The N and the Q finally made it across the Manhattan Bridge tonight. Great job MTA! Many thanks to all the people who worked tirelessly to restore our subway system!
Kamen Rider wrote:the system is fed through the local substations, each of which has a set area that it feeds power to.So how many traction power stations are there? If the one feeding [area] goes down; is any train along [area] trapped until that power station is back up?
That is quite different than WMATA; they have ~50 traction stations, fed from 13KV in MD/DC [PEPCO], and from VEPCO, 13KV or 44 KV. Each station is 7 or 9 MW capacity; with the 7's being upgraded. In the case of outages [...a frequent occurrence during storms here, especially out in the 'burbs...] the system still runs everywhere albeit perhaps slower/longer headways.
One issue is if too many trains are in a third-rail section being crossfed, even their static load will exceed the available tie capacity. This leads to antics such as manually opening the knife disconnects on each car at trackside, then re-energizing the third rail, moving one train out, closing the next one's disconnects, repeat....I'd never have thought the "hotel" {non-traction} demand was so high but seems so.
The worst case was likely 6 Jan 1992 when DC itself went black. There, the suburbs were feeding the core, a dicier proposition. I recall the open faregates and backup lighting, but not how fast the trains ran when I got on board. Now, every station should have generator backup so lights/elevators/faregates etc will still function.