New Red and Orange Line Cars

They'll need to prove all of the new trains as they come in, yes? Not just the first set?

To varying degree. The test track is only for the telemetry logging where you're picking off faults that would appear anywhere after enough duty cycles of operation. And those tend to be weighted heaviest to pilot cars and early deliveries where the fixes result in actual change requests to the manufacturer techs. i.e. The test track is going to weight early and 'obvious' at the faults it logs. It's largely agnostic to application, so for example this is why the Blue Line 0700's started their Boston careers on the OL Wellington test track for several months before ever being shipped to Orient Heights (Blue of course not having any test track of its own).

Then you have line-specific testing, where you have to get your reps in doing simulated runs. That's where you find out how these things handle "switching problems at Alewife" or speed enforcement on particular mission-critical stretch of track for proper headway management, or test for door-stick issues by making all-stops non-revenue runs, or see how they handle running at full HVAC power draw over a potentially vulnerable at-capacity power section, or do the weight simulations with sandbag 'passengers' to test bridge loadings. You can only do that on the mainline...mostly overnight, but also as we saw this past week with the Red pilot set on available off-peak slots.


Once you get deeper into the orders and have accumulated most of your change requests, each new delivery spends a lot less time on the test track before graduating straight to mainline testing. Because at that point most of the new faults you uncover are purely line-situational (door-stick, etc.) and only uncoverable by skewing your testing reps to the mainline. You'll see fewer and fewer test cars packed inside and out with telemetry wires and sensors duct-taped to every surface and snaking out under the door lips to the undersides, because focus turns from breadth of telemetry collection to consistency of telemetry collection. This is about the threshold where Blue Line deliveries 16 years ago stopped coming to Wellington and started getting unload straight to Orient Heights; the ones that malingered at Wellington were generally the most heavily modded earlier cars needing add'l testing on the mods, and not the factory-fresh deliveries that baked in any change requests right from Day 1 assembly.

By that mid-order threshold through the end where cars are getting graduated way more quickly into service after delivery, they're not spending much time on the test track at all before going into mainline test rotation. And are doing so with little to no extra onboard telemetry equipment. That's simply burn-in...racking up reps of simulated runs to see if the consistency holds up. The test tracks will get their use because the rate of deliveries is so much quicker on the backside, but each pair spends very little time there before going straight to a short-duration but intense duty-cycle run on the mainline before graduating quickly into revenue service.


Thus...the most critical period for test track usage is in that "15% in" threshold of the order where you're past the first purely-test pilots, past the first large-scale warranty mods, and in that sensitive part where you're trying to bring down the rate of new telemetry faults. That point where you can start reducing the number of sensors painstakingly taped up across the cars and start multitasking with mainline testing of more total cars watched by fewer tech eyes...filling up the overnight shift with simulated runs, slotting a few on the far off-peak without fear of it hosing revenue service. Red is basically sitting at this threshold right now. The pilot set has already moved onto purely mainline testing and simulated runs, in pursuit of that quoted early-Fall timetable for first revenue tests.

Now...what's changed is the great COVID pause. Orange has gotten months of bonus time on the Wellington test track, and simultaneously all the bandwidth in the world to multitask its sets with mainline testing because of the much-reduced service levels. Orange being the identical base model in all but dimensions for Red means that a lot of the activity you would've seen on Track 61 has been shifted to Wellington, with less urgency for CRRC to rush-release another 6-10 cars of Red testers because the OL base model has been able to take on much more completist telemetry logging. So by circumstance you are now going to see a Red testing schedule skewed much more heavily towards mainline testing than test track. That makes sense and is fully explainable by the COVID reshuffle. Shit happened, and they chose the most expedient way to adjust.


