Railroad Forums 

Discussion related to commuter rail and rapid transit operations in the Chicago area including the South Shore Line, Metra Rail, and Chicago Transit Authority.

Moderators: metraRI, JamesT4

 #1412712  by lstone19
 
At least from my perspective as a Metra passenger on the MD-W, this winter is not off to a good start. Lots of trains delayed due to signal problems, lots of malfunctioning doors.

But the topper was this morning when my usual morning inbound showed up 10 minutes late (they had been announcing a delay due to a mechanical failure) and then I found it had no HEP. Yep, no heat on a single-digit morning. The interesting thing was at each station, we'd stop, then the HEP would come on, and then they'd open the doors. The HEP would then go off several seconds later, usually before departing (I assume it just kept tripping off although perhaps they were shutting it back off manually as whatever the problem was, they couldn't leave it on too long).

The obvious implication is that they need HEP to open the doors with the push buttons (or maybe just to use the trainline contols but not locally?). But it seemed we'd frequently lose the HEP before we'd depart so I guess they don't need HEP to close them. And why aren't the door controls on battery power (not that it would have helped my car - by CUS, the batteries had died as we had no lights at all although I know the emergency lists were working earlier in the trip)?

As cold as it was, it was better than getting off and waiting in the cold for the next one 30 minutes later.
 #1412793  by eolesen
 
If twitter is to be believed, both MDW and the UP-NW had their fair share of issues yesterday... and these are just the delays that were bad enough to require some form of notification.

https://twitter.com/metraUPNW" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://twitter.com/metraMDW" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;