WASHINGTON — Amtrak said on Tuesday it discovered additional hairline cracks on four high-speed Acela trains, slowing the passenger railroad’s drive to restore service along the heavily traveled Washington-Boston corridor, a wire service reports.
Amtrak has been scrambling to restore its 50 daily departures by Acela trains after the discovery of potentially dangerous suspension-system defects prompted it to suspend operations last week of the high-speed trains made by a consortium led by Montreal-based Bombardier Inc. .
Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black said the railroad decided to slow its return to full service after tests with a special metal-penetrating dye found tiny cracks on the yaw-damper brackets, which prevent the train from swaying as it hurtles down the tracks at speeds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h).
“They’re probably not new. These trains have been operating safely with these cracks,” Black said. “But we like to feel an abundance of caution. We’re not going to run them with any cracks.”
Bombardier said it was working in close collaboration with Amtrak in its own repair shops in New York, Washington and Philadelphia to solve the defects.
“The new problem is a different aspect of the same old problem,” company spokeswoman Lydia Dufresne said.
“The repair teams are working 24 hours a day. It’s a complex problem that we want to solve as soon as possible.”
Acela trains, plagued by a raft of mechanical problems since their launch in late 2000, are designed to cut travel time between New York and Washington to under three hours, but service was interrupted last week after inspectors first discovered cracks on the yaw-damper brackets.
The latest cracks were found during tests on trains that already had been certified free of defects and were due to go back in service, Black said.
Black said Amtrak ran only 15 trips with four high-speed Acela trains on Tuesday between Washington, New York and Boston, half the number of trips it had planned to run.
Black said the railroad would add a fifth Acela train, bringing the total number of trips to around 17 on Wednesday, and he expected the number of trains to remain steady at that level throughout the rest of the week.
He noted that the newly discovered cracks were not visible to the naked eye, and were discovered only because of more thorough testing by railroad engineers.
“We’re working overtime in four facilities making repairs on these trains,” he said.
To ease delays for customers, Amtrak was supplementing the Acela express trains with nine conventional trains that would depart at the times scheduled for Acela.
Acela runs between Washington and New York in 2 hours and 43 minutes, compared with 3 hours in a conventional train.
The difference is greater on the Boston-New York route, on which an Acela train takes 3 hours and 28 minutes, compared with 4 hours and 15 minutes on the conventional Metroliner trains.