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| M-9 pilot cars at Hillside (Photo: MTA Long Island Rail Road) |
The MTA has laid the latest delays at the feet of Kawasaki, telling Newsday that the railroad is "disappointed [in] Kawasaki’s failure to do this work in a timely manner and will hold them accountable to their contractual obligations". While Kawasaki has definitely struggled in recent months to get these cars here and in service, the MTA's hands are by no means clean when it comes to the overall timeline of these cars slipping. By my count, the completion date for the base order cars has slipped seven times since the funding was first committed in the 2013 Capital Program amendment. The figure below shows how the schedule has slipped over time:
Notable milestone misses include:
- Contract awarded 21 months late...the MTA's Capital Program dashboard showed work on the cars beginning in 2011, but the contract was not awarded to Kawasaki until September 2013. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in MTA procurement land...the MTA commits to a lot of projects in the five-year capital programs, but projects can sit in procurement purgatory for years before the MTA even starts working on finding a contractor to perform the work. Since there's no noticeable construction work going on, these projects often fall off the radar, and the schedule just slips and slips and slips, to the point where we are nearly at the end of the MTA's current 5-year capital program, and relatively few of the projects have made it over the finish line. A large chunk of this delay was recovered, likely due to a shorter overall duration in the contract, but the procurement delays (before Kawasaki was even selected the contractor) set the overall timeline back about 12 months.
- Design review delays cars 3 months...the MTA's Independent Engineering Consultant attributed a three month slippage in the timeline to delays in the railroads' design reviews, saying that "LIRR and MNR should have mechanisms in place to facilitate the review of car design submittals...in a timely manner to prevent any effect on the project schedule"
- B-end carbody structure change order includes 4 month extension...the MTA issued a change order to Kawasaki in 2015 Q2 to strengthen the B-ends of the carbodies (the non-cab ends of the married pairs), in response to information learned during the 2013 Metro-North Fairfield train crash. The MTA also incorporated onboard CCTV cameras into the design. This design change pushed the schedule out by about 4 months.
- MTA-KRC 2016 Global Settlement extends timeline 5 months...as a result of a number of issues that had developed over the course of the design phase of the cars, Kawasaki submitted a 5.5 month delay claim, that the railroads disputed. This was brought about in part due to design issues after the LIRR did not set aside enough space to fit PTC equipment on the new fleet, which was an additional change made since the B-end carbody/CCTV change order. The MTA and KRC ended up negotiating a global settlement agreement in 2016 "to amicably resolve a number of open issues that have arisen during the design phase of the project". A joint delay of sorts, the timeline was pushed another 5 months as a result of this settlement.
- In Q2 2017 the base order completion date slid one month...no explanation was given.
- Delay in start of pilot car qualification testing delayed deliveries 1 month
- Delays in delivering the pilot cars to LI caused substantial impact to the schedule, as it delayed the start of intensive pilot testing on Long Island. As mentioned back in October, when we first learned of the delay, the cars were enroute from the Transportation Technology Center test facility in Pueblo, CO when they reportedly derailed outside Chicago while being transported by CSX. The cars suffered nontrivial damage and had to spend time being repaired at Kawasaki's facility in Yonkers before they could be delivered to LIRR for pilot testing.
Déjà vu
Now the schedule is slipping again. All that we know now is the cars are undergoing "operational testing" and that the manufacturer is working through "a variety of issues". The MTA has not said what specifically is ailing the cars (and whether they are minor glitches that can be worked through in a couple weeks, or significant/potentially fatal design flaws that might take much longer). The cars must run for 4,000 miles issue-free before they can enter into passenger service, and the first 6 cars have been testing since May 2018. At last week's MTA Board and Committee meetings, LIRR president Phillip Eng did not address the car delays directly, instead just saying in highly circumventive language that the cars would be put in service only after the testing had been completed: “while we’re very excited to provide new cars to our riders and add more capacity to a growing system, we need to make sure that we address reliability and safety. We will not place those cars in revenue service until the operational testing is completed to our satisfaction.” Apparently we do not get any specificity for our $734 million. The MTA has not provided an updated date by which riders could expect the cars in service.The missed milestone seems rather abrupt. While I had noticed the MTA and LIRR slowly try to distance themselves from the May start of service date in dialogues with riders and in public over the last couple of months, officials touted the impending start of service for the new cars in a Newsday feature that made the bottom of the front page on May 8, saying just four weeks ago the new cars were on track to be in service by the end of May. So much for that.
