(The following story by Steve Ritea appeared on Newsday.com on December 2)
In the nine weeks after starting her first full-time teaching job, Long Island Rail Road commuter Robin Larsen was late to work four times.
She always caught the 5:37 a.m. train out of Patchogue, aiming to stand before her seventh-grade English class at IS 216 in the Bronx by 8 a.m. The blame, she said, lies with the LIRR’s unreliable, breakdown-prone diesel trains, with her sitting in a disabled train or waiting on the platform for one that dragged in late.
“Being late is not something I can continue to do, or else I could not have a job next September,” said Larsen, 27.
Trouble-prone trains
This is the LIRR’s diesel dilemma — for the railroad and for the 10,000 passengers a day riding those troubled trains, about 5 percent of the fleet. Eight years after 46 diesel and “dual-mode” locomotives were built specifically for the LIRR and bought for $152 million, their track record is dismal: They break down twice as often as anyone had predicted.
What’s more, the General Motors division that made them exclusively for the LIRR has shut down. The warranty on most parts for the trains has expired, officials said. That has left the LIRR with several dozen troubled trains unlike any others in the world, built by a GM division that no longer exists.
“It is obvious that the entire diesel fleet is in serious trouble,” former Metro-North Railroad President Don Nelson, acting as a consultant for the LIRR, wrote in a survey in October. Nelson pointed out a host of especially profound problems with the dual-mode locomotives. If they “can’t be made more reliable soon,” the consultant wrote, “the LIRR will be forced to deal with the fact that these units are lemons … ”
Electric versus diesel
The diesel trains, easily identified by their handsome double-decker passenger cars, travel along the system’s Oyster Bay, Port Jefferson and Montauk branches, and the Ronkonkoma branch east of Ronkonkoma. Twenty-three of the locomotives are diesel and 22 are dual-modes, which can switch between diesel and electric power. (One dual-mode was destroyed by fire several years ago.)
Last year, dual-modes broke down, on average, every 14,595 miles — more than twice the 30,000 miles projected between breakdowns. By comparison, the LIRR’s newest electric trains only broke down an average of every 303,604 miles last year.
LIRR President Helena Williams, acknowledging that diesel malfunctions have caused many delays, said the agency has hired a separate consultant to determine whether they should be replaced or repaired. She expects an initial report by year’s end.
Why diesel’s necessary
The LIRR’s staff acknowledges it might be a difficult problem to fix. The trains — debuting in 1999, more than a year after they’d been pledged to be running — were to provide 30 years of service. At this rate “that’s not looking very promising,” said Ray Kenny, the LIRR’s senior vice president of operations.
The problem with the dual-mode trains appears fundamental to their nature: Kenny said the locomotives most commonly have problems while switching between diesel and electric modes. The age of the track on certain lines, and the prohibitive cost and extreme difficulty of electrifying the entire system, are what drives the LIRR’s need for diesel trains. While most sections of track have an electrified third rail that powers trains, some older sections do not and rely entirely on diesel power.
But exhaust from diesel trains prevents them from going into enclosed stations such as Penn Station, while a dual-mode can enter once it switches over to electric power. The addition of dual-modes to the fleet allowed passengers who use stations along diesel-only tracks from having to transfer to electric trains — most often at the Jamaica station — before traveling into Penn Station. LIRR officials said they asked GM to manufacture locomotives especially for them that were able to speed up and slow down just as quickly as traditional electric trains. That was necessary, Kenny said, to assure traffic is not backed up in and out of Penn.
Dual-modes get most delays
Metro-North Railroad uses dual-modes built by General Electric and purchased around the same time, officials there said. By all accounts, theirs are working much better than those on the LIRR — breaking down half as often. Metro-North reported average breakdowns every 36,714 miles in 2006.
Although the LIRR’s strictly diesel trains have had problems, also breaking down far more than LIRR officials would like, the dual-modes most consistently delayed commuters, befuddled mechanics and caused headaches for LIRR brass. “Clearly, they’re breaking down too often,” Kenny said, “The diesel shop is very put-upon.”
Officials say it’s not uncommon to see the same locomotive reappear in their repair shop every few weeks. Compared to electric trains, “we do a lot more maintenance on them,” said Charlie Cicalo, an LIRR master mechanic. “A lot more.”
Pete Volpe, an electrician who spends his days tinkering with troubled dual-modes, said the complexity of the one-of-a-kind locomotives creates lots of potential for breakdowns. “There’s so many computers … that every time there’s a glitch, you’ve got seven computers that can shut down,” Volpe said.
Despite mechanics’ best efforts, problems persist for commuters. Gerard Bringmann, president of the LIRR Commuter’s Council, believes the diesels should be junked and replaced, a suggestion he made in a recent letter to railroad higher-ups.
A toll on commuters
“The condition of the diesel fleet is taking a major toll on Long Island commuters in terms of stress and impacts on social and family life,” wrote Bringmann, a regular diesel rider. “Equipment breakdowns on the LIRR are jeopardizing some commuters’ performance evaluations … and in some cases … their continued employment.”
Larsen, the teacher from Patchogue, knows she can’t continue to be late. Her students suffer too, she said, because they fall behind as last-minute substitute teachers unfamiliar with her lesson plans struggle to fill in.
“Most of the time I end up having to make up that work with them the next day,” she said.
Although the length of her commute also wears on her, Larsen said the unreliability of the diesel fleet ultimately won’t allow her to keep the job.
“I’m not a tenured teacher, so what school in their right mind is going to welcome me back, knowing I could be late so many times?” she asked. “Honestly, I’ve already accepted the fact that I am going to have to look for something on Long Island in September.”