Updates on M-9 and M-9A car delays; old M-3 fleet to live on until 2024

Drama continues to ensue over the LIRR's delayed M-9 fleet, which was last expected to enter into revenue service in May, but didn't.  MTA officials have been pointing fingers at Kawasaki, the company manufacturing the 202 cars for $734 million, for recent delays and issues that have come up during "operational testing".

One of the M-9 pilot cars at Ronkonkoma (Photo: MTA LIRR)

But while officials pledge that progress is being made towards addressing the issues, the MTA and LIRR continue to be very non-specific and non-committal with regards to the specific issues delaying the cars and when riders might be able to see them in service.  We were originally supposed to get a detailed, bi-annual update on the M-9 procurement in June, but the MTA scrubbed any reference to the cars from the MTA Board's work plan, and instead have given very brief and vague statements on what is going on.  Last month the MTA declined to respond to multiple requests for additional details on the status of the M-9 fleet.

Kawasaki execs appear before MTA Board

Several members of Kawasaki’s executive leadership team, including several executives from Kawasaki Heavy Industry’s global HQ in Japan, were present at last week's MTA Board meeting. The executives were in attendance at the meeting at the request of board members (including Suffolk County representative Kevin Law) seeking an explanation as to what was going on. In attendance included Yoshinori Kanehana, president and CEO of Kawasaki Heavy Industries from Japan, Kazutoshi Honkawa, president of Kawasaki's Rolling Stock Company, Akira Matsufuji, VP of the Rolling Stock Company, and others.  This part of the show starts at the 2:20:16 mark in this video.

At the start of this segment of the meeting, LIRR President Phillip Eng gave a slightly more substantive update on the status of the cars than what we had been receiving. While he again did not provide the public any actual details about what is forcing the cars to be withheld from revenue service, or provide any specifics on when riders could see the cars in service, he acknowledged that a majority of issues already identified had been already addressed and solutions to the balance of problems.

Mr. Eng stated that each car needs to undergo approximately 4,000 miles of trouble-free testing before they could be accepted for service, and that takes approximately 16 days to achieve. Each issue that is identified resets the 4,000-mile counter. It appears that only the initial 14 pilot cars are currently undergoing that operational testing.

A total of 41 cars are currently in New York (either on Long Island or at Kawasaki’s plant in Yonkers undergoing final assembly) while others are undergoing construction in Lincoln, Nebraska. Mr. Eng restated his earlier remarks that “Kawasaki is in the final stages of delivering a revenue-ready fleet” but did not commit to a date when riders could see the cars in service.

Kawasaki executives answering questions at July's MTA Board meeting

The overall presentation with the Kawasaki team was brief and few board members had any real questions for the executives while they were there. Most of the time was spent on introductions and restating general information previously provided to the public. Following the introductions, Mr. Kanehana restated that 75% of issues that were identified by the railroad were resolved by mid-June, and another 7% have been resolved since. The remaining 18% of outstanding are related predominately to:

• Automated Station Identification (ASI): issues with the ASI system, which automatically announces station names. The specific issues were not discussed, but Kawasaki said they were fine-tuning the exact station locations to address this
• Automatic Speed Control (ASC): issues with the LIRR’s main train control and cab signaling system (this is also the system Positive Train Control is overlaid across most parts of the system). Again, neither the Kawasaki team nor MTA/LIRR officials discussed the specifics of the issues, but these can range from minor/mundane to significant, as ASC failures can cause major delays if it fails enroute.

But both LIRR officials and the Kawasaki team stated that fixes have been identified for the remaining issues, and that operational testing of the first 14 cars would be resumed that night (slightly ahead of schedule). The testing would resume with increased support from both sides, with on-site support from Kawasaki to resolve any further issues that might come up during testing, and increased attention from railroad management to provide direction and support where needed.

While railroad officials continue to avoid committing to a date when the riders (who are financing this whole venture) might be able to see these cars in service, the Kawasaki team said at last week's MTA Board meeting they believe they will receive conditional acceptance of the first cars by the end of August (the point where the LIRR takes official ownership of the cars and acknowledge they met the requirements they set). That doesn’t necessarily mean they will enter service at that point, but the railroad has enough ink on its face that we probably won’t see too much time pass before they are put in service, at least on a limited basis.

