fleet of Orange Line cars! They DO look rather dark, dull & dismal inside with dull lighting and warped floors. They no longer look attractive any more - inside or outside! They are old rust buckets now.
The new cars will have stainless steel shells that will help to ward off rust & salt that's in the air. One of the main reasons that the Blue Line's new cars have SS shells is because of the salt in the air that comes from the Atlantic Ocean. With the addition of the new RL & OL cars coming into service, ALL of the Red, Orange & Blue Line cars will have stainless steel bodies.
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Jahvon09
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I rode on an Orange Line train the other day just one stop from Downtown Crossing to State Street. I just couldn't believe how warped and bumpy the floor tile was!
And one side of the car that I was in, had some of the lights completely out, as if no one bothered to replace them. Those cars have really gone down hill. They are just falling apart, and no one seems to care.
And one side of the car that I was in, had some of the lights completely out, as if no one bothered to replace them. Those cars have really gone down hill. They are just falling apart, and no one seems to care.
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Was it ever confirmed that as part of this order (since it was so much cheaper than planned), that they were upgrading signaling on the Red Line? I know power upgrades are in the works, but I remember a few articles awhile back that also stated signal upgrades.
Jahvon09
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Yeah, I believe that signal upgrades, track work and other stuff is part of the agreement / contract.
But we probably won't see the first new rail car on the Orange Line for about another 3 years or so. Red Line about 2 years later.
They need to desperately get away from the old decrepit dilapidated antiquated dinosaur signal system that they've been using since the subway system was first built.
F-Line to Dudley
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If you mean, is Red getting the state-of-art CBTC signaling that NYC Subway is installing? No, they are not. Not yet at least.
But that's because:
1) A next-generation signal system has to be designed and implemented before they even know what kind of signal equipment to order. CBTC is more software than hardware, so there's no such thing as 'generic' CBTC. How the cars interact with dispatching entirely depends on how you program it, so it's much more an IT systems implementation -type project than a typical "have the Procurement Dept. buy X number of signal widgets" project. For that reason it's pointless to guess in advance what they'd need.
2) Even if they kick-started the design process for next-gen signaling, these cars are arriving in only 3 years. Too soon for them to start signal construction even if they hurried (because the back-office IT systems design work in #1 is far and away the most time-consuming task). So the cars will have to run on the existing signals for their first several years any which way.
So...these Red and Orange cars are being delivered to run on the same magnetic-induction ATO signal system that both lines run on today. However, because the cars' controls are much more heavily computerized than anything that came before them, it's not that big a deal to change the signaling equipment to some other system later on. Unlike the current Red and Orange cars which have large electrical-mechanical signal boxes full of hard-wiring, these signal units will just be circuit boards with programmable firmware outputting to the computer screen at the operator's console. If they need to change to next-gen signals--or an overlap of new and old while they're mid-transition--it's plug-and-play: plug in new circuit board, update car's firmware, plug in new radio receiver underneath the car, test car to make sure everything works, send it back on its way.
Computers are reprogrammable, and these cars' computers are being designed from Day 1 to be reprogrammable. So it's nothing to worry about. They're easily and inexpensively adaptable to future developments.
Just seems a shame that the Red Line, even with the new cars (in hopefully 5 years) still will be bogged down by the existing, ancient, ATC system that keeps headways crappy on the branches. AFIAK, with the new OL rolling stock they will be actually able to greatly increase headways. I would think this would be a very high priority at the T. Also depressing that you would think something that is mostly software would take that long to design/implement - I have done start->end completion of (seemingly) much larger/complex projects before (in software). At least hopefully the upgrades/repairs to the existing signaling will make things more reliable.
I would also think that the new rolling stock would have better acceleration/braking/etc - I wonder if with it and all of the other work if it will reduce overall travel times from say Ashmont -> Downtown Crossing. I know looking at the speedo heading in town in the mornings (when the cloth screen isn't there), it looks like for the most part it tops out around 20-24mph, sometimes getting to 34mph. Seems like the existing trains generally get up to this pretty quick - before the last car leaves the station.
I would also think that the new rolling stock would have better acceleration/braking/etc - I wonder if with it and all of the other work if it will reduce overall travel times from say Ashmont -> Downtown Crossing. I know looking at the speedo heading in town in the mornings (when the cloth screen isn't there), it looks like for the most part it tops out around 20-24mph, sometimes getting to 34mph. Seems like the existing trains generally get up to this pretty quick - before the last car leaves the station.
F-Line to Dudley
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It's not depressing, it's the nature of the beast. The MTA spent over a billion dollars and toiled for 10 years before its first CBTC implementation went on-line. It's fundamentally that much different than an ATO or trip-stop system. 80% of it is in the central dispatch back-office...software, server racks, debugging, dispatcher training. Very little of it is out in the field...just some cheap little RFID transponders on the track for maintaining unbroken radio signal, the fiber optic cable those simple transmitters are hooked up to, and the computer receiver on the cars. The systems they replace involve hundreds of miles of heavy copper cable; power-sucking electrical feeds that burn thousands of watts per day; on the mechanical systems like NYC literally thousands of signal lights, trip arms, and switch heaters; and on ATO systems like Red/Orange hundreds of magnetic induction boxes and track circuit insulators.
