 |
| A 2016 cartoon about M-9 car delays (from the last time the cars were delayed 9 months!) (Newsday/Matt Bodkin cartoon) |
The IEC’s report that follows indicates that “the delay is primarily due to issues Kawasaki (KRC) had in delivering the pilot cars to LIRR” (the pilot cars were built in Japan, with the base order cars built in Lincoln, Nebraska), but hopefully railroad officials will have a more detailed/better explanation for another major schedule slip on Monday.
The common MTA practice when discussing delays to major projects is to discuss “delays” compared against the last time they changed the schedule, which is misleading. As with all capital projects, the only timeline that really counts is the schedule as it stood when the agency first asked the taxpayers to put up for the money for the project. In this case, that would be the 2013 amendment to the MTA’s 2010-2014 Capital Program. At that time, the MTA stated that the project would begin in January 2011 and the 92-car base order would be complete in January 2017.
The current schedule that will be presented on Monday pushes the completion of the 92-car base order to January 2020, meaning the cars will be delayed a total of three full years:
If the MTA had kept to the schedule they originally stated when we put up the money for the M-9’s, not only would delivery of the base order have already been complete, but the LIRR would have already exercised, received, and put into service the 88-car M-3 replacement option…and we would have been completely rid of the M-3’s more than a year ago.
Instead, while pilot car testing is currently taking place on Long Island, and you can see the cars if you know where to look, to date there are just 6 M-9 cars on LI. The other 8 cars in the pilot set can be seen outside Kawasaki’s plant in Yonkers, awaiting repairs after they derailed outside Chicago enroute to Long Island (say what you will about what that portents…).
Also new this month is a change in the procurement strategy for the M-9’s. While the original plan for the M-9’s was a 92-car base order, an 88-car M-3 replacement option, and a 77-car ESA expansion option, along with 160 M-9A’s procured separately under a different contract, there will now be just 110 option cars, with 54 cars being moved to the M-9A design. The M-9 option have reportedly been exercised.
This is, of course, not the first problem encountered with the M-9’s. While the delays are definitely a big problem (mostly due to the fault of Kawasaki, though a LIRR change order added 6 months to the timeline, the cars are very expensive ($4.2 million each for the base order), and the procurement overall is a victim of rather bad timing on the part of the MTA and the FRA. Currently in the works are a series of regulatory reforms to bring the FRA’s rather burdensome crashworthiness standards more into line with more widely accepted practices used in Europe and Asia. Had the MTA waited for the new FRA regulations to enter into force, it would have blown open the door for the LIRR to select more modern, lightweight, and cost efficient designs ubiquitous elsewhere in the developed world, saving us hundreds of millions of dollars in the process:
Even if the MTA carried on with the M-9 base order and then washed their hands of the design, they could have still saved us more than $611 million—and the end product would have been much better.
Then that brings us to the design itself—the M-9 cars are basically a slightly newer version of the M-7’s (originally designed in the late 1990’s) with a very short list of relatively minor improvements over the M-7 design. To put it flatly, the design pales in comparison to modern MU equipment currently entering service elsewhere in the world, like the new Class 345 trainsets entering service on Crossrail in London, for example.
On the day they finally enter service, the design of the M-9 cars will be more than 30 years out of date when compared to their counterparts in Europe and Asia. I don’t really fault the designers—with the rather byzantine crashworthiness regulations currently in place, there are only so many ways to design an 85 foot long metal box that has to seat 110 passengers—but the LIRR’s extreme aversion to change is again very visible in the design of these “new” cars. The MTA and LIRR are missing a major opportunity to bring modern, well-designed rail equipment to Long Island, and are instead chaining themselves to this outdated design for another three decades.
History repeats itself…again?
The M-9 procurement was split into two portions: the M-9 car order, funded as part of the main Capital Program, to replace the M-3’s and expand the electric fleet, and a separate M-9A procurement funded predominately through federal funds for East Side Access (as part of the “Rolling Stock Liability Reserve”). While the manufacturing process for the M-9 fleet is already underway (albeit very behind schedule), the process is just getting started for the M-9A fleet, with a RFP issued last year and contract award expected in the second quarter of next year.The M-9A order, now 214 cars, with options for 30 additional unpowered coaches and 200 cars for Metro-North, presents a new opportunity for the LIRR to get things right. With the contract not yet executed, the LIRR has the opportunity to pause for the new FRA regulations to enter into force, and then come up with a proper design fit for the 21st century.
So will the LIRR size the tremendous opportunity the FRA rule reform will present, or will the M-9A design be just another minor modification to the 30-year old M-7 and M-9 design? That will, quite literally, be a several hundred million dollar question. When writing these two particular pieces it has really struck me how little the LIRR has changed over the last 30 years, and how the stubborn and inflexible bureaucracy that has strangled forward progress remains very much in place at the LIRR. If history is to repeat itself, again, the LIRR will again be shoveling giant piles of our money towards an out of date design as part of a big rush to get cars here for East Side Access, a project that perpetually 7 years away, forfeiting for us the opportunity to ride on faster, lightweight, modern rail cars sometime before the 2050’s…
