Talking about DMUs...I still don't understand why they can't used refurbished RDC's. Theoretically, an RDC with electric doors, high-level platforms, and charlie card farebox could be operated by one person off-peak.
BandA wrote:Talking about DMUs...I still don't understand why they can't used refurbished RDC's. Theoretically, an RDC with electric doors, high-level platforms, and charlie card farebox could be operated by one person off-peak.1) They're not up to current safety regs. You can run them grandfathered in more or less as-is condition because they used to be compatible with FRA regs, but you wouldn't be able to produce new exact replica RDC's and have them pass current crashworthiness standards.
2) There physically aren't enough of them left in operating condition to populate a robust service for a major commuter railroad. Most carriers that have them only have a handful, and use them in pretty light duty.
3) They're ollllllllllllllllld tech. Not even diesel-electric vehicles...diesel-mechanical derived from WWII tank engines. They may be pretty basic for some gearheads at a RR museum to repair using spare parts, but the "they don't make 'em like that anymore" factor inhibits maintaining uptime for a sizeable fleet.
4) Due to the ancient design in #3 they also have wretched fuel efficiency, are exhaust-belchers to an extreme, and have a lot more moving parts that can break than a diesel-electric. Fine for the museum shop gearheads and fine for excursion service, but they will tax a major commuter railroad's shops with the escalated parts wear and arguably do worse for air quality than an HSP-46 push-pulling a few coaches.
#1, #3, and #4 explain why no one has inquired about open-sourcing the design and producing updated modern variants. While they were outstanding vehicles for their era, especially on passenger comfort and ops ease, producing modern replicas still requires so many changes to the guts of the cars that the economics prove infeasible. Plus the whole need to hit Tier 4 emissions standards on any newly manufactured vehicle. I mean...the production design is 65 years old, the R&D design closer to 70 years old, and the last one rolled off the assembly line 52 years ago. Unlike PCC streetcars whose basic design and systems live on umpteen evolutionary generations later in modern LRV's being manufactured today, the RDC lineage stopped so long ago it is historical tech.
Things would be different if the Budd SPV-2000 wasn't such a lemon. Common carbody with the Amfleet and Metroliner giving Budd a single platform to base every railcar type on, modern diesel-electric engine right in line with everything used today, 6-car MU'ing, potential to pack enough horses for 120 MPH operation, configurable for commuter and Amtrak interiors. Unfortunately, they did suck as badly as the Metroliners sucked, were too high-tech for production units, and should've been R&D demonstrators worked on and perfected a few years longer instead of rushed to market in desperation. If they'd succeeded railroads like the T, Metro North, and LIRR probably would've never stopped running DMU's in the first place and the whole SPV/Metroliner/Amfleet platform would've grown infinitely modular and plug-and-play with more market penetration. But it was that bad, and the RDC's were that worn-out so the DMU generation ended. Nobody's invested the R&D into a low-cost FRA-compliant yet because the big, big manufacturers with huge production scale like Bombardier and Kawasaki are still sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if the market heats up. And the Euro imports we all thought would be ubiquitous right now have been harder to adapt to FRA regs than expected, with overcustomization driving up the unit price (again...the diesel LRV's have fared well but those are fundamentally mongrel streetcars and not commuter rail vehicles at all).
Bottom line is: do you trust the T with their purchase history and cost control history on unproven equipment...and with their institutional inertia for modernizing ops practices...to be 'THE' trailblazer for a Top 6 North American commuter railroad to successfully adopt DMU's on the sort of scale where the mode will pay off? Personally...I would be scared to death given their recent track record of handing them that responsibility before somebody else provides a similar-scale example to learn from of how to do it right. Which doesn't mean they shouldn't pursue it; fear and paralysis is a terrible way to run a railroad. I just don't want them to do their homework and not rush into something they don't fully understand yet. Or...worse...suffer another bout of Silver Line syndrome and start backpedaling from the implementation when it proves much harder than expected and the agency realizes it bit off more than it could chew. Because that would suck if it happened yet again.
Do it right by doing their homework. Even if that means waiting until the fate of the FRA proposal to relax the buff strength regs goes through (we still don't know how far they're willing to bend) and the market expands with less-overcustomized Euro imports. In the meantime there's a lot of efficiencies they can gain by more precise push-pull configurations and ops nimbleness that probably can execute something like the Fairmount service plan usefully enough to generate very good ridership and prime that route--and the other speculative routes--for a larger up-front DMU fleet when those purchase options get attractive. We're nowhere near peak CR ops efficiency. Nowhere near at all...the 3 NYC-area roads still run circles around the T (out of necessity) at mixing and matching expresses and more localized short-turns on the schedule, optimizing consist length and staffing to trim excess fat, and so on. That's a productive start. Flabby ops on push-pull is going to result in flabby ops on DMU's too with headway consistency landing something short of goal and cost-per-rider remaining higher than it really should be. There's not one magic bullet like a vehicle purchase that's going to get the system executing like it's capable. It's an all-out, top-down effort that has as much to do with looking alive as an institution (well beyond even the MBCR-->Keolis upgrade) as what shiny new equipment they run.
Measuring success is going to be as much about that...or, realistically, more about that...than simply plunking down for a vehicle procurement.