M-9A cars delayed nine months

While the issues with the M-9 cars have been stealing the show, the MTA is quietly pushing out the timeline for the M-9A cars, a completely separate procurement being made with the rolling stock liability reserve funds set aside as part of East Side Access.  As of last year, the MTA was planning on ordering as many as 444 M-9A cars (100 base cars for LIRR, 114 option cars for LIRR, 30 option coaches for LIRR, and up to 200 option cars for Metro-North), and these cars would feature a small list of improvements over the prior design.

The previous schedule called for the MTA to award the contract for these cars in December 2018, but buried on page 83 of the meeting notes for July's Capital Program Oversight Committee meeting, the MTA has pushed out the expected award date by nine months, to September 2019.

In the report, MTA says that the "RFP modified to maximize competition and associated negotiations have extended the procurement phase", but does not say what those modifications entail.

Rendering of the proposed M-9A cars, which will likely be only a minor
improvement over the base M-9 fleet (Photo: MTA LIRR)

The MTA and LIRR are at a major crossroads with the M-9A procurement.  The base M-9 procurement, befallen with bad timing, is being built to outdated/archaic FRA crashworthiness standards, and coupled with a fairly unimaginative design, the new cars will boast a fairly negligible list of improvements over the roughly 20-year old M-7 design at an incredible cost ($3.63 million per car), which is 23% more expensive than the M-7 cars (which cost about $2.25 million per car, or $2.95 million when adjusted for inflation effects).

But new FRA Passenger Equipment Safety Standards, which entered into force in January, can offer tremendous new opportunities for the MTA and the railroads to purchase higher quality cars for a much lower price.  The FRA regulatory reform effectively standardizes the crashworthiness requirements, bringing them more or less into line with Euronorms.  This means that the MTA and the railroads could effectively buy off-the-shelf EMU cars from Europe and only have to make relatively minor modifications to allow them to run in the United States.  This could offer the opportunity for significant savings (off-the-shelf EMU procurements in Europe typically cost only about $2 million per car (once adjusted for train length and currency effects)...roughly half of what the MTA will likely pay for the M-9A's).  Compare the design for our new M-9 cars to the Stadler FLIRT, an example of what MTA/LIRR could be able to purchase under the new regulations...they are many miles apart (and the FLIRT cars have been in production for over 10 years!)...

A Stadler FLIRT train in Basel, Switzerland (Photo: NAC/Wikimedia Commons)

Interior of FLIRT in production for a railroad in Italy (Photo: Railway Gazette)

The only real way to "maximize competition" is to shop off-the-shelf and seek out a proven EMU car design on the European market.  The US railcar market is already highly oligopic, for reasons I explain in more detail here.  There are already extremely few companies that can compete in the US market, and even fewer willing to do business with the MTA.  In the past, the MTA has effectively received responses from only two companies: Bombardier (which made the M-7 cars) and Kawasaki (which made the M-8's and is now working on the base M-9 cars).  The MTA has said it will shut out Bombardier from future procurements due to its poor performance on the R179 fleet contract for NYCT.  That leaves......

I would suspect the M-9A contract award will likely continue to lag for several months until the bad press over the base M-9 fleet blows over.  There's probably a 90% chance Kawasaki will win the contract, as they are in the most logical position to perform, since they could just keep the M-9 assembly line going in Nebraska, with whatever minor modifications the M-9A cars will come with.  It probably would not look too cool for MTA officials wringing their hands over Kawasaki's current issues with the base M-9 cars to turn around and award Kawasaki another several hundred million dollar contract...

The only viable solution here is to buy off-the-shelf...that not only will expand the pool of potential bidders, but get us cars that are of much higher quality, for a much lower cost...and since they are already proven designs, a much lower likelihood of testing problems and delays.  Mr. Kanehana noted in his remarks to the MTA Board that one of the reasons why these procurements are so complex is the cars are specially designed unique to each operator (even the LIRR and Metro-North, two railroads run by the same agency, have had differing design requirements in past car procurements).  And we are seeing the consequences of that right now with the M-9 fleet delays.

If the MTA fails to seize this opportunity to take advantage of the new regulatory environment, we'll either see them hand a whole new contract to Kawasaki (at a considerable cost premium over the base M-9's, to be sure), and we'll have the same problems all over again...or, even worse, if they decide to spurn both Bombardier and Kawasaki and hand it to some less experienced car builder, we'll end up paying even more and experience many more issues and problems than what we are seeing now...

I asked the MTA if they were planning on seeking alternative compliance (under the new FRA regulations) for the M-9A fleet, but they declined to respond.

M-3 cars to live on until 2024

As part of the MTA/LIRR’s July financial plan, which went before the MTA Board earlier this week, the LIRR included forecasted expenses to continue maintaining 80 M-3 cars until at least 2024.

