New Red and Orange Line Cars

F-Line to Dudley said:
And Red/Orange aren't anywhere near as behind-schedule as NYC's more tortured Bombardier order of similarly newfangled-computery generation HRT car, so we are very far from being surprised by anything here.
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(Here F-Line Refers to the MTA NYC Transit's R179 cars where 300 trains had to be pulled from service on the A & C, J & Z lines)

And have other annoyances that until operators felt the window latch on their neck (as they leaned out to look) it'd have been hard to catch in even VR simulation.
 
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jass said:
I agree that it's normal, but it's not something we should accept.

How can the ship yards put out a new custom design every few years and execute it without delays?

Thats what we should be asking of the train people.
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Your comparing private money building a for profit luxury liner to publicly financed not-for profit mass transit train?

That's similar to comparing a casino opening on time to federally subsidized multi-family housing.

The similarities end at being a mode of transport with people inside them, or a building that has people in them....
 
jass said:
How can the ship yards put out a new custom design every few years and execute it without delays?
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Describe the level of tech/systems integration that a ship has with the water it floats in, vs the integration between a railcar and the rails it rides on.

I'm also going to say that "shakedown cruise" and "soft open" for hotels is still a real thing, where they have the luxury that if a room or whole hallway of them is non-functional, they just block it off.

And if we turned instead to the delays in production, delivery, and post-delivery groundings in the airliner business--787 rivets, 777X wingtips, 737 Max, A321neo, A350xwb, we really don't see much different--they are big systems integration problems.

There are solutions
- excercise options at the end of your (or somebody else's) contract
- buy a truly modular, service-proven system (like Amtrak did with the Avelias and Brightline did with Siemens)
- Adapt your base system (green line curves) to buy a truly modular, kinda-proven system (Green LIne type 10)
- Buy close variants on a custom design: e.g. once Orange is proven, the Red variant will have much less to go wrong.
 
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Don't forget about the 737-Max, which was the result of two catastrophic crashes. The plane has been ordered grounded by the FAA, & there is STILL no fix for it as of yet! The 787-8 Dreamliner had problems with the batteries. the kept on overheating the batteries, causing them to catch fire! :oops:
 
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According to today's FMCB meeting:
  • Six cars are back in service
  • Second set of six will return by late January
  • A new third set will be ready to enter revenue service by end of February
For anyone keeping track that would be 18 new cars entering service over a period of 6 months. Continuing at this production rate the full fleet should be in service by June 2024. That's two years behind their given schedule so I continue to expect a ramp up in delivery speed sometime soon.
 
HelloBostonHi said:
According to today's FMCB meeting:
  • Six cars are back in service
  • Second set of six will return by late January
  • A new third set will be ready to enter revenue service by end of February
For anyone keeping track that would be 18 new cars entering service over a period of 6 months. Continuing at this production rate the full fleet should be in service by June 2024. That's two years behind their given schedule so I continue to expect a ramp up in delivery speed sometime soon.
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The initial projection was one set per month back in September. I suspect that would be the rate after February.

One note from watching the presentation myself - Gonneville noted that the trains completed in Springfield would need to be retrofitted with the quieter pads. Not sure how many of those there are, but that might suggest that they'd all be retrofitted over the next month (they've done two trains at Wellington in two weeks, after all) and arrive a little faster in Wellington for the rest of the Spring. Not that he committed to that, but it's possible.
 
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Equilibria said:
The initial projection was one set per month back in September. I suspect that would be the rate after February.

One note from watching the presentation myself - Gonneville noted that the trains completed in Springfield would need to be retrofitted with the quieter pads. Not sure how many of those there are, but that might suggest that they'd all be retrofitted over the next month (they've done two trains at Wellington in two weeks, after all) and arrive a little faster in Wellington for the rest of the Spring. Not that he committed to that, but it's possible.
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That's true. They were not doing their homework. Had they been doing it, all these problems would not have been surfacing after the fist two trains were introduced into revenue service. 😡
 
Textbook = plans for the cars
Book Learning = building the first few cars
Homework = actually run the cars and see if they work

By this analogy, they're doing their homework when and how they ought to.

Then, feeding the insights from "the homework" back into production has two parts:
1) Retro-fitting the revised pads to the previous cars
2) Building all future cars with the revised pads

Once they've finished their homework, I'd expect new trainsets to arrive 1 per month (or faster, if they've also learned how to speed their work in that time)
 
Jahvon09 said:
That's true. They were not doing their homework. Had they been doing it, all these problems would not have been surfacing after the fist two trains were introduced into revenue service. 😡
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These types of issues are very common with new trains.

Biggest issue is that the old cars are beyond their design life, and new trains should have been ordered earlier. Also dosn't help that the T kept advertising the new cars, getting people excited.
 
New train 1401 is running this morning as well. No sign of a problem
 
sneijder said:
New train 1401 is running this morning as well. No sign of a problem
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Yep, and the T announced it on Twitter. Doesn't sound like there was a problem.

They'd really like you to know that "The train will be in and out of service as we continue to monitor and optimize its performance." :)
 
I got the new train this morning! Thoughts:

The new plastic seats seem 'slippery' compared to the old cloth seats, but they have oddly great lumbar support.
The doors chimes that I was worried about are far less annoying than I thought. I was able to tune them out by the second stop.
As someone with a shitty back, the loss of some seats is not great, but I get it. It's for the greater good.
As we were pulling out of Oak Grove the automated announcement said "Entering Oak Grove, Last Stop!" The driver had to come over the PA to give the correct announcement. Minor blip.
Otherwise, the ride went flawlessly.
 
I thought the new cars had a net addition of seats, just more can be flipped up/etc for wheelchairs and accessibility ?
 
I may have been wrong about that, but some reason I thought I had read that due to the wider doors they have room for fewer seats. It seemed like there were fewer seats, but I am open to correction on that.
 
From my recent trip.
IMG_20200107_102242259.jpg


The grey panels in the left distance are flipped up seats
 
statler said:
I may have been wrong about that, but some reason I thought I had read that due to the wider doors they have room for fewer seats. It seemed like there were fewer seats, but I am open to correction on that.
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It makes sense that there would be fewer seats as you suggest. From Arlington's picture, it looks like there is one less seat between each set of doors.
 
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