by pennengineer
Forgive me if this has been posted before; I do not visit this board on a frequent schedule.
As luck would have it, I boarded M4 #1037 at 15th St. this evening to find that it (along with its "spouse" in the married pair) has been retrofitted with new seats, replacing those god-awful cushions. The new seats are roughly identical to those found in most SEPTA buses - basically metal with "pop-in" fabric inserts. (They are not the new "curved-back" bus seats.) I was surprised at how well they had been adapted into the car! The fabric inserts used seems to be the same as on the buses - dark blue.
I wish they had ditched the fabric altogether and gone with seats like those on the subway-surface or BSS, but it's still a phenomenal improvement over the cushions, most of which have by this point become quite, for lack of a better term, feculent. I had heard that they were planning to outfit a pair of cars to test the new seats back when I visited the MFSE shop at 69th street in May. The bad news is that at that time they were planning to run the test cars for at least 6 months before deciding whether to apply the new seating to the rest of the fleet. But given the level of the improvement, I cannot see how they could possibly decide not to.
As luck would have it, I boarded M4 #1037 at 15th St. this evening to find that it (along with its "spouse" in the married pair) has been retrofitted with new seats, replacing those god-awful cushions. The new seats are roughly identical to those found in most SEPTA buses - basically metal with "pop-in" fabric inserts. (They are not the new "curved-back" bus seats.) I was surprised at how well they had been adapted into the car! The fabric inserts used seems to be the same as on the buses - dark blue.
I wish they had ditched the fabric altogether and gone with seats like those on the subway-surface or BSS, but it's still a phenomenal improvement over the cushions, most of which have by this point become quite, for lack of a better term, feculent. I had heard that they were planning to outfit a pair of cars to test the new seats back when I visited the MFSE shop at 69th street in May. The bad news is that at that time they were planning to run the test cars for at least 6 months before deciding whether to apply the new seating to the rest of the fleet. But given the level of the improvement, I cannot see how they could possibly decide not to.