(The following article by Keith Reed was posted on the Boston Globe website on June 10.)
BOSTON — Amtrak said it should be able to restart limited service of its Acela Express high-speed train between Boston and Washington in July but won’t return to a full schedule until the fall.
Amtrak and Acela’s manufacturers believe vibrations that occur when Acela’s brakes are applied led to 300 cracks in the trains’ brake discs, forcing Amtrak to sideline Acela since April, William Crosbie, Amtrak’s senior vice president of operations, told a House Transportation subcommittee yesterday.
An Amtrak spokesman later added that the manufacturers are testing a redesigned brake disc that is less vulnerable to vibration and cracking.
Crosbie’s remarks come only a week after the president of Bombardier Transportation, one of Acela’s lead manufacturers, said that some of the trains could be ready for use this month. Though it now appears that timeline won’t hold, it looks likely that Amtrak will keep its initial promise to restore at least some Acela service before summer’s end.
”That is the hopeful prognosis at this point,” said Amtrak spokesman Clifford Black.
Black said a possible scenario is that up to four of the 20 Acela trains could be outfitted with the new brakes and start runs between Boston, New York, and Washington on a limited schedule by next month.
All 20 Acela trains likely won’t be back in service until the fall, Black said.
Since Acela, Amtrak’s flagship service on its important Northeast Corridor tracks, was sidelined, the struggling railroad has lost both money and passengers. Amtrak had 803,800 passengers on its Northeast Corridor trains in April, compared with 843,900 in the same month last year, though officials note some of that loss is attributable to the busy Easter holiday falling a month earlier this year than in 2004. Amtrak, which markets Acela to business travelers, estimates it is losing $1 million a week in revenue.
The trains were pulled from service after more cracks were found in football-shaped spokes on 300 of the trains’ 1,440 brake discs. Engineers now believe the narrow ends of those spokes, which align directly with the rest of the disc, made them vulnerable to cracking as a result of brake vibration.
On the new design, the spokes will be rotated 90 degrees to reduce vibration, Black said.
Bombardier spokesman David Slack declined to comment on the cause of the cracks, saying the company had not made a final determination.
Crosbie appeared before a subcommittee to defend the rail agency against a report that accuses it of poorly managing its food service operations, causing about $245 million in related losses between fiscal years 2002 and 2004.
The report, from the Government Accountability Office, said that in addition to lax oversight of an outside company, Gate Gourmet, Amtrak may have overpaid for food and drinks — in one instance paying up to $3.93 each for bottles of imported Heineken beer.
Black called the report ”grossly misleading.” Amtrak actually paid 83 cents per bottle for the beer, he said, but the GAO had taken its information from a report in which data had been wrongly entered and were later corrected.