The latest schedule slip is definitely a cause of great disappointment among riders, who have grown increasingly fed up with the railroad's aging M-3 fleet (which has been showing its age particularly in recent years) as well as short trains as cars are taken out of service for maintenance, PTC installation, or sidelined permanently due to derailments or other incidents. The railroad has billed the M-9 fleet as providing much needed additional seating capacity by means of longer trains first, with the later option cars eventually enabling the retirement of the M-3 fleet in a couple of years time.
While it is important to get the design right so the cars can be as useful and reliable as possible once they are in service, continued delays from both sides are beyond unacceptable. We will soon be coming up on six years since the contract was awarded for the first cars, and in the eyes of most riders (who are only concerned about rear ends in seats) we have very little to show for it. If you think about what's possible to accomplish in six years in other cities, it really puts a poor complexion on the overall state of the US railcar industry. This is not the MTA's first railcar rollout fiasco. When the M-1 fleet was rolled out in the late 1960's, a number of the early cars developed propulsion problems shortly after being put into revenue service, and many of the cars ended up having to be sidelined until they could be repaired.
Bad timing, and new opportunities
I still maintain that many of the M-9 procurement issues are a function of rather poor/unfortunate timing...the MTA proceeded full steam ahead with this procurement before new FRA crashworthiness standards that could have dramatically improved the design, reducing cost and timelines, were published last year. There is/was—for some reason beyond my reckoning—a great rush to get new cars here to support East Side Access, which is still, at best, 3.5 years away from opening. But had the M-3 fleet been better maintained, and the timeline for East Side Access more realistic from the start, the MTA could have very likely forestalled this procurement until the new regulations entered into force, then buy off-the-shelf equipment from Europe that was much cheaper and could have likely gotten here and in service much faster than what we are dealing with now. But instead they charged forward, and now we will be saddled with expensive and very heavy cars boast only relatively minor improvements over the nearly 20-year old M-7 design. I would encourage you to read more about the criticality of the regulatory changes and what it could mean for US passenger railroads in this item first published last November.There is still some hope for the M-9A fleet, a separate fleet being funded in part through the Rolling Stock Liability Reserve for East Side Access. The MTA is currently going through the initial stages of the RFP and procurement process for those cars now. With the alternative compliance standards now fully in force, the MTA could adapt a design already proven in Europe to deliver cars sooner and for a more reasonable price (typical European MU's average about $2 million per car once adjusted for train lengths and currency effects, compared to the $3.63 million per car we are spending for the M-9's). But the MTA has not definitively said they will be going the alternative compliance route (and/or seeking a Buy America waiver) to use a proven, off-the-shelf design for the M-9A fleet. I would hope the MTA is able to deliver not only a reduction in not only price but also a reduction in the quantity of M-9 option cars being purchased as part of any settlement negotiations with Kawasaki over these latest delays. Reducing the number of M-9 option cars can help mitigate the damage, and allow the MTA to devote more dollars towards a modern/off-the-shelf M-9A car, allowing us to get more bang for our hundreds of millions of bucks.
Overall, the MTA needs to do a much better job of closely managing these procurements and holding the feet of vendors to the fire—whether it's Bombardier or Kawasaki or someone else, the MTA has a long history of being hoodwinked when it comes to project timelines and delivery schedules on rolling stock procurements. While this is a problem that plagues the entire US railcar industry, it seems particularly acute at the MTA, and there has to be a better answer than just shutting out vendors due to "poor performance", like the MTA is doing with Bombardier. The US railcar market is highly oligopic...there are very few players to begin with, and if you scratch off every builder who burns you soon there will be nobody left!
I am hopeful that the new FRA regulations will allow for improvement in the quality of competition, as it opens up the field to new car builders who were previously unwilling to participate in the constrained American market. But agencies must have the prudence to break from tradition and go with designs that have been proven to work outside the United States, even if they are a big break from what they are typically used to. Not going in an aggressively different direction with the M-9A procurement would be a grave mistake, and hopefully the MTA is putting extra effort into courting vendors outside those already established in the US for the M-9A. But for the time being, our M-9 trains will likely continue to be delayed for the foreseeable future.