What doesn't make any sense is why Track 61 hasn't been used when right now and for the last 1-2 months would've been the ripest time of all to do back-and-forth repeat telemetry logging of the Red sets already on the property. It was a fair question from the beginning when this Track 61 build was proposed "Why aren't the Cabot leads and their crossovers enough test track for doing this?" They were adamant in front of the FCMB that it wasn't enough...that there were things beyond simply dispatching test moves vs. regular deadheads on the Cabot leads that made them not enough, and that the Cypher St. maint shed too was a critical piece. That's the part that baffles. It appears the Cabot leads were indeed enough, because they crammed 3 months worth of testing on those alone. Granted, that was easier with daily revenue service running on reduced schedule, but what of the "above-and-beyonds" mandating the never-used shed? They apparently got all that done right from the main carhouse...despite the fact that the carhouse has been busier than usual rotating the higher quantity of daily unused trains in for maint TLC during the reduced service levels.

So if the Red pilots now thoroughly on the mainline-only portion of their testing are going to graduate to revenue trials without using it, and Orange is absorbing more of the late-stage shakedown testing as the base order...it is fair question for the Board to revisit the supposed urgency they were sold on for appropriating the $$$ for this never-used test track and shed. Because even with the unforeseen COVID reshuffle there's clearly also a large gap in advertised urgency vs. actual urgency. Where did all the shed's functions disappear to in the reshuffle? Where did the shakedown inadequacy of the Cabot leads disappear to in the reshuffle? Those are completely fair ass-covering questions, because right now is when we were supposed to be seeing that 'urgency' value proposition for the 61+shed build being realized...not on the backside of the order that's bulk-weighted to mainline testing.
 
Maybe somebody could drop a hint to the Globe reporters that there might be FRA compliant gondolas that could use Track 61, but "fly" over Cabot, Southampton and Widett. :cool:

"Dual modes": the universal solvent. :unsure:


But seriously...once the RL test track misadventure is done there's not any additional rapid transit uses they can milk out of that shed. Because while the FRA out-of-service designation can stay in effect indefinitely if there's no immediate RR use it's still not a permanent accomodation. CSX didn't trade down from ownership to trackage rights to never again collect a penny's worth of revenue from Port of Boston. They did it because Massport had bigger ideas, and it was better to let them be in full stewardship of enacting those bigger ideas. They're absolutely going to ask "You ever getting this port freight show on the road?" if plans keep collecting dust in a file cabinet, and if they have to light a fire under Massport's ass they can be the ones to file 30-day reactivation notice with the FRA to get some attention. Doesn't mean freight trains will be running in 30 days of said filing...but it does mean if the shed is overstaying its lonely welcome connected to RL third rail they can evict the rapid transit connection and force its reconnection to the Old Colony. As a pot-stirring move that'll get some immediate results.

Rather than wait for the inevitable "WAITAMINUTE! We need to commission another passenger study before doing anything!" ritualistic lighting of spare budget on fire to make the end of the RL-connection interlude that much more senselessly overthought/overwrought and full of pants-on-head pitches from pols and execs who would never in their lives be caught dead on transit (hell...just pre-pencil in "Gondola Alternative" for entertainment purposes), maybe some deft sleight-of-hand can deflate Shirley Leung's head before it threatens to blow and kill us all.

"Hi, Global Cement? This is Massport. I know you haven't taken a sand car delivery at the pier in 25 years, but have you ever considered going back to rail?"​
"Massport, Global here. We do lots of rail at our other locations so still have an active contract with CSX, but honestly barge rates are so much better at this location I can't see us ever going back."​
"What if we greased some skids and got you a plum rate reduction? Would you commit to taking cars 2 nights a week from a Readville switcher?"​
"Probably not."​
"What if we rebuilt your loading dock with a 'multimodal grant' and gave you a free trackmobile we found cheap on eBay?"​
"OKAY!"​
"Two nights per week, right?"​
"Right, whatever!"​

Yeah...it's chintzy, contrived, and just a little bit bastard. But does beat a lot of the unicorn-pitching drama to the punch by saying "Welp...30-day reactivation notice just got handed down. Gotta get to work on the track grinding and repairing Cypher St. crossing. You find bandwidth for a too-many-chefs study on your own time, 'cause we got shit to do. Oh, yeah, and commuter rail is going to start using the shed and Cypher St. yard next month for MOW staging. And...oh by the way...minimum revenue target is now 10 sand cars per week, so try to moor your unicorn pitches to a farebox recovery baseline for a change. Meanwhile, imma go dust off that Tide St. spur render to Marine T. now that we're cooking with some gas! La-la-la...Shirley Who?!?"

