#14 Orange Line Cars 1400-1551 (From Red/Orange Procurement discussion)

RailBus63 wrote:

ns3010 wrote:Nice that they're building in fleet expansions into the OL base order and RL option order.

The Red Line option is not likely to be for fleet expansion - it's to allow for a 1-for-1 replacement of the 01700's if the money is available. 58 option cars = 58 01700's.

Good call, I didn't pick up on that.

MBTA3247 wrote:

AznSumtinSumtin wrote: and LCD information displays.

*headdesk*

Why is that a bad thing? They're not talking about the destination signs; those are specced to be LED. The "LCD information screens" are TV's placed throughout the car that can be used to display service information, advertisements, etc.

BostonUrbEx wrote:

RailBus63 wrote:Awesome - so instead of a married pair being removed from service due to a breakdown, the entire six-car set has to be sidelined.

And this is essentially how the MBTA does it anyway, so what's the point?

Um, the point is the difference between uncoupling and removing only a two-car married-pair set for repair versus having to remove the entire six-car set for repair.

BrandeisRoberts wrote:

RailBus63 wrote:

BostonUrbEx wrote:

RailBus63 wrote:Awesome - so instead of a married pair being removed from service due to a breakdown, the entire six-car set has to be sidelined.

And this is essentially how the MBTA does it anyway, so what's the point?

Um, the point is the difference between uncoupling and removing only a two-car married-pair set for repair versus having to remove the entire six-car set for repair.

MTA, The London Underground, The Paris Metro, and a few dozen more world-class transit systems that consistently provide more reliable service than the MBTA could dream of right now all manage to do so with >6 car A-B-...-B-A trainsets that can't quickly be separated for maintenance. So why can't the T do the same?

The MTA (new york, if that's what you're referring to) has a ton of spares, so they can afford to take their semi-permanent 4 and 5 car sets out of service for maintenance (the MTA also does NOT run >6 car A-B...-B-A train sets). As for the other systems (the ones you mentioned, and also most metros in China, ie, the MTR, Shanghai, Beijing, etc), my response would be "THIS IS 'MURICA!!!" lol. We can have nice things, so long as they're not too nice, or else they somehow end up getting screwed up.

AznSumtinSumtin wrote:I stumbled upon the tech specs (PDF warning!) of the new cars on the MBTA website. At 643 pages, it's quite a lengthy read.

Great find!! Thanks!!

One of the interesting things (to me) about the new car spec is the doors... the size is huge: 64 inch wide dual-leaf, meaning that even if one door leaf fails to open there will still be 32 inch clearance - which is the ADA specification for wheelchairs. The wider doors also mean more room for riders to enter and exit, which might cut down on station dwell time. <sarcasm> It also means up to three people can stand in the doorways blocking them, instead of just two. </sarcasm> See page "T6-3" among others.

Also these will be the first heavy-rail MBTA cars with power-operated gap fillers (a.k.a. bridge plate) for wheelchair users. (The current Blue Line doesn't have them, right??) The "gap fillers" are mentioned on page "T6-9". It does say "option" which I think means it might get dropped from the final design though.

By the way that full URL for the PDF is https://www.mbta.com/business_center/bidding_solicitations/pdf/MBTA%20RO%20Technical%20Specification%20October%2022%202013.pdf and even though it's 643 pages it's "only" 2.1MB which is really good for such a big document!

StefanW wrote:Also these will be the first heavy-rail MBTA cars with power-operated gap fillers (a.k.a. bridge plate) for wheelchair users. (The current Blue Line doesn't have them, right??) The "gap fillers" are mentioned on page "T6-9". It does say "option" which I think means it might get dropped from the final design though.

No, the Blue Line does not. Nice catch there -- that's interesting.

Also spec'd is LED interior lighting with an option for LED headlights as well. Why they specifically asked for "cool white" LED's is beyond me... there are plenty of LED options available today which give off a nice, warm light (some of which are already in use by the signal departments); I imagine this technology would be even further perfected by 2018. I don't see how giving the impression of a cold storage locker improves passenger comfort or safety (If you want to see what I mean for yourself, look for one of the LED test cars on the green line).

Type7trolley wrote:Also spec'd is LED interior lighting with an option for LED headlights as well. Why they specifically asked for "cool white" LED's is beyond me... there are plenty of LED options available today which give off a nice, warm light (some of which are already in use by the signal departments); I imagine this technology would be even further perfected by 2018. I don't see how giving the impression of a cold storage locker improves passenger comfort or safety (If you want to see what I mean for yourself, look for one of the LED test cars on the green line).

Interestingly, I believe relatively cool lighting temperature is the norm in modern rail cars. I agree it sounds like it would be harsh, but I guess it has been working out well so far. It's worth noting that the LEDs on the Green Line cars are probably no longer a good example of the best the industry has to offer.

Finch wrote:

Type7trolley wrote:Also spec'd is LED interior lighting with an option for LED headlights as well. Why they specifically asked for "cool white" LED's is beyond me... there are plenty of LED options available today which give off a nice, warm light (some of which are already in use by the signal departments); I imagine this technology would be even further perfected by 2018. I don't see how giving the impression of a cold storage locker improves passenger comfort or safety (If you want to see what I mean for yourself, look for one of the LED test cars on the green line).

