Winter 2015 and Impact on MBTA

Red Wing wrote:

charding wrote:…what is the status of tomorrow's Patriots' parade - should be a real challenge - instead of duck boats, use dog sleds…how much of the T will be running? What a game!!! In the same category as Franco Harris's 'immaculate reception' against the Raiders in a long distance Super Bowl…what game!!!

Parade's been moved until Wednesday according to WBZ.

Should be held on Saturday...my 2 cents...the rush hour trains won't be able to hold the crowds, gonna be a mess

Doesn't the T have equipment to blow snow, throw snow, and haul snow from the rail lines?

Plows mounted on trains only go so far. When the snow banks just to the sides of the track get too high then it is necessary to remove the snow, not just push it aside.

Tight quarters such as the Longfellow Bridge on the Red Line and between Brookline Hills and Brookline Village on the Green Line D, require hauling the snow away.

If the Patriots parade were deferred to Saturday, many of the team members won't be in town to participate. Deferring to Wednesday would bring out more spectators since the weather would not be so bitterly cold.

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…noticed on Globe website this morning…long slog for the T - and understandable.

After seeing the Above-ground Blue line struggle this evening,seeing a forecast for another 24"+ inches in the next 10 days, I'm still thinking that 100% closed is a little too drastic (though periodically called for) but trying 100% open is looking unsustainable.

MBTA F40PH-2C 1050 wrote:

Red Wing wrote:

charding wrote:…what is the status of tomorrow's Patriots' parade - should be a real challenge - instead of duck boats, use dog sleds…how much of the T will be running? What a game!!! In the same category as Franco Harris's 'immaculate reception' against the Raiders in a long distance Super Bowl…what game!!!

Parade's been moved until Wednesday according to WBZ.

Should be held on Saturday...my 2 cents...the rush hour trains won't be able to hold the crowds, gonna be a mess

None of the players would still be in the area by then. They have family obligations, vacations . . . training planned.

Disney Guy wrote:Doesn't the T have equipment to blow snow, throw snow, and haul snow from the rail lines?

Plows mounted on trains only go so far. When the snow banks just to the sides of the track get too high then it is necessary to remove the snow, not just push it aside.

Tight quarters such as the Longfellow Bridge on the Red Line and between Brookline Hills and Brookline Village on the Green Line D, require hauling the snow away.

If the Patriots parade were deferred to Saturday, many of the team members won't be in town to participate. Deferring to Wednesday would bring out more spectators since the weather would not be so bitterly cold.

It has nothing to do with pushing the snow away. As long as the stuff gets airborne in the wind the traction motors are going to vacuum it right up. Combine with cold starts the next morning in the yard after all that intake has re-frozen as ice inside the car's guts and you get a whole lot of dead trains. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it when the systemwide fleet is that old, the crews are spread so impossibly thin playing medic to all these dead trains. If it moves on its own power, it's going to get sent out for revenue duty whether they have any hope of it completing a single revenue run in one piece.

This is the price they're paying for deferred maintenance. The conditions leading to this week's commute were born 10 years ago when rebuild programs were put off and new acquisitions left unfunded for entire 4-year budget terms. There is no fix they can pull today..this morning...that'll make the uptime any better when cumulative long-range decisions and non-decisions were what dug this hole. They can remove every single flake from the Longfellow and the spray from oncoming traffic and snow whipped airborne by the wind off the frozen surface of the Charles will do exactly the same number on the traction motors of a 45-year-old 015/16 consist or a 21-year-old 01800 consist that has no midlife overhaul program funded or scheduled with any hope to start this decade. This is about competency executing 5-year Plans...not competency with snow removal.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:As long as the stuff gets airborne in the wind the traction motors are going to vacuum it right up. Combine with cold starts the next morning in the yard after all that intake has re-frozen as ice inside the car's guts and you get a whole lot of dead trains. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it when the systemwide fleet is that old, the crews are spread so impossibly thin playing medic to all these dead trains. If it moves on its own power, it's going to get sent out for revenue duty whether they have any hope of it completing a single revenue run in one piece.

This is the price they're paying for deferred maintenance... wind off the frozen surface of the Charles will do exactly the same number on the traction motors of a 45-year-old 015/16 consist or a 21-year-old 01800 consist that has no midlife overhaul program funded or scheduled with any hope to start this decade. This is about competency executing 5-year Plans...not competency with snow removal.

I'd love to beat politicians over the head with examples of how deferred maintenance causes systemic failures, but how are new or overhauled trains any more resistant to ingesting snow/water than old/un-overhauled trains?

