The Friday before the monthly MTA Board and Committee Meetings (typically held the third week of each month) the MTA puts the meeting materials up on their website. They contain the different presentations and reports that will be made during the meetings the following week. It’s the one time a month we get any useable information (their press releases and other announcements released during the month usually only bring good news and typically lack raw numbers). Included in this month’s meeting notes for the combined Metro-North and LIRR committee meetings is an update on the status M-9 procurement.
In the update on the status of the procurement, they provide some information on the expected delivery schedule. If you take a look back at the last M-9 procurement update, from the CPOC meeting last July, you would see that all of the dates under the delivery schedule have been shifted back, by about 4 months.
On a later slide, they attribute the delay in delivery to a change order for the carbody structure. The railroads made some design changes to the carbody structure to strengthen it further and to take into account some recent NTSB recommendations made in response to the May 2013 Bridgeport derailment. The merits of this change order, and the FRA’s crashworthiness standards overall, are debatable (the standards that railcars overseas in Europe and Asia are built to are far less strict than they are here, yet we don’t hear of derailments injuring hundreds because the cars weren’t strong enough). The FRA is supposedly reviewing its regulations and there’s rumors that they’re about to relax some of their stricter standards, which would be great, since the current regulations require agencies to purchase cars that are far heavier, far more expensive to design and produce, and far more expensive to operate than similar regulatory bodies in Europe and Asia require.
The change order will cost the MTA $1,000 per car, which is not all that much, and add 334 lbs. to the weight of the already overweight cars. As of last July, the weight was 2% above specification and was trending upwards.
In terms of the project schedule, the new cars will be delivered along the following timeline:
Milestone |
July 2014 Update |
June 2015 Update |
Change |
Start Pilot Car Testing (14 cars) |
September 2016 |
January 2017 |
-4 months |
Complete Pilot Testing |
March 2017 |
July 2017 |
-4 months |
Start Delivery of Base Order |
September 2017 |
January 2018 |
-4 months |
Complete Delivery of Base Order |
April 2018 |
August 2018 |
-4 months |
Start delivery of 1st Option Cars (88 cars) |
May 2018 |
September 2018 |
-4 months |
Complete delivery of 1st Option Cars (retire M-3’s) |
November 2018 |
March 2019 |
-4 months |
Start delivery of ESA Option Cars (77 cars) |
March 2020 |
April 2020 |
-1 month |
Complete Delivery of ESA Option Cars |
August 2020 |
October 2020 |
-2 months |
The delays mean that the pilot car testing won’t commence until 2017, and we won’t start seeing the delivery of the base order cars (at which point passengers will actually start to see the M9’s in action) until we’re into 2018.
Furthermore, the delivery of the first option cars, which will allow the LIRR to complete the replacement of the M-3 fleet, has also shifted four months back, meaning that the M-3’s will most likely see 2019. This is unfortunate, because the M-3’s are in very bad shape, and commuters will have to deal with them for another four years at this point. When I would take the LIRR daily, the nature of my commute would keep me on diesel equipment for most of the time (the Montauk Branch and Long Island City are both served exclusively by diesel trains). While the diesel equipment is a lot more unreliable, I do find the C3 coaches more comfortable, both in the seating and the overall ride quality of the cars.
About a month ago a train I was on had M-3 equipment, and the condition of the cars I walked through was pretty poor. Several of the seats were either ripped or duct-taped, the linoleum floor was buckling, the wallpaper was peeling, there was a thick layer of grime and dirt in all of the hard to reach places and along the floors, and some of the windows were so dirty that you couldn’t see a single thing out of them.
It’s almost like the LIRR has given up on maintaining the M-3 fleet. While the MDBF for the M-7 fleet was a record high 1.2 million miles in April 2015, the M-3’s failed to meet their MDBF goal for the fourth straight month, and at just 50,928 miles, the M-7’s were thirty-four times more reliable in April. 11 out of the 22 primary failures in April were M-3’s. The LIRR’s M-3 fleet stands in stark contrast to Metro-North’s. In recent years, Metro-North has refurbished their M-3A fleet in-house up in North White Plaines, and their M-3A’s look and feel like they could last another 15 years, while the LIRR’s M3’s look like they should’ve been scrapped 15 years ago. The MDBF for Metro-North’s M-3A fleet was 336,523 miles in April, 6.6 times more than the LIRR’s M-3’s, which are the same age.
The actively deteriorating state of the M-3’s is probably the largest source of complaints that I’ve seen passengers make on social media (behind late trains). The LIRR’s stock response to these complaints is that they’re needed to meet passenger demand now, but will be replaced “soon.” The M-9’s certainly cannot come “soon” enough!
