Green Line Type 9 Thread

After seeing all those sleek modern designs, Boston once again goes for the ugly award.

And note the 50 mph maximum speed.

I'm curious to see how these will make the curves on the system with those skirts over the trucks. With the current Type 7s and Type 8s, the truck mounted equipment swings out beyond the side of the cars when going around curves. (To see this in action, watch trains take the curve at Packard's Corner and you'll see what I mean) Unless of course, they're restricting these to the Medford extension.

The other design was a disgrace for esthetic and practical reasons. This rendering is sensible and is aN esthetic improvement over the type 8 for sure!

I noticed the skirt too. My guess is that it'll be mounted to and swive with the trucks. My guess is also that they won't last long. They'll be taken off so often for maintenance reasons they'll likely stop going back on (assuming they still have them when they arrive).

bostontrainguy wrote:After seeing all those sleek modern designs, Boston once again goes for the ugly award.

And note the 50 mph maximum speed.

Blame loading gauges.

A good parallel here is the Panama Canal, the old locks were designed for what was considered an outlandishly large ship - for 1900. As a result, as the canal got busier and busier shipbuilders sought to maximize the amount of cargo or passengers that they could get through the canal's century-old locks (in order to maximize throughput through the canal itself), their ships started looking more and more alike, especially after the 1970's or so. Given the physical constraints imposed by the canal's old infrastructure, there was pretty much one way that you could build a container ship, tanker, bulk hauler, or cruise ship that still maintained good hydrodynamics and seakeeping abilities, while squeezing just about every cubic meter of space out of the canal's "loading gauge".

Like the Panama Canal, the Green Line is a 100+ year old piece of infrastructure operating at passenger volumes that would have given its original designers an aneurism. When the T made the switch to articulated LRV's instead of rigid trolleys in the 1970s, the extremely tight clearances on the Green Line all but dictated that an articulated LRV maximizing its use of the available space would by necessity have to look a certain way. That "certain way" was pretty much the sole reason for the Boeing LRV's "distinctive" looks, with flat ends allowing the designers to push the cab bulkheads as far to either end of the vehicle as possible in order to squeeze as many extra inches of passenger space as they could out of the existing clearances.

Because of that, nearly every design for the GL since has more or less resembled a Boeing LRV, being tall, with tapering ends and a blunt, flat-looking front end that uses vertical volume to minimize the footprint of the driver's area. Look at the LRV's, the Kinki's, the Bredas, and these new CAF cars side by side, and you'll see that it's just like looking at pictures of different Panamax cruise ships.

CRail wrote:The other design was a disgrace for esthetic and practical reasons. This rendering is sensible and is aN esthetic improvement over the type 8 for sure!

I noticed the skirt too. My guess is that it'll be mounted to and swive with the trucks. My guess is also that they won't last long. They'll be taken off so often for maintenance reasons they'll likely stop going back on (assuming they still have them when they arrive).

Hey hey hey, the type 8's have plenty of failings, but I've always thought that their looks have a wonderful 90's-ness to their almost whimsically techno-modern looks. They remind me of some of the wackier pieces of Japanese rolling stock from the late 80's to mid-90's.

As to CAF's reliability, last year I was in Santiago, Chile, and I got a chance to ride on the new CAF cars that they just purchased for their ever-expanding, WMATA-caliber metro system.

Here they are:
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/news ... tract.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I liked them a lot, and certainly at least as much as any of the newer Alstom trains running on that system, and that's saying something. The Santiago Metro, like Montreal and Mexico City, is an originally French-designed system built primarily around Paris-style rubber-tyred rolling stock, that up until the recent CAF order was always built by Alstom, the direct descendant of the original designers of that system.

As a "peculiar" piece of railway engineering, those French rubber-tyred metros are easily as weird and potentially failure-prone as anything involved with the Green Line, and given the challenges associated with that design, CAF seems to have hit it out of the park with Santiago's new vehicles.

