(The following article by Joie Tyrrell was posted on the Newsday website on September 28.)
NEW YORK — Four Long Island Rail Road signal projects ended up costing tens of millions more than expected and will be delayed by years because they were more complex than the railroad had anticipated, railroad officials said yesterday.
LIRR officials told an MTA board yesterday that the four projects are going to be redesigned, rebudgeted and rescheduled. Work had started during the past four years, but soon costs escalated. Railroad officials realized that the process of designing the projects while building at the same time was not working.
The railroad had never installed microprocessors in such complex locations, but had succeeded on smaller, simpler projects. “The delays in the signal program obviously reduce the flexibility and safety of the railroad and that is … a concern,” said Metropolitan Transportation Authority member Mitch Pally.
“I don’t have a problem providing them more money. The signal work is essential, the hope is that this time they do it right,” Pally said after the meeting.
The LIRR is in the process of replacing its antiquated signal system from Jamaica to Speonk with a microprocessor system to enhance safety and reliability in the movement of trains.
The railroad also decided to add on to some of the bigger projects. For example, railroad officials decided to replace lower speed switches, the device that moves the train from one track to another, with higher speed switches at the Queens Interlocking, near Bellerose, but deferred the installation to 2006 after receiving signal control equipment that had not been factory tested.
“We took equipment prior to it being fully built,” said Brian Finn, chief engineer. “Henceforth, we learned it is not the way to do business. As a result confidence in ripping out the track structure was not the right thing to do.”
That specific project has grown in scope from a cost of $35 million to $50 million and will be complete next year instead of 2004.
Railroad officials said initially they were caught off-guard by the cost increases.
“We didn’t realize it until we jumped into Queens Interlocking – the cost, the time, the complexity,” Finn said.
Labor costs were mostly driving up the budgets on the projects.
“One example is we thought it would take 1,800 hours to do testing, but testing was in the 15,000 to 20,000 hour range … we had done it very simple, once we started communicating to multiple locations it got very complex exponentially,” Finn said.
Replacing outdated signals at the Valley Interlocking near Valley Stream was initially budgeted at $19.4 million and expected to be complete by September 2004. But now, the work will cost $74.5 million and be complete sometime in 2009.
The Babylon-Speonk project grew from $27.6 million to $34.3 million and the Jamaica Interlocking jumped from $25.6 million to $59.4 million.
The Queens Interlocking and Babylon project are now fully funded and are under way. But, the LIRR is waiting on full funding for the other two projects.
The Federal Transit Administration, the funding arm of the signal projects, had suspended funding in December, as the cost started to climb, but after meeting with railroad officials restored funding in April.