Interestingly, I believe relatively cool lighting temperature is the norm in modern rail cars. I agree it sounds like it would be harsh, but I guess it has been working out well so far. It's worth noting that the LEDs on the Green Line cars are probably no longer a good example of the best the industry has to offer.

The cool white LED's have higher production yields than the warm white ones, simply because they've been around longer and are more mature technology. Warm whites can have issues with off-kilter phosphors making individual dots in the fixture weird colors. That's why on the mass market they're pretty much limited to small household fixtures and Christmas lights today, where the number of dots per fixture is small, the number of fixtures is small, and one off-color or off-brightness dot isn't going to be a problem. It may seem like an itty bitty problem to the passenger if every 25th dot in an Orange Line car is purple or slightly greenish...but consider how many thousands of dots that is for one row of lights on 1 car x 2 rows x a few hundred cars on this order. On that scale it is considered an uncomfortably high manufacturing error rate. And that's assuming these aren't cheap-cheapo pieces of junk with every 10th dot screwed up and people actually tweeting Pesaturo to explain why the lights in the new cars are all weird.

Cool whites are bulletproof enough by now that they're going up by the thousands in all kinds of heavy-duty installations like street-lighting. They have the proven MTBF to take the punishment for 10 years in a rattling transit vehicle that's out in the freezing cold or blazing heat. And for the next 5 years the cools will have the reliability lead on the warms until the warms close the gap. It's a lot like those first wave of mid-90's LED traffic lights that were so prone to dead pixels, flicker, and yellow lights that looked kinda wrong. Those problems all went away with the next wave of installations. Just like the first wave of cool whites you bought 5 years in flashlights and on hideous Xmas light strings are kinda crappy compared to the millions of new installations going up today. Warm whites will be there. But for the T, 2018, and the size of this vehicle order...stick to what works.


Hey, it's not like the cool white fluorescents in the 01500's don't make you look like a freshly blood-drained cadaver too. We're talking pretty minor degrees of separation here.

The Red Line cars will have 4 per side the like the 01800s and the Orange Line cars with have 3 per side.

If they're doing the latter, it's going to be interesting to see how they intend to have any meaningful number of seats in the cars with such huge doors.

Not to mention the size of the door pockets... say goodbye to windows. Maybe they'll incorporate windows into them, like on the old PATH cars.

I actually came across the LED car (3658B) the other day for the first time, and I actually liked it. It made that end of the car much brighter and less-dingy looking than the other end with the traditional fluorescent lighting. Just for comparison's sake, I would like to see what a car would look like with a warmer LED lighting (it would be nice if they did this on the other end of the test car, for a side by side comparison of different LED tones), I have no issue with the cool LED's used on the test car.

As for the doors, I agree, that is very (almost excessively) wide. I'm curious to know if this addition width would have any significant impact on the flow of movement through the doors.
I suspect that the reason for having wider two-leaf doors is so that if one side fails, you can still have people go through the other half of the door. With a single leaf door, if that one leaf fails, you lose the whole door, which would do WONDERS for the loading/unloading flow and dwell time. Having two doors almost provides a sort of "redundancy" since it is unlikely that both leaves will fail at the same time.

ns3010 wrote:As for the doors, I agree, that is very (almost excessively) wide. I'm curious to know if this addition width would have any significant impact on the flow of movement through the doors.
I suspect that the reason for having wider two-leaf doors is so that if one side fails, you can still have people go through the other half of the door. With a single leaf door, if that one leaf fails, you lose the whole door, which would do WONDERS for the loading/unloading flow and dwell time. Having two doors almost provides a sort of "redundancy" since it is unlikely that both leaves will fail at the same time.

As someone speculated earlier, the reason for the wide doors is most likely so that if one door in a doorway is cut out, the remaining door is still wide enough for a wheelchair to exit. Considering that I can't imagine the wider doors doing anything but improving passenger flow, this should be a real slam dunk. This could potentially shave time off of those longer dwellings -- and in the case of a wheelchair needing to exit a cutout doorway, you're cutting out minutes.

BostonUrbEx wrote:

ns3010 wrote:As for the doors, I agree, that is very (almost excessively) wide. I'm curious to know if this addition width would have any significant impact on the flow of movement through the doors.
I suspect that the reason for having wider two-leaf doors is so that if one side fails, you can still have people go through the other half of the door. With a single leaf door, if that one leaf fails, you lose the whole door, which would do WONDERS for the loading/unloading flow and dwell time. Having two doors almost provides a sort of "redundancy" since it is unlikely that both leaves will fail at the same time.

As someone speculated earlier, the reason for the wide doors is most likely so that if one door in a doorway is cut out, the remaining door is still wide enough for a wheelchair to exit. Considering that I can't imagine the wider doors doing anything but improving passenger flow, this should be a real slam dunk. This could potentially shave time off of those longer dwellings -- and in the case of a wheelchair needing to exit a cutout doorway, you're cutting out minutes.

I sense you may have missed by sarcasm

One bidder is eyeing the old Westinghouse plant in Springfield as its assembly plant for the new cars:
http://www.masslive.com/business-news/i ... plant.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Orange Line cars would have to be shipped out by truck because there is no interchange with the main line. Other finished cars could leave by rail.

I wonder why they specified that? Neither the Orange nor the Red have intact connections to the main line rail network, but both are so close in places that it would be trivial to throw in a crossover.