The Comet I's are here

GP40MC 1116 wrote:I just saw a video with these cars going by, and they have all of the side vestibule doors OPEN! That looks like a pretty dumb thing to me, what if someone was to walk through the vestibule and slip or trip down the stairs that is a injury waiting to happen!

Every passenger railroad or even tourist railroad I've seen or been on, if their equipment has taps and side pocket vestibule doors they are always closed when the train is in motion

Without seeing the video, I will explain. During rush hours, the older equipment is allowed to run with the doors open, however NJT has tightened this policy recently due to clumsy and stupid passengers making it inconvienent for everyone.

Ken S. wrote:

GP40MC 1116 wrote:I just saw a video with these cars going by, and they have all of the side vestibule doors OPEN! That looks like a pretty dumb thing to me, what if someone was to walk through the vestibule and slip or trip down the stairs that is a injury waiting to happen!

Every passenger railroad or even tourist railroad I've seen or been on, if their equipment has taps and side pocket vestibule doors they are always closed when the train is in motion

Without seeing the video, I will explain. During rush hours, the older equipment is allowed to run with the doors open, however NJT has tightened this policy recently due to clumsy and stupid passengers making it inconvienent for everyone.

Very true, however, the Comet 1s that have been retired from NJT, and some are in excursion service (like in the video mentioned, I saw a video as well, with the doors open) are low level only cars. Meaning that the doors do not need to be opened for the trap to be raised. the Comet 1's still in NJT service are high level doors, and the door needs to be opened first before the trap raised, for a low level station, which is the reasoning behind the rule.

Those cars should have had their doors closed, there was no need for them to be opened. My buddy was on one of the Reading FP7 trips, and he is knowledgeable about the cars, and they had a probem wiht a door, and he closed it and got it operating properly. I think as a door encountered a problem, it was left open. I also highly doubt that the trainline cables were hooked up, meaning that the door controls wouldn't work trainline, and the doors had to be opened individually from car to car. Or, possibly, no one had a proper coach key to operate the door panels electrically, and they were held open somehow. If the cars had HEP and lights, the doors motors had power, unless there were parts of the door system that were missing/scavaged

My point as you already seemed to understand was that for a excursion train like so, they only need them open when they are actually making a stop and so forth, otherwise they should be shut with the traps down

GP40MC 1116 wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgsVg4xY3y0

My point as you already seemed to understand was that for a excursion train like so, they only need them open when they are actually making a stop and so forth, otherwise they should be shut with the traps down :wink:

Just to clarify, these cars don't have traps, they are "low level" only.

Gravelyfan is right. Check out the three Comet 1s Whippany has and none of them have a trap and so do the ones the M&E has minus the disco stripes. Why would you? those doors are so low to the ground that the are inconvieniant to high level platform ops. Only a midget and a child can go through those doors.

I'm glad NJT got rid of those things as they looked embarrasing whenever a Hoboken-Hackettstown Train pulled into Dover and you had those low level doors. What a headache and an embarassment since that's the only North American Railroad I've seen with those doors.