8th Avenue Subway Disaster

I don't know. One imagines that while they know the basics, the devil may well be in the details. The wiring was installed over half a century ago, and one imagines there's been a *lot* of maintenance over the years. How carefully was it all documented originally? How completely do they know what's been done over the years? For added sport, one has to assume that there was plenty of physical damage to the ends of all the cable runs into the room.

I expect that simply identifying all the cable runs, and getting to a point where you have all the pairs neatly labled is going to take some time, especially since you almost certainly need someone down in the tunnels, at the switch and signal control units to verify each cable run. I suspect you can do some of that work without disrupting traffic, but I'd bet some of it can't be done while trains are running. Even with hundreds of cable runs to sort out, that isn't years worth of work, but I bet it's plenty.

In terms of parts, the best news is that you don't need all 600 relays in place, in order to get the basics running. I'm sure that some bright boys an girls in the engineering group are bosy laying out the minimum repairs needed to increase TPH on the As and then allow the most straighforward possible set of moves to permit the Cs to start running again. I'm willing to bet that long after they've "restored" service they'll be doing work to enable all the oddball options that permit alternate service patterns, skipped stations, moves between express and local and the like.

In the mean time, I also hope someone is being told to go and figure out what the story is in all the other relay and control rooms, and see if we can't prevent this sort of thing from happening again. If some homleless guy can do this much damage it by accident, someone working with hostile intent could almost certainly make a bigger mess.

- David

Someone asked about service in northern Manhattan. The B train serves stations to 145th Street. The A is being switched to the local track north of 145th Street to make the stop at 155th Street. The A makes all subsequent stops to 207th Street. So the A is only adding one stop.

Here's what I don't understand.

The media reported that the fire knocked out the switches and signals for about a quarter of a mile south of the Chambers Street station. There might be a crossover there but I don't think there is much more; I'd be surprised if there is an interlocking as there must be between Chambers Street and Canal Street stations. So even if the signals are gone, why can't the TA station people at Chambers Street and Broadway Nassau stations and send trains one at a time. My recollection is that it takes about 2 minutes to go between the stations which means that there could be at least 20 trains an hour operating per hour, instead of the 13 an hour now operating.

A number of posters wondered how the TA senior management could come out and state that it would take a long time to make the repairs. I suspect that what they said was quite right but that they got innovative when the public, the media and the governor got on their case.

Jay Kaplowitz

iiipr wrote:Someone asked about service in northern Manhattan. The B train serves stations to 145th Street. The A is being switched to the local track north of 145th Street to make the stop at 155th Street. The A makes all subsequent stops to 207th Street. So the A is only adding one stop.

However, the B doesn't run from 9 PM to midnight and on weekends, and the A and D run express then. Has one of them been moved to local?
Oh, and with the A switching to local at 145th, it will also make the stop at 163rd, right?

UpperHarlemLine4ever wrote:
Perhaps the transit systems should be returned to private operators. Maybe they could get things done a lot quicker and cheaper. I used to be an advocate of government ownership of public transportation. No more.

It is unfortunate, but private operation would not be any better. The private operator would be responsbile first to its shareholders. The system became a public entity so that service would be the number one priority. It is a shame that politics turned it into something else, but we have an option...VOTE them out!

I'm going to guess at how this whole thing unfolded: Word of the fire got to one of the TV stations, and a call was made to a home number of an MTA Public Relations person, who should have said something like "Yes! There's a big problem and we're working on it!" but instead panicked and said " Ohmigodit's awful! Fire! Burned up! It's old stuff! The whole thing's gone! It'll take YEARS to fix it! Ohmigod!!!!"

It is an example of how NOT to deal with the press.

Is the MTA going to start upgrading the relays that are still part of the system? IIRC, those in the Chambers St. control room were pretty old.