New Red and Orange Line Cars

SouthEnder88 said:
An article in the Globe a few weeks ago mentioned that LCD screens would be inside the trains (for ad revenue), but this made me wonder if this also will double as a bit more of an interactive map for each train.
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I am hoping for something at least something like the R160 setup for the line map over doors/etc. Full blown LCDs would be cool, too.
 
bakgwailo said:
From what I can tell, the outside seems pretty set, but I don't think anything on the inside has been released as final. Also, I haven't seen any articles that the actual mechanical specs/designs are done, either, and the T does seem to love to throw in curve balls in specs.
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Here's 643 pages of specs for these cars if you want some light beach reading: https://www.mbta.com/business_cente...O Technical Specification October 22 2013.pdf.


Interior livery, LCD's, paint job are just the lipstick put on last, so that is still changeable. Dimensions are cast in stone at typical Red and Orange spec. Car guts won't change from the specs sheet and aren't any great mystery in the first place because most HRT cars are pretty generic under the hood.
 
I can't wait to at lease see the mockups!
 
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F-Line to Dudley said:
Here's 643 pages of specs for these cars if you want some light beach reading: https://www.mbta.com/business_cente...O Technical Specification October 22 2013.pdf.


Interior livery, LCD's, paint job are just the lipstick put on last, so that is still changeable. Dimensions are cast in stone at typical Red and Orange spec. Car guts won't change from the specs sheet and aren't any great mystery in the first place because most HRT cars are pretty generic under the hood.
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Ah, very nice, thanks! Will make for some good bedtime reading :)
 
One of the things that we could see on the new Red & Orange Line trains is the use of electronic station stop signs of the entire route of the two lines.

They would help to eliminate the sagging falling-down cardboard signs that plague the present cars in service. :cool:


http://greatergreater.com/images/201210/101240-1.jpg
 
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bakgwailo said:
Interesting article: T offers plan to boost Red Line service.
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I'm not sure that genuine service increases are possible on Red given that Harvard curve is the frequency limiter and current peak-hour service is pretty much at the limit. There aren't enough slots to cram 30 more cars in there.

Now...there's a lot of service quality improvements they can do to alleviate the destabilizing downtown dwells. CBTC signaling, while not increasing absolute service beyond the Harvard curve limiter, has the advantage of being programmed for 'self-healing' of bunching effects by using its computer brain to fine tune each individual train's spacing imperceptibly by treating the entire line as one living system instead of sandboxed block by sandboxed block. And egress improvements at Park and DTX can get engineering studies to help clear the platforms faster. Those will allow peakmost rush hour service to operate at robust resiliency, similar to how the emptier but max service density early-peak currently performs. But those are lineside and station capital projects, not vehicle capital projects.

If anything, they might want to think about transferring that +30 padding to Orange because CBTC'ing that much straighter line would indeed lift the headway ceiling beyond the current signal system's (yet untouched) limit.


It's been known for awhile that they've got an either/or decision to make re: the 86 Bombardier 01800 cars whether to program a 25-year midlife overhaul in one of the upcoming CIP's or start fresh with a supplemental order of the new CRRC cars. The Bombardiers are first-generation AC traction cars with some unorthodox systems because that type of propulsion was so new in the early-90's. Rebuild would have to deal with some quirky aspects not found on later-gen AC traction heavy rail makes, so it could very well be that price point for another round of CRRC cars while the factory is still hot proves a better lifetime value than overhauling the decent-condition 01800's. Midlife rebuild isn't always an automatic decision when economies of scale get weighed.
 
Jahvon09 said:
Why do one & not the other? :confused:
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They are increasing the amount of trainsets on the orange line with the new order. I believe that they plan to lower headways to 5 mins during rush hour.

I believe that they plan to increase the amount of cars from 120 to 152. I'd argue that with all of the development at Assembly/Sullivan/Back Bay/JP they should increase it even more.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
I'm not sure that genuine service increases are possible on Red given that Harvard curve is the frequency limiter and current peak-hour service is pretty much at the limit. There aren't enough slots to cram 30 more cars in there.
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Why would Gonneville claim that if it weren't true?
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
The Bombardiers are first-generation AC traction cars with some unorthodox systems because that type of propulsion was so new in the early-90's. Rebuild would have to deal with some quirky aspects not found on later-gen AC traction heavy rail makes, so it could very well be that price point for another round of CRRC cars while the factory is still hot proves a better lifetime value than overhauling the decent-condition 01800's. Midlife rebuild isn't always an automatic decision when economies of scale get weighed.
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How about just buying new trucks/propulsion/brakes from CRRC and figuring out a way to mate them to the Bombardier bodies?

