New M-9 Railcars May Be Delayed Even Further

This item appeared first in News and Notes: June 19, 2016

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LIRR riders may have to wait a little longer to ride M-9 railcars, which are meant to replace the badly worn M-3 cars and expand the LIRR’s fleet to support additional service for East Side Access.  In a report that will be presented to the MTA Board LIRR Committee Meeting (pages 52-66), MTA officials will say that Kawasaki Rail Car, the company that was awarded a $1.8 billion contract in September 2013 to furnish and deliver hundreds of M-9 cars, has submitted a five-and-a-half month delay claim.  And while the railroads only say that they do not agree with the claim (they don’t say why Kawasaki submitted the claim in the first place in the meeting notes), the delay might impact how soon LIRR riders can take advantage of the new rolling stock.

The M-9 procurement has already been a rocky and troublesome one—the project got rolling 32 months late (work was originally supposed to have started in January 2011, but the contract wasn’t awarded until September 2013), and then last year, the MTA approved a change order to strengthen the B-end of the cars to make them stronger in the event of a crash.  The change order was issued in response to the findings from the 2013 collision of two Metro-North trains near Bridgeport and gave Kawasaki an additional four months on the project timeline, pushing the final delivery of the base order and first option cars (which would allow for the full retirement of the M-3 fleet) into 2019.

There have been several photos of pilot cars 9000 and 9001 under development at Kawasaki’s facilities in Japan, and the cars seem to be fairly well along, but there’s been no sign of the other 12 pilot cars that are supposed to be on Long Island in January (if the MTA’s schedule is still being stuck to).  I don’t know all that much about the production cycle of these railcars at Kawasaki’s facility, but I do know that for these cars to get from Japan to Long Island by January, they probably have to be on a boat around Thanksgiving, if not earlier.  That doesn’t leave them all that much time to make 12 whole cars and get them ready to be shipped out.  If the cars are going to be affected by a five-and-a-half month delay, that means the pilot cars probably won’t start testing on Long Island until the summer of 2017, and we won’t be able to get rid of the M3’s until well into 2019:

Milestone	Original Timeline	Latest Update	With 5.5 Mo. Delay
Start Pilot Car Testing (14 cars)	June 2015	January 2017	June 2017
Complete Pilot Testing	December 2015	July 2017	December 2017
Start Delivery of Base Order	June 2016	January 2018	June 2018
Complete Delivery of Base Order	January 2017	August 2018	January 2019
Start delivery of 1st Option Cars (88 cars)	January 2017	September 2018	February 2019
Complete delivery of 1st Option Cars (retire M-3’s)	August 2017	March 2019	August 2019
Start delivery of ESA Option Cars (77 cars)	December 2018	April 2020	September 2020
Complete Delivery of ESA Option Cars	May 2019	October 2020	March 2021

The front of this M-3 is being held together by an advertisement from inside
(Photo: @AirlineFlyer)

The completion of the delivery of the first order option cars (highlighted in yellow) is the big target to hit—once the LIRR finishes getting those cars, they will be able to fully get rid of the M-3 fleet, the condition of which has gone from bad to terrible over the past couple years.  It’s almost as if the LIRR has given up on maintaining them now that the M9’s are supposedly on their way.  It’s not so much that the mechanical reliability has dropped precipitously, they haven’t been all that reliable for several years now, but rather the conditions onboard the trains—the seats are in terrible shape, the linoleum floors are dirty and buckling, the wallpaper is peeling, and almost all of the windows on the south sides of the trains are completely opaque to the point where you can’t see anything at all out the windows.

Torn M-3 seats repaired using duct tape (Photo: @AirlineFlyer)

When riders complain about conditions on the M-3 cars (which is several times a day now), the LIRR says that they need the cars to meet current ridership demand, but will retire them “in 2018” once the new M-9’s arrive.  Even though they’ve been sticking to that story, I think it’s very unlikely that the M-3’s will be gone by the end of 2018.  With the delays the M-9 procurement has already encountered and any further delays that may still be possible, we’re not into that ‘production groove’ where cars are being churned out consistently and reliably.  Only at that point can they really say with any certainty when the new cars will be showing up in large enough numbers to replace the M-3’s.  The LIRR has also been soliciting 3-year contracts for various things that have to do with the M-3 fleet (including shock absorbers, flexible pads, and fuses).  The terms of those contracts would extend well into 2019, and it would be a pretty silly thing to award a three-year contract for a fleet if they were really going to get rid of them in two years…

The LIRR’s fleet priories are extremely out of whack.  Metro-North’s M-3A fleet is in much better shape after MN refurbished their cars several years ago, extending their fleet’s life by about a decade.  It probably would have been a better idea for the LIRR to refurbish their M-3’s then too (which could have been done for a fraction of the cost), then use part of the money allocated for the M-9’s to expand the diesel fleet (a pressing need now), since the electric fleet expansion the M-9’s will enable aren’t really needed until ESA (years away). But who cares whether or not LIRR riders are seated and comfortable?