Here is the Kansas City streetcar which was built by CAF recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddTJliUtKqE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Propulsion for these streetcars, along with Cincinnati is from CAF Power & Automation, which is the former Trainelec. Similar to how Bombardier gained propulsion capabilities when it bought AdTranz over 10 years ago, Trainelec gives CAF that same capability plus communication systems and rail signalling.

As for the new Type 9 rendering, I like it. It's a good evolution on the Type 8 and it should perform much better over the long run.

I did some additional research and found out that the Type 9 will feature CAF IGBT propulsion. This will be the third project to use CAF propulsion in the United States, after Cincinnati and Kansas City. Previously, CAF outsourced their propulsion to Alstom, Bombardier, Siemens, Mitsubishi, or other companies. However, they recently acquired the company Trainelec. This gave CAF propulsion, low voltage power, IGBT electronics, communication systems, train monitoring, and signalling systems capabilities that they previously did not have.

Link to the IGBT electronics: http://www.cafpower.com/en/systems/elec ... -converter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For those who are wondering what CAF's propulsion sounds like, here is a link from the Kansas City streetcar amd a link for the same LRV platform from France:
Kansas City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ9pReytVaI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYRKwLeYwXU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The e-bells are hideous. Sounds like a kid banging on a cheap tin pot.

The e-horn sounds even weirder. Like they recorded a short blast from an Amtrak horn and decided to call it a day.

tommyboy6181 wrote:I did some additional research and found out that the Type 9 will feature CAF IGBT propulsion. This will be the third project to use CAF propulsion in the United States, after Cincinnati and Kansas City. Previously, CAF outsourced their propulsion to Alstom, Bombardier, Siemens, Mitsubishi, or other companies. However, they recently acquired the company Trainelec. This gave CAF propulsion, low voltage power, IGBT electronics, communication systems, train monitoring, and signalling systems capabilities that they previously did not have.

Link to the IGBT electronics: http://www.cafpower.com/en/systems/elec ... -converter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For those who are wondering what CAF's propulsion sounds like, here is a link from the Kansas City streetcar amd a link for the same LRV platform from France:
Kansas City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ9pReytVaI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYRKwLeYwXU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Oh, great - another unproven system. The MBTA will never learn.

The systems CAF is using are not exactly unproven. CAF propulsion (Trainelec) has been used in many tram/LRV and heavy metro applications across the globe over the past 5-10 years. Same goes for the power electronics. Plus, CAF has been involved in many more tram/LRV projects than AnsaldoBreda (now Hitachi Rail Italy) over the years, so I'd say they should likely do a good job with the Type 9.

They are however two years late with the Amtrak contract which might delay this contract too.

I will say they are very quiet.

From yesterday (March 27) at the FMCB meeting:
http://mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/E.%20MBTA%20Type%209%20Board%20Update%20Mar%2020%202017%20Rev%2010%20w-notes-video.pdf

It includes interior and exterior views of the mock-up.

It appears that CAF isn't perfect.

Fair use quote:

[Houston] Metropolitan Transit Authority officials continue withholding $12.9 million from CAF U.S.A. - the builder of the vehicles - as they debate the amount of liquidated damages owed because of delays and delivery of railcars that were overweight, leaky and halted by faulty axles, among other problems.

Bear in mind that was also only an order for 39 vehicles. Boston, otoh, represents to CAF what could very well turn into the largest LRV sale in North America since the MUNI/MBTA Boeing order if the To decides, as I think they will, to add options replace the entire existing fleet as sell.

That being the case, for all we know, they could be rushing things on other smaller orders like Houston in order to preserve the Type 9 order's timetable, since a painless Type 9 procurement means they could potentially sell nearly 300 light rail vehicles in total should the T like the 9 and decide to go all-in on it.

I thought the FMCB was looking at the next/Type-10 order being an industry-standard LRV, even at the cost of removing the tightest loops at Park or shaving the walls.