New or old or re-manufactured, doesn't this come down to either big things, like redesigning how the air flows in, or small things, like the quality of the hairnet you put over places that're likely to ingest snow? Or maybe the question of whether we should be spraying the guts of the motors with a water repellent "wax" (like industrial Rain-x or Scotchgard) or one of these new super-hydro-phobic paints

As you note, freezing water is powerful stuff, regardless of how well-maintained its opponent is. While better maintenance would make things generally more resilient (and I deplore deferred maintenance), isn't the particular disaster of the last few days really that we have unprecedentedly-tall piles of snow, producing unprecedented quantities of easily-ingested water, combined with sustained overnight temperatures in the teens (unlike, say, the April Fools storm of '97)

Rbts Stn wrote:

MBTA F40PH-2C 1050 wrote:

Red Wing wrote:

charding wrote:…what is the status of tomorrow's Patriots' parade - should be a real challenge - instead of duck boats, use dog sleds…how much of the T will be running? What a game!!! In the same category as Franco Harris's 'immaculate reception' against the Raiders in a long distance Super Bowl…what game!!!

Parade's been moved until Wednesday according to WBZ.

Should be held on Saturday...my 2 cents...the rush hour trains won't be able to hold the crowds, gonna be a mess

None of the players would still be in the area by then. They have family obligations, vacations . . . training planned.

Seems it would have worked to have the parade in the Spring. This could be a Bilandic moment (one and done mayor of Chicago who was done in by his inaction durring and after their blizzard of '79) for Mayor Walsh? Time will tell and here's hoping everything goes well today.

Arlington wrote:

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:As long as the stuff gets airborne in the wind the traction motors are going to vacuum it right up. Combine with cold starts the next morning in the yard after all that intake has re-frozen as ice inside the car's guts and you get a whole lot of dead trains. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it when the systemwide fleet is that old, the crews are spread so impossibly thin playing medic to all these dead trains. If it moves on its own power, it's going to get sent out for revenue duty whether they have any hope of it completing a single revenue run in one piece.

This is the price they're paying for deferred maintenance... wind off the frozen surface of the Charles will do exactly the same number on the traction motors of a 45-year-old 015/16 consist or a 21-year-old 01800 consist that has no midlife overhaul program funded or scheduled with any hope to start this decade. This is about competency executing 5-year Plans...not competency with snow removal.

I'd love to beat politicians over the head with examples of how deferred maintenance causes systemic failures, but how are new or overhauled trains any more resistant to ingesting snow/water than old/un-overhauled trains?

New or old or re-manufactured, doesn't this come down to either big things, like redesigning how the air flows in, or small things, like the quality of the hairnet you put over places that're likely to ingest snow? Or maybe the question of whether we should be spraying the guts of the motors with a water repellent "wax" (like industrial Rain-x or Scotchgard) or one of these new super-hydro-phobic paints

As you note, freezing water is powerful stuff, regardless of how well-maintained its opponent is. While better maintenance would make things generally more resilient (and I deplore deferred maintenance), isn't the particular disaster of the last few days really that we have unprecedentedly-tall piles of snow, producing unprecedented quantities of easily-ingested water, combined with sustained overnight temperatures in the teens (unlike, say, the April Fools storm of '97)

You're always going to have failures like on Blue yesterday. But new cars are more resilient to this stuff. Blue's going to bounce back and stabilize fastest by far. You don't have the extreme number of casualties they're experiencing this week...where Red doesn't get any better 3 days after the storm because it still hasn't hit rock bottom. You don't have already fragile cars quitting sooner, or getting sent out in no condition to run where a they know it's not going to make it through the day. You don't have the shops so stuffed full of casualties the overflow can't be tended to. Don't have motors already held together with baling wire and hairnets with parts supply strained to the limit. Don't have so many motors so shot to begin with that it takes way more than a quick de-gunking to get them back out on the road.

It's all about the tolerances. A bad day on cleanup day after the storm is wholly expected. A bad 10 days is not. A bad entire-winter is not. The fact that they have no tolerances to stop a free fall once it starts is where poor planning manifests itself and where it takes a 5-Year Plan's worth of cash infusion to address it. We're not going to get that for 4 more years because that's what it's going to take to get the new Red, Orange, and Green car orders completed. It's going to take 2 or 3 more years to churn the Type 7 and K-car rebuild programs to completion. Hell...it might even take that long to get the Rotems and HSP-46's stabilized at the rate they're going. And they have to allot funding for the 01800 25-year rebuild and the full replacements of the F40PH-2C, F40PHM-2C, straggler Geeps, Bombardier coaches, and Pullman coaches--in short, every single piece of commuter rail equipment that isn't brand new or brand-newly rebuilt-like, NEXT YEAR, or they'll be digging themselves another hole simultaneous with (fingers-crossed) digging themselves out of the one they're currently in. Take a 4-year fiscal plan's vacation tending to eat-your-peas stuff like that and you pay for it with 12 years of even more costly atonement. That's the lesson in all this. Bev Scott is the one who's gotta be the human sacrifice for the sins of the Michael "Bus" Mulhern administration' rail intransigence 3-1/2 GM's and 2+ governors ago.

I was excited to see Charlie Baker chiming in about how unacceptable it all is yesterday. It's about time that some heads roll for the T's incompetence, both in terms of management as well as in terms of advocating for itself and ensuring it gets the resources it needs.

Public transit is the backbone for sustainable urban development, and as this city is in the midst of an unprecedented wave of urban development, having a public transit system that can move past the systemic half-assedness of the T is of the utmost importance.