The Bombardiers have the virtue of 4 doors already, seems like there ought to be upgrades-enough as part of the overhaul, and, as you say, the Orange is probably better bang-for-buck....once it is really cooking, lot of future area transit growth can happen in underutilized places like Community College & Sullivan (taking some "Lechmere" and "Kendall" growth), and all along the Orange.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
I'm not sure that genuine service increases are possible on Red given that Harvard curve is the frequency limiter and current peak-hour service is pretty much at the limit. There aren't enough slots to cram 30 more cars in there.

Now...there's a lot of service quality improvements they can do to alleviate the destabilizing downtown dwells. CBTC signaling, while not increasing absolute service beyond the Harvard curve limiter, has the advantage of being programmed for 'self-healing' of bunching effects by using its computer brain to fine tune each individual train's spacing imperceptibly by treating the entire line as one living system instead of sandboxed block by sandboxed block. And egress improvements at Park and DTX can get engineering studies to help clear the platforms faster. Those will allow peakmost rush hour service to operate at robust resiliency, similar to how the emptier but max service density early-peak currently performs. But those are lineside and station capital projects, not vehicle capital projects.

If anything, they might want to think about transferring that +30 padding to Orange because CBTC'ing that much straighter line would indeed lift the headway ceiling beyond the current signal system's (yet untouched) limit.


It's been known for awhile that they've got an either/or decision to make re: the 86 Bombardier 01800 cars whether to program a 25-year midlife overhaul in one of the upcoming CIP's or start fresh with a supplemental order of the new CRRC cars. The Bombardiers are first-generation AC traction cars with some unorthodox systems because that type of propulsion was so new in the early-90's. Rebuild would have to deal with some quirky aspects not found on later-gen AC traction heavy rail makes, so it could very well be that price point for another round of CRRC cars while the factory is still hot proves a better lifetime value than overhauling the decent-condition 01800's. Midlife rebuild isn't always an automatic decision when economies of scale get weighed.
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The article seemed to imply the rebuild would be $2.2 million per 1800, and that if maybe we ordered soon, we could piggyback on the (most likely heavily subsidized price) price of $1.9 million a car for the brand new ones. Seems like kind of a no brainer if the we can get brand new cars for the same (or less) than rebuilding the old, especially given things like the bigger doors to help with dwell times that probably couldn't be retrofitted on the old cars. Plus, I would think it might simplify longer term maintenance as there would only be one set of parts to have to procure, between basically the entire Red and Orange fleets.

As for the curve, I always thought the crappy ATC signaling was to blame for the terrible headways on the red line. Bummer if the curve is actually a limiting factor, as I have no idea if that could even be rectified (especially with Harvard being... Harvard). Really hate 8 minute headways from Ashmont myself - that is when I am lucky, after 10am it seems like the run every 15-20 minutes.
 
^Does a turn-around curve still exist at Harvard. I wonder if they could terminate some trains at Harvard during rush hour, Davis/Porter/Alewife don't need 2 min headway's.
 
fattony said:
Why would Gonneville claim that if it weren't true?
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I have no idea. But given how much dwells are choking the line to death with bunching Red today handles fewer trains at peakmost than it handles on near-peak when there's less bunching. To actually roll that decay back to previous levels would cost a half-billion dollars in resignaling. As for whether there's any headroom after the works has been CBTC'd? *Maybe*...but probably not +5 trainsets' worth.

The 01800's replacement makes perfect sense. The +30 cars does not unless the other shoe drops on funding for a full-on CBTC resignaling. And then the design of the new signal system has to conclusively show the frequency ceiling getting lifted enough to run more than the current 28 trainsets (168 cars) at peak...something that's unknowable until the resignaling is fully-funded and deep into engineering. Even for somebody in-the-know it's premature to be making pronouncements about supplementals.


