Re: North-South Rail Link
Of course every service pattern requires a minimum amount of yard and fleet for headway staging. DUH!
BUT, from a maintenance standpoint, basic LOGISTICS 101 says that you need a smaller total fleet to properly rotate out cars for Preventative Maintenance, if the fleet is totally interchangeable, and not locked into a particular line (assuming you have some means of transferring cars between lines -- kind of an important system design parameter).
No, that "Logistics 101" spiel is an oft-repeated talking point contradicted by actual math while offering none of its own to back up the indictment.
On all 3 HRT lines, 75-80% of the active fleet is out there in-service each rush hour shift. 10% is sitting on standby for run-as-directeds. The rest...they're either missing several runs on a shift for their turn getting cleaned before going back in, missing several hours or more for their periodic mandatory inspections, missing most or all of the day for cycled changeouts of 'consumable' parts (pantograph surfaces which have a rated lifespan of weeks before friction erodes them, wheels that need changeouts for re-grinding, etc.). And then the rest are the bona fide casualties with anything from malingering aches to major repairs. Whether you apply those percentages to individual lines or lump-sum, the same exact percentages are in-play netting same exact car availability. Short the supply, short the service. This isn't a hard concept to comprehend. The very-much-interlining Green Line has gone through some infamous periods of car shortages when its margins have gone out-of-whack. So has very-very-much-interlining NYC Subway the times they're been overreliant on way too much unreliable old crap and depleted reserves. Under-order, and you get exactly what you pay for whether it's an interconnected system or not. How's supply vs. demand working out right about now for commuter rail?
Secondly...did you not get the explanation in the previous post that distributed rapid transit service patterns do...not...work...like commuter rail radiating from a singular Union Station. You can't feed
any service pattern without a car supply on or very nearly on said service pattern. Every Green Line branch has its own yard. Both Red Line branches do. NYC Subway has 24 yards and 14 shops. By "Holiday Inn Express Logistics 101" standards MTA maintenance practices are comparably as morbidly obese as Fat Bastard eating a baby. They're not...New York is stretched as chronically thin and underfunded as T maint ops projected over a vastly bigger and more dire scale, but logical fallacies work like that.
Third...what part of
same exact cars, different tincan shape, no unit cost difference is so hard to understand here? The T stocks whole warehouses full of generic parts for all 3 HRT lines. They all use exactly the same third rail, running rail, etc. Green and Blue use exactly the same overhead. Both third rail, overhead, the Silver Line, and the Cambridge trackless trolleys use exactly the same DC voltage. Orange and Red use exactly the same signaling. Everett Shops (not: NOT connected to any rapid transit line) does component heavy repair for all 4 color lines. They have fleets of hi-rail trucks that can drive themselves to any line. They have big mechanical tie changers, track tampers, beastly snowblowers, a work locomotive, and other crap that have spent time on all 4 lines and load in one piece onto a flatbed truck when they switch around.
Fourth...it does take a billion dollars to carve out interconnections. And we can't seem to find a compelling service reason to do that when the non-interlining lines are load-bearing end-to-end spokes whose service patterns are unlikely to change even if they did interline. And would arguably serve the city worse if headways were diffused by too much branching. So how does 'Logistics 101' justify $1B in concrete and almost as much in dimensional modifications when we're not even sure what revenue benefit that serves.
There is no alternative in shuttling cars between lines on commuter rail. You can't take a Red car from Cabot Yard, haul it over the Grand Junction, and shove it into Wellington. Rapid transit wheels are ground differently and will derail on a mainline RR. They have to be loaded onto flatbeds...which then makes the load too tall for a freight train to move them under the bridges around Greater Boston. You'd have to do a 100-mile detour around Norfolk, Worcester, and Middlesex Counties to make that move...assuming you can even clear enough bridges to reach one of the tall freight routes in the first place. You'd also have to painstakingly separate each married-pair car, load them individually onto flatcars, then re-mate them in the shop. So much for efficiency; the shop can't tend to the cars it already has because it has to waste days stitching together enough individual cars to net a spare trainset.
So, this pretty much does call for setting aside a couple transit projects we actually do need because some subjective aesthetic notion of 'Logistics 101' says interlining has more personally satisfying integrity-of-concept. It certainly isn't because the real math washes. For real math to wash there has to be a slam-dunk ridership reason to build an interline connection...not the Grand Junction Branch of subways.
Of course the T does not properly perform preventative maintenance ($7 Billion backlog), so the winter debacle a year ago has nothing to do with this point.
This I'm with you on. But not for the reason you cited of "bloated T jobs". The maintenance ranks are the most chronically understaffed class of jobs on the system. And their labor costs are presently inefficient only because of that manufactured crisis. The only way to give the to-do list threadbare coverage is to suck up more OT on any biggish jobs to band-aid over all the years of hiring way below replacement-level in the name of "cost savings". These aren't do-nothing desk jockeys; they're the highest-skill craft labor the agency employs, in a competitive job market. Who knew stripping their ranks to the bone would leave the system chronically extra-vulnerable?
And yes, they do need more work equipment. Up until a few years ago they were still hanging onto chopped-up old BERy cars from the 1920's repurposed for plows, crane cars, flatcars...until they literally disintegrated to powdered piles of rust in their 8th decade of continuous use. There should be a second or third work locomotive, instead of just one that was broken for years on end until Winter '15 embarrassed them into expediting a rehab. They should be running dedicated work trains instead of making a royal mess out of a revenue set carrying dirty supplies and trash on the overnight shift. They should be more concerned that the special car that re-rails Green Line derailments has shot propulsion and has to be cumbersomely pushed around so minor derailment service outages last hours longer. But, you know...the FCMB has to shell out funds ASAP to actually buy this stuff and upgrade the shops to put it to good use. Not jump down a "ZOMG! Fare leakage" wormhole and cop to not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
But that's a straightforward numbers problem of too little for too much, not an eye-of-beholder case for counterintuitive further consolidation. Have track miles to maintain, need staff commensurate staff and equipment for scalable to that number of track miles. Wherever that track may be. Track gangs can work pretty much anywhere, because the stuff they work with is pretty much generic everywhere. Work equipment is easily tradeable between lines during the 18 daytime revenue service hours it's not in use...unlike a de-mated revenue car being painstakingly moved instead of carrying passengers. They just don't have enough of 'em, and don't have as much as they had 10 years ago when the pre-MBTA era ancient artifacts were still creaking along on the work fleet.
