F-Line to Dudley
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Few things. . .
-- CNR has over a dozen HRT clients in Southeast Asia, 2 in South America, and 2 in the Middle East. And they were the sole-source producer for all Beijing Subway rolling stock for its first 35 years of existence until the government opened the bid process to work in some other makers about 10 years ago. Beijing is the second-largest system by mileage in the world and was wholesale-designed by a bunch of imported East German engineers who modeled it after the U-bahn...which technologically very little different from Red/Orange and NYC Subway (it even has one Reddish-dimension car division and one Orangeish-dimension car division).
So this is old hat for them. I'd have been a lot more apprehensive if this were light rail because they've only got a few of those clients on new systems and nothing as difficult as the Green Line. And definitely scared if they were trying to do any FRA-compliant commuter rail/DMU equipment, because Chinese rolling stock isn't waiver-able here. But they've produced well over a thousand heavy rail vehicles over the last 4 decades.
-- Producing HRT equipment for the U.S. market is not nearly as difficult as producing railroad cars for the U.S. market. Each system has a degree of non-dramatic variance in dimensions, voltage (Beijing is 750V DC third rail, MBTA is 600V DC), and signaling tech. But emphasis on the non-dramatic because so much of the technological standards were set top-down on the rest of the world by NYC Subway.
-- CNR has not done very much fabrication of homegrown Chinese propulsion/signaling components. They have a deeply-embedded component sourcing contract with Bombardier. And buy a lot from Siemens too. Under the hood those Beijing vehicles use systems people in the Northeast ride reliably on every single day. Since components like that are the most important things a buyer will express preference for, their ability to win the bid probably hinged on being able to get the same-old Bombardier stuff cheaper because they use Bombardier, etc. in more bulk than some of these other bidders. Perversely, that makes them cheaper than Bombardier itself, which has to deal with the extra overhead of Canadian workers instead of Chinese workers. Labor and assembly is primarily where the savings are coming from.
-- As with anything, the T's own specs are the degree of difficulty. If they try to match component selections that are outside what the manufacturer normally uses--despite HRT being pretty vanilla--it creates more overhead in design/testing to get it all to mesh. It's not because the components themselves are untested; it's the particular pu-pu platter of them. It makes the manufacturer have to huff and puff and chew up more internal resources to fit to spec. That's where Siemens said "to hell with this" on future HRT bids. They make stupendously high profit margins selling vanilla light rail vehicles, locomotives, Euro EMU's/DMU's that are exactly the same everywhere except for the window-dressing stuff like interior and door configuration. They're all about selling families of vehicles with options like a car dealership, and don't have interest in doing fit-to-spec component meshing that ends up being lower-margin.
So in that sense, even with a hard-to-screw-up order like HRT it is justifiable to be nervous about the T doodling too much on components. Their reasons may be justifiable on the surface ("our techs are experienced on this but not that", etc. etc.), but deviation from the vanilla sort of creates a vicious cycle over time where they become more dependent on deviations. The HSP-46 locomotives are instructive of this problem. Everything under the hood is something that's been used many times over. Other than a bad batch of bearings on the traction motors (normal when they catch it and replace at unit #8 of 40, very abnormal when Rotem was still finding chintzy crap under warranty four months after all 75 units had been delivered)...it's been pretty mundane and the vehicles look like they're going to be winners. But the T specs called for an all-new component mishmash. It was a mishmash that MPI hoped to turn into a brand new generic lineup it could sell to other buyers as its 'performance model', and re-sell the guts mishmash as an upgrade kit for remanufactured old locomotives.
The reality is nobody's shown much interest in it. Some of the anal-retentive things the T specced about the cab layout are pretty unorthodox, and the extreme standardization amongst commuter rail diesel locomotives in North America makes new unappealing. Click through the list of CR systems on the continent and what do you see for diesel locos: shitloads of ageless old F40PH's and GP40 variants like the T's that have been rebuilt ad infinitum, F59PH's (the 1980's and 90's successor to the F40), MPXpress (MP36's like ours, and the slightly beefier MP40), and a few GE Genesis (the ubiquitous Amtrak diesels). With the few deviations from the norm generally being seen as unwise investments (NJ Transit's PL42's and Metro North's BL20's are underwhelming oddballs, LIRR's DM30's are the biggest lemons of the last 20 years). The supposed advantages of the HSP-46's--brawnier horsepower and compliance with the EPA's future Tier 4 emissions regs--have already been hit by the generics. MPI now offers MPXpresses with even brawnier 5400 HP engines and Tier 4 emissions, and drop-in upgrade kits for older MPXpresses to bring them up to latest/greatest. The 5 years of lead time for R&D'ing a new make let the generics catch up in tiny increments. Trying to get the leap on a moving target didn't put them as far ahead upon delivery as they thought they'd have been way back in 2008-09 when the bidding took place.