Contrived-as-all-hell a scenario that it is...at least something ends up happening unstuck in the real world involving nonzero revenues and nonzero utility generated by the corridor, and bends the unicornal navel-gazing into binding itself to some TBD greater degree of reality-based constraints as a result. I'll take it.
 
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I hate to be the one to complain, but what the hell seems to be taking so damn long to get the new trains up and running? Those crumbling shitholes that were in service since President Ronald Reagan was in office are still in service. The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed them down even more. When will they be running again? :mad:
 
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Stuck behind a paywall, unfortunately.
This is the slide deck from today's meeting. (PDF) Not necessarily unexpected, given 2020. What's interesting is the delay penalty calculation of $500 per car per day. I believe that's more aggressive than anything that was ever included in prior procurements like the rotems, and if fully pursued, (which I doubt the T will, given the force majeure nature of covid), that could be millions back.
 
This is the slide deck from today's meeting. (PDF) Not necessarily unexpected, given 2020. What's interesting is the delay penalty calculation of $500 per car per day. I believe that's more aggressive than anything that was ever included in prior procurements like the rotems, and if fully pursued, (which I doubt the T will, given the force majeure nature of covid), that could be millions back.

That's how they'll close the $300-600 million FY21 gap
/s

That's quite steep.
 
Allow me to do some shoddy math:

$1 billion total contract cost / 400 cars = $2.5 million per car

$500 per day for a year = $180k

The penalty for a car that is a year late is roughly 7% discount. That doesn’t seem extraordinarily steep to me.
 
Allow me to do some shoddy math:

$1 billion total contract cost / 400 cars = $2.5 million per car

$500 per day for a year = $180k

The penalty for a car that is a year late is roughly 7% discount. That doesn’t seem extraordinarily steep to me.
7% is pretty significant in the industrial equipment world. And I believe that the 1B figure accounts for more than just new vehicles, such as MBTA capital staff salaries and decommissioning costs, given the contract value was $566M (initial order, 152 orange + 252 Red) + $277M (options, 120 red) you get the following math: (566+277)/524=$1.61M per car. 180k is then more than an 11% charge.

While I don't know specifically, It's quite a lot when you consider that the CRRC group of companies in 2019, on ~¥229B RMB (~$32B USD) in revenue, made a gross profit of ~¥13B RMB (~1.7B USD) for a gross profit margin of ~5.7 percent. Net, it's only 2.2%.

Now CRRC MA isn't independently reported, but given how much lower it's bid was than it's competitors at the time, I doubt there's significantly more margin here, so it's likely that CRRC will lose money on at least some units. If we assume only a third will be behind schedule, and they're delivered over the course of a year, it might all cancel out.
 
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OK, thread, do your worst. . .
7% is pretty significant in the industrial equipment world. And I believe that the 1B figure accounts for more than just new vehicles, such as MBTA capital staff salaries and decommissioning costs, given the contract value was $566M (initial order, 152 orange + 252 Red) + $277M (options, 120 red) you get the following math: (566+277)/524=$1.61M per car. 180k is then more than an 11% charge.

While I don't know specifically, It's quite a lot when you consider that the CRRC group of companies in 2019, on ~¥229B RMB (~$32B USD) in revenue, made a gross profit of ~¥13B RMB (~1.7B USD) for a gross profit margin of ~5.7 percent. Net, it's only 2.2%.

Now CRRC MA isn't independently reported, but given how much lower it's bid was than it's competitors at the time, I doubt there's significantly more margin here, so it's likely that CRRC will lose money on at least some units. If we assume only a third will be behind schedule, and they're delivered over the course of a year, it might all cancel out.

