(The following article by Tom Feeney was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on March 23.) Bob Vallachi is the BLET’s General Chairman on New Jersey Transit.)
NEWARK, N.J. — The two-storied, half-billion-dollar future of NJ Transit has hit a bump in the rails.
The agency’s new multilevel rail cars had to be pulled out of service for three days this week after a routine inspection turned up a problem with the brakes.
When the rail cars were in the garage for service last Friday, maintenance workers noticed marks on the brake discs, said Lynn Bowersox, NJ Transit’s assistant executive director for external affairs.
“The markings were like spider veins,” Bowersox said. “They were about the size of a quarter.”
Once the discs were removed, they were shipped back to Bombardier Transportation, the Canadian firm that has a contract to manufacture 234 multilevel cars for NJ Transit. Bombardier will test the discs to see what caused the marks, Bowersox said. In the meantime, the discs were replaced and all the cars are back in service.
The multilevel cars — which have upper-, lower- and mezzanine-level seats — are a key part of NJ Transit’s strategy for moving growing numbers of commuters into and out of midtown Manhattan for the next decade while a new tunnel is being built under the Hudson River.
A train made up of eight multilevel cars will be able to carry 15 percent more passengers than the Comet series rail cars that now make up most of the agency’s fleet.
The multilevels made a much-ballyhooed inaugural run in December, but they still constitute only a small part of the trains the agency runs every day.
Bombardier has delivered 15 of the 234 cars so far. The rest are scheduled to arrive at a rate of between 7 and 10 per month until late 2008. It’s not clear yet whether the brake problem will have any impact on the production schedule, Bowersox said.
So far, the agency has used the multilevels for about three passenger trips a day on the Northeast Corridor Line.
Before they were put into service, the cars were tested extensively. Four of the cars were shipped to the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colo., where they were operated for about 10,000 miles at speeds up to 135 mph, NJ Transit officials said when the cars were introduced in December.
They were subject to tests once they arrived in New Jersey, too. Brake performance was tested at speeds up to 90 mph with enough weight aboard to simulate a full passenger load.
The markings on the brake discs did not appear until the cars were taken into the shop for maintenance on Friday, Bowersox said.
“It’s pretty normal to discover these kind of things once you put them in service,” said Bob Vallochi, chairman of the union that represents train engineers at NJ Transit. “That’s the true test — what happens to them once they’re in service. I’m not too concerned. They seem to be on top of it.”