As an aside, I wonder what effect dealing with 15 years of the "neighborhood"-focused, "rubber before rails" Menino administration had on the T's sorry state of affairs. All I'll say is that you sure as hell didn't see Guiliani or Bloomberg, or even the DC/Chicago mayors turning such a blind eye towards the inadequacies of their public transit systems the way that mumbles did.

That's probably the same reason why NYC and DC got fully-funded system expansions, new lines, etc, as well as all-new rolling stock for most of their lines (along with Chicago's) during the past quarter century, while all we got were the 1800s(thanks to Dukakis/Flynn), the Type 9s, the Siemens cars, and a whole lot of excuses.

The blue line is still having problems. I'm not sure what the problem is, but all outbound blue line trains crawl through the few blocks before Orient Heights station, and stop at every block. Trains are also stopping at the platform for a long time before departing. I saw that a crew was working in one of the bungalows, the one west of the station. Possibly a signal issue?

Age of equipment is a BS excuse that I'm beyond tired of hearing and reading about. Charlie Baker's condemnation of how the service levied against the weather is condemnable itself. It's extremely easy to be a Monday morning quarterback pointing fingers and yelling shouldda couldda wouldda; especially while Amtrak, with it's 14 year old high speed sets and brand new electric locomotives, is boding no better than the T. Let's face it, we weren't prepared for this. We've simplified our operations and equipment to be merely adequate to the norm and so we're completely blindsided when disaster strikes even when we know about it days in advance. The current third rail apparatus is no match for ice and snow, but if they kept the 01400s maintained for active work service that line could have been better maintained throughout the storm (completely different third rail shoes and more effective sleet scrapers). No rapid transit line has any equipment to deal with excessive snow except for a ridiculously expensive to operate jet blower which does little more than impress the masses when the Boston Globe finds a slow news day and is looking for a crowd pleaser.

But, when we have equipment for occasions such as these, people go on and on about the waste because "we haven't even used this thing in years, I don't know why we don't just get rid of it." So some new do-gooder suit and tie with a clipboard walks around and gives directives to clean up this and that and earn a couple scrap dollars and then tells the pissed off public that these old trains are the problem when they've done the best that any equipment could possibly do under the same circumstances. Yes, there's lots to review and reform but it isn't the everlasting simple and proven technology of the most resilient equipment in the fleet.

CRail wrote:But, when we have equipment for occasions such as these, people go on and on about the waste because "we haven't even used this thing in years, I don't know why we don't just get rid of it." So some new do-gooder suit and tie with a clipboard walks around and gives directives to clean up this and that and earn a couple scrap dollars and then tells the pissed off public that these old trains are the problem when they've done the best that any equipment could possibly do under the same circumstances. Yes, there's lots to review and reform but it isn't the everlasting simple and proven technology of the most resilient equipment in the fleet.

The majority of trains this afternoon were older cars - it was the 01800s that were under the weather, 11 older and 3 01800. A little better now 9 older and 5 01800

diburning wrote:The blue line is still having problems. I'm not sure what the problem is, but all outbound blue line trains crawl through the few blocks before Orient Heights station, and stop at every block. Trains are also stopping at the platform for a long time before departing. I saw that a crew was working in one of the bungalows, the one west of the station. Possibly a signal issue?

Sounds like a problem with the trip-arms or the trip-arm heaters...which would constitute a signal issue. If the mechanical trips are too gunked up to move the fail-safe is to stop-and-protect at every block through the vicinity of the fault.

CRail wrote:Age of equipment is a BS excuse that I'm beyond tired of hearing and reading about. Charlie Baker's condemnation of how the service levied against the weather is condemnable itself. It's extremely easy to be a Monday morning quarterback pointing fingers and yelling shouldda couldda wouldda; especially while Amtrak, with it's 14 year old high speed sets and brand new electric locomotives, is boding no better than the T. Let's face it, we weren't prepared for this. We've simplified our operations and equipment to be merely adequate to the norm and so we're completely blindsided when disaster strikes even when we know about it days in advance. The current third rail apparatus is no match for ice and snow, but if they kept the 01400s maintained for active work service that line could have been better maintained throughout the storm (completely different third rail shoes and more effective sleet scrapers). No rapid transit line has any equipment to deal with excessive snow except for a ridiculously expensive to operate jet blower which does little more than impress the masses when the Boston Globe finds a slow news day and is looking for a crowd pleaser.

But, when we have equipment for occasions such as these, people go on and on about the waste because "we haven't even used this thing in years, I don't know why we don't just get rid of it." So some new do-gooder suit and tie with a clipboard walks around and gives directives to clean up this and that and earn a couple scrap dollars and then tells the pissed off public that these old trains are the problem when they've done the best that any equipment could possibly do under the same circumstances. Yes, there's lots to review and reform but it isn't the everlasting simple and proven technology of the most resilient equipment in the fleet.

Then where is the T "leadership" speaking up about how things really are and wheeling and dealing for more/better funding? The silence is (and has been for the last generation or two) deafening.