It is now looking very likely that the T will be the only purchaser of these things. Subsequent commuter rail orders have all been for more MPXpress generics, and new generic-to-be lineups like the EMD F125 and Siemens Charger families. It's also been such a pain in the butt for MPI to engineer the HSP-46 that the rumors are the company is considering pulling back from the new loco business entirely and re-focusing on rebuilds and upgrades. Making it all mesh on R&D has chewed up so much of their margins that they're not going to make much money on these. Even though by all indications it's on track to become a successful order. Their latest efforts have just involved gutting old GP40 carbodies (they bought the full scrap fleet of those ex-MARC rentals the T briefly used) and stuffing a full generic-spec MPXpress inside it with a nose job to graft on a generic MPX cab. It looks like it got beat with an ugly stick, but that's literally a vanilla MP36 clad like a hermit crab in old armor. From inside the cab the engineer can't even tell the difference. It is entirely possible that the only T business MPI is going to do in the future is making a scrap bid on our disposal units so it can play taxidermist on those too to turn into somebody else's next generic MPXpress purchase. In 2020 when the T has to replace the remaining ~35 old locomotives, MPI may not even place a bid and the HSP-46's--good vehicle or not--get consigned to an evolutionary dead end.
This is a worrisome trend. MPI and Siemens both took as direct lessons from an MBTA order that the margins aren't worth it on build-to-spec where onus is on them to go outside of their comfort zone meshing components, when generic families are less a P.I.T.A. to build and fetch way higher margins. Similar situation with Neoplan building T-overcustomized buses ended up bankrupting the damn company (even though those ended up being very good purchases). The free market is speaking here. Now, there's some apples-oranges. Neoplan happened when low-floor buses were newer tech, and the Silver Line is by its own stupid nature a unicorn. HRT does require some (reasonable) degree of build-to-spec that total off-shelf LRT systems don't. And Green Line is a tougher nut to crack than nearly any LRT system in the world. But I think we can agree that commuter rail offers zero compelling reason whatsoever to buy anything but the most vanillavanillavanilla bulletproof stuff everyone else is using. And that their attempts at RFP'ing to what'll be state-of-the-art 5 years from now has been largely rejected by other agencies who overwhelmingly buy to what's state-of-the-art today.
This is absolutely true, but "Buy America"/"Buy [this state]" didn't start here and didn't escalate here. The whole means of government procurements in the U.S. is fucked because of that, with Congress and state legislatures sticking their grimy fingers in the process and making district pork king. It's created an entirely unworkable system that is accelerating in its unworkability. But Massachusetts really is just buffeted by the politics of it. I don't think it's realistic to assume they could buck the trend and just make the bid process clean. If the T proposed that, Bob DeLeo would cut the budget out from under them in a week's time until they did an "OBEY!" on district pork. Gov. Patrick, Rich Davey, and Bev Scott aren't stupid. They know the Legislature is in charge. I don't think the bid process can necessarily be faulted because there isn't another way that'll politically be allowed to happen. It's more keeping the T out of its own way on the RFP specs when customization for customization's sake brings little to the table other than reinforcing the vicious cycle.
But the process isn't going to change until the bubble bursts nationwide. It's bad, but I don't think "Buy America" has hit peak unworkability. If/when Congress ever gets unstuck from funding infrastructure improvements (anything-infrastructure) and procurement demand for every fed and state agency so far outstrips their ability to execute the procurements that this becomes a noose around the neck of being able to function at all...something will have to give to loosen up the rules. Until then no one is in a position individually to rise up above it all. And so, at least for transit, procurements will take longer...be more complicated...and have more needless overhead than elsewhere in the world.
