The LIRR presented an update on their M-9 railcar procurement at the June meeting of the MTA Board LIRR Committee Meeting. According to the most recent schedule the MTA presented in December, pilot testing on the first cars was supposed to start this month, before deliveries of the base order cars started a year from now.
We are almost all the way through June now and the cars are not here, so I figured we would be seeing some sort of “updated” schedule in this month’s meeting notes. The MTA signaled there would be a further three-month delay in the start of pilot car testing, which is now expected to start in September, with the cars testing in Pueblo, CO until January, then on Long Island from January to June of next year. After that, the delivery of the base order cars will start in July 2018, if they keep to the new schedule.
The further delay in the base order cars is likely unwelcome news to passengers who currently have to deal with unpleasant conditions on the LIRR’s rapidly deteriorating M-3 fleet. The M-3’s have certainly seen better days, and while the LIRR should have been sending them off to their permanent retirement very soon, it now looks like they will be around at the very least for the next two years, until the base order and first option of the M-9 procurement is delivered.
The common MTA practice is to only measure delays compared to the last time they changed the schedule—that’s how the Second Avenue Subway happened to open “on time”. But the only schedule that counts is the timeline the MTA puts forth when they submit their Capital Program or Capital Program Amendment for review and approval. When the MTA submits their Capital Programs or CP Amendments and asks us to pay for it all, they are saying they will do a certain project for a particular cost from a start date to a completion date—those completion dates, the ones the MTA says they will stick to when they ask us to put up the money, are the only completion dates that matter.
While the project schedule has not slipped all that much since the MTA awarded the contract, the agency said in their 2013 post-Hurricane Sandy Capital Program amendment that the base order of 92 M-9 cars would be complete in January 2017. If we lived in a world where the MTA stuck to their project schedules, there would be 92 M-9 cars on Long Island and in service for everyone to ride on right now. Instead, the first twelve cars are still in a factory in Japan not quite finished yet. Overall, the MTA is tracking more than two years late for the base order cars, which is a significant delay. The separate 160 M-9A car procurement was supposed to be complete in December 2016, which was more than six months ago now. The contract for that procurement hasn’t even been awarded yet.
If everything went according to plan, we would probably be saying goodbye to the M-3’s at the end of this summer, but instead the cars, with their buckling linoleum, peeling wallpaper, and fronts being held on by duct tape and advertisements, will probably be here through next summer and the summer after that, through mid-to-late-2019.
Aside from the disappointing schedule update, the presentation included an updated rendering of what the cars may look like—the all yellow front has been traded for a navy blue and white combination, with a big blue and gold stripe on the side of the cars. I have no strong preference for one of the other—I wasn’t a big fan of the all yellow (these are regional rail trains, not a school bus), but I think having white on the front of the train is a poor choice, since all the bugs and dirt and everything else will stand out. It doesn’t really matter, but the pilot cars seem to have been built with the all yellow fronts…whether they are going to go back and change them, build all the further cars with this new design, or they just came up with this for show is unclear. Hopefully if they go with the stripes, they’ll stick with it, and not put a whole bunch of energy into removing them years down the line like they did with the blue stripes on the M-1 and M-3 fleet.
Photos of the car interiors show seats much like the ones on the M-7’s now, though with looped armrests that hopefully won’t catch on people’s pants, digital advertisement displays (which hopefully won’t be as obnoxious as the ones they piloted on the M-7’s), powered B-end doors like the M-8’s have, and a couple other changes. You can see more photos starting on page 55 of the meeting notes.
