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Electric testing begins on Denver airport commuter rail line
Why do the cars have to run 1000 hours before passengers can board them?
I agree. It doesn’t sound like there is any new earth-shaking technology or anything with this rail line that would require this extent of shakedown of cars, track, and power delivery system. why the over one year wait to actually place this line in revenue service??
Many of the stations are not complete including the hotel/terminus station at DIA and will not be ready for at least a few more months. They will be able to test the trains but there is still a lot of construction to be done until the trains can carry passengers.
Earth-shaking technology or not, if some obscure defect were to cause a serious accident early on, people would demand to know why the cars had been pressed into service prematurely without an adequate break-in period. It would be Somebody’s Fault–everything is–so Somebody is trying to keep from ending up with parts of their legal anatomy in a sling by imposing a long and expensive break-in period.
I’m just glad they finally built a light rail line from the city to the airport they located out in the boodocks.
There’s two factors involved in certification of new rail equipment like this, Standard Operating Procedures and FRA compliance(they do have regulations on how much testing passenger equipment needs to go through before an agency can accept it into revenue service). Of course, there’s also the reason stated below to find any potential bugs before going into revenue service.
I took possession of a new van with less than five miles on the odometer…
Eric Schneider a big difference in safety factor of taking a van or any auto with only 5 miles on its odometer, than a train that can take 100 or more passengers at a time. As for testing, part of the problem is that the rails and electric lines are in place, but as somebody else pointed out, most of the stations are incomplete, especially the hotel at the airport which is the end of the line for this particular track. Not sure when the hotel will be finished, but not likely to allow any trains to let passengers on or off while it is under construction. Also RTD needs to train more operators to run those additional trains.
I have to wonder how “storm” protected the entire route is. Between summer thundrstorms and winter blizzards I wonder if they have planned ahead.