DCMike, I agree completely with you. I've been saying for years that I believe the herky jerky experience is the operator's hand on the controller, not the mixed consist. This fact becomes obvious when you ride a non-mixed consist, and find it is just as jerky as the mixed consist. The common denominator is manual control. This was further confirmed when I rode several mixed consist 8 car trains with ATO in use. As if by magic, the mixed consist was nice and smooth. Most people never experienced mixed consists or manual control until the red line crash. All at once, they switched from ATO to manual (a PR stunt), and mixed up consists to protect the 1000 series cars (another PR stunt). Not surprisingly, the union and operators blame the jerky movements on the mixed consist because they don't want to admit it's themselves. It's not really a big human fault either. The human hand will never operate that control as smoothly as a computer.
dcmike wrote: I look forward to any comments or feedback as I am far from perfect (particularly at my age) and may have overlooked something.What about the station announcements? It seems that on some trains the announcements are as clear as a bell, and on some trains you hear a muffled voice that is barely intelligible.