A M-3 train at Carle Place (Photo: The LIRR Today)

That means riders, who often groan at the sight of the old, beat-up cars slithering into their station will have to put up with the old fleet on a sporadic basis for at least five more years…. The delay in their decommissioning was not completely out of the blue, as LIRR president Phillip Eng said at a “Customer Conversation” event last year that the M-3’s would be kept around for the foreseeable future to meet consist requirement needs. The railroad has already started to install Positive Train Control equipment on the M-3 fleet in anticipation of keeping them beyond the 2020 deadline.

The MTA attributes this need in part due to “revised acquisition timing of the M-9A fleet”…or, in other words, their delay of those cars. Keeping the M-3 cars around and in serviceable condition is expected to cost us $23 million per year ($288k per car per year), or about $115 million through 2024.

Dirty and duct-taped seats are common on LIRR's M-3 fleet
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

The railroad has not done much to address the condition of the M-3 fleet, and it’s unlikely the railroad will be doing anything more to maintain the cars other than the bare minimum to keep the wheels turning.  It's a good time to buy stock in whatever companies LIRR buys duct tape from...  The conditions of the M-3 fleet have deteriorated to a very disappointing state (definitely not commensurate to the fares riders are paying), as the railroad has certainly neglected several important maintenance points, attempting to justify that as the cars have been a couple years away from retirement for nearly a decade now. Originally supposed to be removed from service in 2017, delay after delay in the M-9 and M-9A procurements have pushed the retirement of the old cars out again and again.

Beat-up and torn seats (many with a thick layer of grease and grime from all of the passengers who have sat in them over the years), buckling linoleum flooring and peeling wallpaper, windows that have been occluded to the point where you can’t see a thing out of many of them.

A Metro-North M-3A car, built around the same time, but in much better
condition (Photo: The LIRR Today)

The LIRR’s M-3 cars stand in stark contrast to their siblings at Metro-North, which were fully refurbished several years ago and remain reasonably pleasant to ride in. Had the LIRR made the same move and refurbished the cars to extend their useful life another 10-15 years, they could have saved riders a whole lot of bother and bought time until new FRA passenger equipment safety standards entered into force, thus allowing the purchase of proven, off-the-shelf designs which would have been cheaper and far less likely to encounter the problems currently being faced with the M-9’s.

Through the first five months in 2019, Metro-North's M-3A fleet has had a MDBF of 101,444 miles, which is 72% better than the LIRR's M-3's, which had a MDBF of just 58,593 miles.

Continued rolling stock fumbles

The present issues with the M-9 and M-9A cars are just the latest in a long line of rolling stock fumbles and follies made over the last several years. The LIRR let their M-3 cars deteriorate, and instead of refurbishing them to extend their useful life and buy time, they instead pushed forward with buying new M-9 cars at a much higher price. The railroad plowed ahead with the M-9 cars, saying that they needed to prioritize it to have enough cars available for the opening of East Side Access, which has been delayed again and again. For that contrived immediacy, the M-9's are being built to outdated and cumbersome FRA regulations, and missing the opportunity to pursue alternative compliance and modern off-the-shelf car designs widely used elsewhere in the world. All the while, riders on the LIRR’s diesel branches continue to suffer from problems with the diesel fleet, many of which have persisted for more than a decade. Instead of addressing issues with the diesel fleet 5-10 years ago, refurbishing the M-3 fleet to buy time until the new FRA passenger equipment safety standards took effect, and then pursuing a proven off-the-shelf design to bulk up the EMU fleet for East Side Access.

The LIRR’s fleet planning has been straddled with fumble after fumble, botched timelines and projections, and poorly placed priorities.  While these planning blunders rarely receive the press attention or scrutiny from the MTA Board and elected officials, they have driven up costs considerably, extended timelines, and left passengers to deal with deteriorating conditions on old cars, delays and standee conditions on short trains, and cancellations and delays due to equipment troubles. It ranks high on the list of LIRR blunders over the last 10-20 years, perhaps only behind the overruns and delays with East Side Access itself.

As I've said many times before, the new FRA regulations present tremendous new opportunities for the MTA and LIRR.  Will they take advantage of these opportunities and put some oomph behind "LIRR Forward" by going off-the-shelf for the M-9A fleet, reconsider purchasing a DMU fleet for East End shuttle services (or even a HMU fleet).  Or will they make the same mistakes, run into the same issues and delays, and repeat the same problems over and over again?