That's exactly why the federal government is sanctioning Chinese rolling stock manufacturers. Bidding at a likely loss (even if the maths of the contract technically add up to an above-board balance sheet) for the long game of buying national market share is why the tarriff war is erupting, and also why the industry is gettting earthquaked with protectionism mega-mergers like Alstom-Bombardier that normally wouldn't pass muster with antitrust regulations. Long-game bidding at loss for national manifest destiny is a new wrinkle.

Granted, I don't think that necessarily explains what happened here. This is pretty clearly supply chain + labor plugged into COVID, as the guts of these cars are a veritable United Nations worth of global-source components and every country/region is unique as a snowflake in how COVID has impacted their mfg. sectors. Might've been some missteps by CRRC on anticipation...but *everyone* gets some mulligan this year on not having spot-on accuracy being able to anticipate the unanticipateable.

Reading between the lines, though, the fact that at no point were mechanical-design issues cited for delays is a good thing for predictability of a turnaround. The worst-worst case scenario would be an open-ended freakshow like the NYCTA Bombardier subway order whose lemon stink never stops taking a dump on the order...where actual contract closure basically has no end date because of the unending warranty repairs. Those are the procurements that leave a mark...not the ones that are simply late because no one was around to assemble/deliver components with a predictably declining/under-control fault list.
 
I'm confused by this presentation. It says that they are running 14 trains during rush hour. Presumably 2-3 of these are new trains (not sure if all three have been used at one time yet). That means there are at most, 72 of the old cars in use out of 114 total. Does this mean that the old cars are so decrepit, that they can really only use 63%? The presentation says that the delay in better headways is based on delayed equipment delivery. But why can't they run at least some of the other 7 old trains during rush hour?
 
I'm confused by this presentation. It says that they are running 14 trains during rush hour. Presumably 2-3 of these are new trains (not sure if all three have been used at one time yet). That means there are at most, 72 of the old cars in use out of 114 total. Does this mean that the old cars are so decrepit, that they can really only use 63%? The presentation says that the delay in better headways is based on delayed equipment delivery. But why can't they run at least some of the other 7 old trains during rush hour?

The denser headways are contingent on (1) signaling improvements still under-construction, (2) ALL trains on the line being CRRC's with no old cars so dispatching can be 100% predicated on latest/greatest acceleration and braking profile. The headway improvements can't be deployed (without excessive kludges) on a mixed fleet.

14 trains per rush is still a COVID-recovery schedule. 16 is the normal baseline...so we're not totally back to reference rush hour ops yet.
 
Granted, I don't think that necessarily explains what happened here. This is pretty clearly supply chain + labor plugged into COVID, as the guts of these cars are a veritable United Nations worth of global-source components and every country/region is unique as a snowflake in how COVID has impacted their mfg. sectors. Might've been some missteps by CRRC on anticipation...but *everyone* gets some mulligan this year on not having spot-on accuracy being able to anticipate the unanticipateable.

Seems predictable that they'd run into major production delays at a brand new factory, with green personnel, with a company in CRRC that isn't used to building things in the US.

The price people in Boston pay for the jobs in Springfield.
 
I read online yesterday that the new Red & Orange Line trains won't come into use until 2024. Seems that we'll have to deal with those old crumbling shit holes even longer than expected. Crazy!!
 
I read online yesterday that the new Red & Orange Line trains won't come into use until 2024. Seems that we'll have to deal with those old crumbling shit holes even longer than expected. Crazy!!
And that there is the unfortunate result of how the T phrased their press release, people coming to that conclusion. They said they'll be running increased service with all new trains by 24, but trains will be slowly rolling in over the next few years and the old OL ones are expected to be fully retired by 22. You're not the only person who I've seen on the internet who's misinterpreted their poorly done press release though.
 
That's the MBTA for yah. They fooled everyone into thinking that the new trains would be a real pleasure to ride, only to be shafted into thinking that the days of riding those old rust buckets would disappear. Only to have to deal with them for another damn 2 years!!!! They owe us new equipment to ride in. Why on earth do they keep old dilapidated rusted out trains around for so damn long?!! Why is this train wreck allowed to continue?!!:mad:
Old rusted orange line tran!!.jpg
Train withbroken axle..jpg
 
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