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Officials: Northeast Corridor disruption could last days
Amtrak keeps diesels in New Haven for Springfield branch service, and Metro North has some for branch line trains. However, the FL9s are now hauling passengers on the Maine Eastern, without the third rail pickup shoes, and the rest of the New Haven RR locos have been scrapped.
I don’t think it’s so much of a private or public sector problem but a “Best Practice” problem. You had two wires powering the system with one as used the main and the other as the backup which is fine. The question here is if you take one of the wires out for repairs (as was the case here), should a third “temporary” cable be installed in the event the sole remaining cable breaksdown? Clearly both ConEd and Metro-North assumed that the sole remaining wire would not breakdown.
While it would be nice to have protection locomotives just sitting around waiting for a disaster to be employed, it would be a poor business decision to such a thing. Assets that are just sitting there not producing revenue are just a waste of money with money being flushed down the toilet maintaining the equipment in to be ready at a moments notice, insurance on the equipment and depreciation. Depending on the length of such a service disruption, it would be cheaper to wait 24 to 72 hours to round up spare equipment scattered through out the system and bring them into the problem area of the system.
So much for so-called high speed rail. What a poorly designed system. Doesn’t the backup cable have a backup cable? That way when you take down the backup cable for service, the other backup cable is still available. I bet back in the day the North Shore didn’t have these problems with the Electroliners.
Meanwhile, find some old but still working Alco diesels and let them play with the commuter trains. Show the environ-mentalists what real smoke looks like. I bet most of them have never seen real smoke.
What I would like to know is how does a feeder cable just fail? Did the lines totally melt down? Transformers blow up? I’d like to know what the exact failure is…
So, this is a typical example of a failure by the private sector. If Con Edison was as well run as efficient government enterprises such as Amtrak, this kind of failure wouldn’t have been tolerated. (Only semi-sarcastic BTW)
Wonder if Amtrak would be better off keeping some diesels available for exactly this kind of problem, or whether the logistics of such a back-up system just don’t work in practice.
The FL-9 won’t do any good as suggested by a poster. It’s the overhead that has power problems and not the third rail power.
The FL-9 won’t do any good as suggested by a poster. It’s the overhead that has power problems and not the third rail power.
Apparently, ‘Acelas’ aren’t towable by conventional (Diesel) power, to bridge the gap. Not very smart.
Philip: FL-9s can/could operate under dead catenary and on dead third-rail lines. In PC days, they hardly ever used the DC power, running as straight Diesels, even in the Park Ave. Tunnels and in GCT. Too much trouble for the crew to make transition, even if the third-rail shoes had not been clipped off at Woodlawn.
I am almost positive that the Acela’s ARE tow-able. I have seen their nose opened and a coupler is in there. Not sure why they wouldn’t consider that?
This outage is a shame and an embarrassment. As a railfan and user of NJ transit from Princeton Jct to New York I worried about sagging wires during the heat of July. In fact, the there was a downed wire in Metuchen, NJ during July.
I was considering a trip from GCT to New Haven in the near future but it will have to wait.
The MTA and Con Ed should give this the highest priority and restore service in days, not weeks.
When the New Haven RR owned these rails, they produced their own power for the overhead at the Cos Cob (CT) powerplant. Don’t ever remember these kinds of problems during that period!
But we are told that we don’t need to spend money on infrastructure? There will be more problems with rail lines and highways coming in the near future.
Folks, the FL9s are gone and aren’t coming back. )-: As for Mr. Guse’s usual bloviation - recall there were TWO cables, each capable of independently providing sufficient power for total electric operation - so when one was taken out of service for scheduled preventive maintenance, the other should have been sufficient. That it wasn’t is why the commercial (not government) power provider is currently investigating. If two cables are normally sufficient, I hardly think the utility company would invest in a third “just in case.” As to the North Shore Line, it was wonderful in it’s limited mid-Western context but child’s play in the context of the former New Haven’s electric operation.
I watched a pair of Amtrak P42’s #200 leading pulling an AEM Electric (pantographs down) and its 8 Northeast Regional cars southbound at 1 PM yesterday through Milford CT 9-29-13) at track speed. There’s probably lots more of this being done.
We’re scheduled to take NER 93 down from Route 128 to DC on the 10th. Wonder if they’ll have the line fixed by then. Where are they changing to diesels? It used to be fun getting out on the platform at New Haven and watching the switch, before they electrified the line to Boston.
/Mr Lynn
Con Edison may technically be a private company but it is a regulated utility. I have worked for two regulated utilities during my career and believe me, the government controls just about every aspect of operations. There is no way the New York DPUC would allow Con Ed to buy a second back-up cable.
I wonder why they can’t pull the Acelas with P42s the same way as the NERs. Could it be that there’s no cabling to carry head-end power for the passenger cars back from the diesels?
/Mr Lynn