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Siemens, city speak on $648 million San Francisco light rail vehicle order
There are no neon lights, just fluorescent lighting.
Kudos to Muni… Easily one of the best and most pleasant systems in the US. Some of their older units are pretty rough and needed replacement… But NOT the great PCCs. A ride along the Embarcadero on the F line to The Fisherman’s Wharf is well worth the airfare. What a nice job they’ve done with the PCCs (and The Embarcadero!)
Robert Tracy clearly has never lived in San Francisco.
Muni is horribly run, the maintenance of trains is legendarily awful and it’s dreadfully unreliable. It goes everywhere, but whether a train shows up is another question. It’s a common occurrence for there to be 40 minute gaps between trains (and buses too) when frequency is supposed to be 9-15 minutes.
Bus, light rail, it doesn’t matter. Muni is utterly terrible.
It’s a sad commentary on American transit systems that you think it’s one of the best.
I can only hope that these Siemens trains will be better than the Breda ones that were purchased in the mid 90s. But ultimately the problem with Muni isn’t the equipment it’s the administration and intrasigent union work rules. The people who suffer are the riders and residents (I lived there from 1995 to May, 2014).
Frankly I was floored when I read that Muni has to replace the Breda Cars already. They, like the Boeing-Vertol cars are practically new and they already need to be replaced. What’s wrong with this picture? The original equipment, the so-called Iron Monsters ran for 45 years and were replaced by PCC Cars mostly because they were Two-Man cars.
I am glad to see that the cars are being built in the USA and in California too.
It seems to me that one of the main problems with the Muni underground trains is that there are only two tracks. If a train becomes disabled and unable to move there is no alternate track for other trains to continue running or for the disabled train to be moved to while it is serviced. As a result when a train is disabled all trains running in that direction cease to run; I heard one person say recently that he was stuck on a train for 45 minutes until the disabled train could be removed. This would not occur in the New York City subway system.
In response to Jim from Oregon the Boeing Vertol cars were a piece of junk. Boston cancelled the order and Muni bought the rest of them instead. It was cheaper for Boston to upgrade the PCC cars as a temporary fix for the failings of the Boeing Vertol cars. The articulation hinge pins failed constantly which caused low speed derailments. They rusted out the main beams right away and as a friend that worked in the T maintenance department told me “they have 35 different manufacturers just for all the components in the doors”. The Breda cars had to be pulled off of the Boston tracks completly and then all of the tracks in the entire Boston system had to be replaced because the wheel profile on the Breda cars made them constantly just walk off the rails while PCC cars and the disentgrating Boeing Vertol cars had no troubles with the rails.
I was in SF recently and rode the F line and the MUNI subway (N).
I was quite impressed. Just a thought. Maybe being an urban traction enthusiast skews my view.
What can be learned from the PCC cars design from long ago that makes them so endurable???