Now...Orange is already getting a +32 car increase in the base order to bring frequencies up closer to the limit of the current signal system. 5 more peak trains may not even exhaust the limit of the old signals, so it's possible that more fleet padding chucked on top in the supplemental order could do some additional good. Most definitely a CBTC re-signaling would lift Orange's ceiling, because there's nothing like Harvard curve setting a hard geometric/speed limit on train spacing. In all likelihood if you committed to CBTC'ing Orange you could hedge on the +30 cars being put to good use by the time they're delivered. Much moreso than you could hedge those units for Red service increases well ahead of time.
 
Arlington said:
How about just buying new trucks/propulsion/brakes from CRRC and figuring out a way to mate them to the Bombardier bodies?

The Bombardiers have the virtue of 4 doors already, seems like there ought to be upgrades-enough as part of the overhaul, and, as you say, the Orange is probably better bang-for-buck....once it is really cooking, lot of future area transit growth can happen in underutilized places like Community College & Sullivan (taking some "Lechmere" and "Kendall" growth), and all along the Orange.
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Probably because hacking components to fit a whole different design's make adds enough overhead to foul the economy of scale. This isn't going to wind up a brain-teaser. They have pretty good idea what the 01800's would cost to rebuild, because HRT cars are overall pretty generic animals and they have the full specs of each car component to benchmark. And they know how the CRRC unit price scales, because CRRC has given them that detail. So if the relatively minor differences in the early-gen AC propulsion of the Bombardiers tips the unit price in favor of new CRRC cars over rated lifespan of vehicle, they go with CRRC. If the Bombardiers price out better on unit price over life-of-rebuild, they rebuild the 01800's. Simple as that. There's no pressure to invent a way to preserve the Bombardiers until they're ground to dust; they're worth a lot on the aftermarket in harvested parts and scrap.
 
tysmith95 said:
^Does a turn-around curve still exist at Harvard. I wonder if they could terminate some trains at Harvard during rush hour, Davis/Porter/Alewife don't need 2 min headway's.
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No. The new alignment demolished the far ends of the original Harvard station and the old yard tunnel is unserviceable from the Red end for diverting trains to any sort of stub-end 6-car platform. Short-turning anything at Harvard requires rounding the curve and reversing direction in the current station, so the absolute headway limiter imposed by the curve is an immovable object.

The only way the yard tunnel is *possibly* reusable is for Green Line Urban Ring breaching it from the opposite end via a cross-Charles tunnel and stubbing out behind the wall of the Harvard lobby with a 2- or 3-car LRT platform instead of a 6-car HRT platform. And even that is pure unadulterated spitballing until there's a formal engineering feasibility assessment.
 
The article in Commonwealth Magazine makes a lot more sense. I had first read the one in the Globe which was all about money. I had thought wait... they're spending $200 million anyway to refurbish, why not put it to new cars instead? Even if they only ordered 86, it would still be around (or less than) the $200 million. I'm glad that this article points that out, but also with a disclaimer about the low ball bid- that didn't occur to me right away. The Globe article is almost attempting to instigate instead of report on what could be a no-brainer, cost neutral change.
 
fattony said:
Why would Gonneville claim that if it weren't true?
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The base headway in the peak is 13 trains per hour (9 min headway each on Ashmont and Braintree, 4.5 in the trunk). They do however schedule 2 extra Braintree trains in the peak of the peak and send trains out of Alewife at the rate of 20 trains per hour but only for about 20 minutes. The signal tweaks and the additional equipment would allow 20 trains per hour for most of the peak vs. just a small portion of the peak. The curve at Harvard and its proximity to the station holds them to no more than 20 tph.

Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation to the Control Board:
http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/A...gs/Red Line Capacity Constraints Sept 19.pptx

The presentaion states that installing CBTC would only get them one more train per hour vs. just imprroving the present signals and buying the additional cars. the slide on CBTC states:

-A detailed analysis assuming a moving block CBTC system on the Red Line was completed.

-Analysis found that a CBTC system would produce an improvement of just one train per hour beyond the improvement from the new cars and minor system changes.

-Major Red Line capacity improvements can be achieved without implementing very costly CBTC.

-Long dwell times in the downtown area and close spacing of stations limit CBTC as much as they limit fixed block systems
 
Are there any remotely feasible tunnel routings between Central and Harvard that could straighten out the curve?
 
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