Oldest New York subway cars getting final overhaul

CIE

The Budd-built R32 cars are meant to hang on until their fiftieth year in service, when (hopefully) the R179 cars (from Bombardier) will start arriving.

MTA web site

The "Brightliners," as the Budd-built cars were dubbed upon their introduction into service back in 1964, were the first large fleet of stainless steel cars purchased by New York City Transit and the first corrosion-resistant cars placed in service since the ten experimental cars purchased in 1949 by the New York City Board of Transportation. ...

Today, the remaining 222 cars out of the original 600-car fleet are rotating through the Coney Island Overhaul Facility at a pace of four cars per week undergoing a limited-scope maintenance makeover intended to improve their performance and reliability until they are replaced by the fleet of 300 new R179 cars, due to begin arriving in 2014. ...

Would that any of the DART fleet would last as long. (The R32s are 60 feet long and 10 feet wide; they might fit on Irish rails, but they'd need fewer doors per side, i.e. presuming that Ireland would have electrified Dublin suburban services as far back as the 60s.)

Cookie_Monster

CIE wrote: »

Would that any of the DART fleet would last as long.

I don't see why not. The 141's made it that long, more or less and the original DARTS are nearly 30 years old now and going strong, fresh from a heavy overhaul not so long ago. They should have that much life left in them, whether IE deem to keep them or just bin them for the sake of shiny new trains is another question entirely.

dowlingm

The Budd stainless steel stock does seem to last all right - there are 50-60 year old DMUs and coaches which have been rebuilt from the frame up several times.

Without doing a finite element analysis like that recently done for the UK Mark 3s it's hard to know how long the DARTs or anything else will go.

Losty Dublin

The Dart were intended to have a 30 year life in service an but the in house estimation is that the German sets are good till at least 2030 and the Japanese set about 2040. The initial plan was that the refit would see them through till Dart Underground and a new fleet. Since that's been set aside they will continue in service for the long term.

CaptainFreedom

Makes a mockery of the whole (finished) Mk3 debate here

dowlingm

I think over the next 20 years disability regs will start to bite in the US as they have in Europe and the additional costs of rebuilding to ADA spec might make manufacturers consider new build instead, not to mention additions people have come to expect like AC, wifi, power sockets and so on. The advent of new FRA compliant DMUs will also make a dent in the Budds since the RDCs are the only realistic option there at present, but if the Sumitomo DMU works as advertised Budds are going to look like heritage stock rather than day to day workhorses.

Subway/metro/commuter stock is always going to take a pounding - the stainless holds up well but the tendency to use newer lighter materials in railcar construction probably means a concurrent reduction in overall lifespan.

CIE

dowlingm wrote: »

The Budd stainless steel stock does seem to last all right - there are 50-60 year old DMUs and coaches which have been rebuilt from the frame up several times.

Without doing a finite element analysis like that recently done for the UK Mark 3s it's hard to know how long the DARTs or anything else will go.

I do wish sometimes that Amtrak was smart enough to hold on to their RDCs. VIA certainly does the interior right...I'd be fine riding several hundred miles in one of those, especially if they could run at speeds of at least 90 mph (not meant to be a dig at Transport Canada, but things are what they are, and companies like VIA and Amtrak wouldn't exist without regulations that are rather draconian in certain areas).

dowlingm wrote: »

I think over the next 20 years disability regs will start to bite in the US as they have in Europe and the additional costs of rebuilding to ADA spec might make manufacturers consider new build instead, not to mention additions people have come to expect like AC, wifi, power sockets and so on. The advent of new FRA compliant DMUs will also make a dent in the Budds since the RDCs are the only realistic option there at present, but if the Sumitomo DMU works as advertised Budds are going to look like heritage stock rather than day to day workhorses.

Subway/metro/commuter stock is always going to take a pounding - the stainless holds up well but the tendency to use newer lighter materials in railcar construction probably means a concurrent reduction in overall lifespan.

Well when it comes to metro-type systems (which do not fall under the jurisdiction of the FRA but rather the Federal Transit Administration; exceptions are New York's PATH and, for a long time, the Staten Island Railway), the rolling stock will be fine as far as ADA goes (what's the equivalent Canadian law?); the sticking point would be access between street and platform at stations. Commuter rail would be the problem area, especially along the Northeast Corridor in the USA and their commuter railway areas, which used to be mostly low platforms but (especially in New York state) got converted to mostly high platforms, where many other systems along the line have a mix of low and high platforms and no simple way to allow wheelchair access between the two types of platforms. If they had gone the other way and tore down the high platforms in favour of all low platforms, they could have built low-floor commuter cars that wheelchair passengers could roll on and off at a low platform, e.g. like on commuter railway systems in the western USA. (In Chicago, Metra's double-deck "gallery cars" have wheelchair lifts on board, and the former Illinois Central "Metra Electric" has been high platform for many years.)

Thanks to the FRA, it's not practical anymore to rebuild RDCs for operating in the USA; there are new crash-worthiness specifications that would make it more expensive to rebuild than in the past, and whatever ones still operate are "grandfathered" until a replacement comes along. The only new DMUs that operate are Florida Tri-Rail's double-deck DMUs and Portland's Westside Express single-deckers (both built by the now-defunct Colorado Railcar, formerly Rader Railcar of Stanley Rader fame or infamy).

dowlingm

Disabilities reg depend on whether the transit co is federally or provincially regulated. The Toronto Transit Commission programme to replace the high floor streetcars is driven by an expiring grandfathering provision of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2024, because it doesn't cross a provincial border. VIA Rail as a federal agency is governed by the Canadian Transportation Agency (via the Canada Transportation Act and Agency-created codes of practice) which in one example forced VIA to rebuild the coaches they bought surplus (the Nightstar ones) to meet disability requirements for toilets etc.

dowlingm

CIE wrote: »

Commuter rail would be the problem area, especially along the Northeast Corridor in the USA and their commuter railway areas, which used to be mostly low platforms but (especially in New York state) got converted to mostly high platforms, where many other systems along the line have a mix of low and high platforms and no simple way to allow wheelchair access between the two types of platforms.

This is how AMT and NJT are getting around it.


With Amtrak there's a bit of a divide between the west coast which is all low floor and uses Superliners and the like and the east coast which is getting more and more high platforms (Niagara Falls NY just had a high platform project announced) which means Viewliners and either a gauntlet track or no freights on that track.

CIE

Those double-deck coaches do not have level boarding at low platforms, not to mention that for wheelchair passengers, only the end compartments are accessible, which appears to violate the ADA's edict of "no segregation" of compartments (they say it hearkens back to Jim Crow's "separate but equal accommodation"). They're also, as it appears to me, more expensive to the public, since New Jersey Transit is apparently performing frequent brake inspections on them (and built pedestal tracks for that purpose) that none of the earlier single-deck stock required. Even funnier, the FRA does not require those brake inspections. New Jersey Transit went away from EMUs to avoid a quarterly inspection required by the FRA (who classifies EMUs and DMUs as locomotives), and here they are with these push-pull coaches that require more frequent inspections. On top of that, this agency just announced that they are planning on a brand-new design for a double-deck EMU that uses these coaches as trailer cars, which would mean that they are going to have the first brand-new EMU with AAR couplers that the state of New Jersey operated since the Lackawanna MUs were retired in 1983. How strange.

Amtrak themselves contributed enough to the high/low platform problem. Used to be that major stations like Baltimore Penn and Boston South had all low platforms, but Amtrak built high ones anyhow. (They need to retain low platforms at Washington Union since they run Superliners out of there.)