All of that maintenance-intensive trackside metal and electrical that you can see everywhere out the train window gets displaced by a server farm in the central operations center that you never see. It's trading way, way less complexity trackside for way, way more complexity at the nerve center. So of course it's going to take forever to design and equip the nerve center. The upside is that once the nerve center is scaled up it gets a lot easier to do the field work and equip the cars quickly, orders of magnitude easier and less-costly to keep good SGR out in the field, and each additional line you equip goes faster and cheaper than the last. But it's an enormous change in skew; everything out-of-sight gets front-loaded and gobbles up lion's share of the schedule, while everything trackside is done last and quick. It's totally, absolutely different from how signaling works today. And that's why it can't be timed with a car order.
It's not good/bad/fast/slow...it's just different. If they got the ball rolling 5 years ago they'd still be in the same place NYC was: wads spent, but no trains running on the new signals yet because the nerve center you can't see chews up the lion's share of the project schedule. These new cars would still have to run for their first couple years on the old signals even if they acted more proactively. It's that different a construction schedule.
Digital_Islandboy
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People keep voting Republicans who just say "cut taxes", "cut taxes", "cut taxes". Well that's what you get when you just keep cutting taxes... Rust buckets. Then again Democrats make it too easy because they spend money like it is water. There needs to be a happy medium where you can vote for where your tax dollars get spent. Personally I'll take all mine out of military and put towards education and infrastructure.
FFS, these projects must pay for themselves in scrap copper and power savings alone.
Still amazing that it's not easier. I spent a few of the best years of my life working in the materials handling world - think thousands of cardboard boxes per hour, each potentially a different size and weight, each with a different destination, showing up with minimal advance warning, being sorted automatically in a giant warehouse, half of which is dark because there are no people involved.
I still can't understand why navigating a dozen or two dozen trains costs as much. But I defer to the expertise of this community and accept that it does.
Ah, no, I totally agree - I guess I was just pointing out that I wished the T had started this years ago, as it does simplify everything so much (cost/maintenance wise) and seems like it would be the biggest improvement, at least for the Red, in addition to the new rolling stock. And more gripping that I realize most of the work is in the command center and done via code, which, for me at least, isn't an excuse for something to take long, but in my experience, government agencies do seem to have issues with large scale software projects and/or the consulting firms they hire to implement them
Jahvon09
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Also, & come to think of it, The Green Line is still using the old signal system. About the only line that appears to have a fully automated signal system is the Orange Line.
The MBTA came under tremendous fire after the May 28, '08 deadly crash on the Green Line in which the driver of the trolley was killed when the one that she was driving slammed into the one in front of her trolley.
The NTSB, upon having investigated the cause of the crash, had recommend that the T consider replacing the old signaling system with the new automated one. The T gave the indication that it would cost too much to do, & chose saving money over safety, saying that it was in the best interest to get the commuters to their destinations faster, but said that there was no design flaw in the old system.
But deep down, a similar tragic accident like that one could very well happen again. It was determined that the driver had a condition known as sleep apnea,
which is known for causing episodes on micro sleep, having drifted in and out of short bursts of sleep. But as we all know, the automated signaling would've stopped her from crashing into the other trolley, and her life could've been saved, and passengers would've been kept out of harm's way.
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millerm277
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If the driver of something falls asleep, bad things are going to happen. If your airplane pilot or bus driver falls asleep, a bunch of people are likely to die as well. I see no reason transit systems should be mindlessly held to such a standard when there's huge operational consequences to doing so, which is the case with regards to the Green Line.
I'm pretty sure (perhaps F-Line can answer for sure) that implementing such a system on the Green Line would make the frequencies the line currently runs (>40 trains per hour peak) impossible. That's why there are no plans to ever implement it.
Any signaling system that is going to keep trains from colliding means the trains have to be kept far enough apart to make them unable to collide. The Green Line often runs far more closely together than that, most obviously at places like Park Street where you have multiple trains on a single platform.
So unless you're finding a billion+ dollars to add more tracks to the Central Subway, signaling = drastic permanent service reductions. I wouldn't call that "choosing money over safety".
I don't think you understand how commercial aviation works.
*Pilot falls asleep*
*Copilot get annoyed*
*Autopilot continues to function*
*Pilot sent to the cabin for a nap and gets a nasty reprimand from the airline after landing*
Jahvon09
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Also, pilots don't just kick back, relax and go to sleep while manning the cockpit. On ultra long-range planes like the 777, 747 & the A-380, there is a bunk room behind the cockpit, where the relief pilots go to get some sleep while the crew on duty is flying the plane.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...d-than-used/yywGoxRfnaIjU52IGwBnLP/story.html
The orange line has seen reduced numbers of trains during rush hour because there aren't enough working cars to maintain full levels of service. This is come at the same time that orange line usage numbers are skyrocketing. The article also mentions that the orange line trains have not received a makeover while the older Red and Green line trains have. The new trains can't come soon enough, especially with hundreds of units being built at Assembly, Stations Landing, and in JP congestion will only get worse.
The orange line has seen reduced numbers of trains during rush hour because there aren't enough working cars to maintain full levels of service. This is come at the same time that orange line usage numbers are skyrocketing. The article also mentions that the orange line trains have not received a makeover while the older Red and Green line trains have. The new trains can't come soon enough, especially with hundreds of units being built at Assembly, Stations Landing, and in JP congestion will only get worse.
