(The following story by Joe Malinconico appeared on the Star-Ledger website on April 19. Bob Vallochi is General Chairman of the BLET’s New Jersey Transit General Committee of Adjustment.)
NEWARK, N.J. — With advanced technology and the latest amenities, NJ Transit’s new rail passenger car was supposed to make commuting easier.
Instead, the model, called the Comet V (five), has produced tedious travel delays and routine aggravations ever since it started carrying New Jersey riders back in the fall of 2002.
First, there were computer glitches that caused the trains to shut down en route. Then came a nagging series of door malfunctions that riders say still have not been fixed.
On top of that, the very comforts that transit officials bragged about in a news conference two years ago have turned out to be less than comfortable. Take, for example, the Comet V’s public address system. More often than not, it spews annoying static.
What else? The ticket holders are ripping the new red seats. The faucets in the restrooms do not work correctly. The windows leak. The electronic message screens sometimes announce the wrong station.
All this for rail cars that cost between $890,000 and $1 million apiece.
“It’s some of the worst new equipment I’ve seen,” said Bob Vallochi, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “They arrived dead on arrival.”
“If you purchased something that has quality problems in the beginning, what can you expect in the next 20 or 30 years?” wondered commuter Michael Weingarten of Westfield. “We’re going to have to live with these things for a long time.”
NJ Transit officials say it’s normal for new rail cars to have kinks that need to be ironed out. After the manufacturer, Alstom Transport of France, provided a test model of the Comet V a few years ago, NJ Transit crews found 260 things that needed to be fixed before the rest of the cars could be completed.
Once the trains started running on regular schedules, the railroad identified another batch of flaws that needed to be resolved. NJ Transit has a list of 60 “modifications” that still need to be done, including things like the public address system and the doors, said Richard Sarles, the agency’s assistant to the executive director.
“It’s like peeling an onion,” Sarles said. “You see a problem and you believe you’ve identified the fix and then something else may pop up, which was masked by the problem that was fixed.”
Sarles said the number of modifications needed on the Comet V has not been unusual for new equipment. But some of the veteran engineers, conductors and mechanics who work for the railroad say otherwise, insisting they cannot recall new trains that were so problem-plagued.
“It’s not acceptable for new cars to have this many problems,” said Xavier Williams, general chairman of the United Transportation Union, which represents NJ Transit’s conductors. “We’ve always felt like these cars are a piece of junk.”
At present, Alstom has about 25 employees at NJ Transit’s various rail yards, working on improving the cars.
“I believe it has taken Alstom longer than it should to address some of these problems,” Sarles said.
An Alstom spokeswoman in France, Helen Connolly, referred questions about the Comet V cars to staff members in the United States, who did not return phone messages.
In 1999, Alstom won a $273 million contract to build 265 Comet V cars for NJ Transit and Metro North. NJ Transit is paying $207 million for its allotment of 200 of the cars.
Sarles said the agency has withheld about $12 million of the payments to Alstom until the company fixes the lingering problems.
One of the factors that complicated the construction and the repairs on the Comet Vs has been Alstom’s financial problems, officials said. Last year, the company worked out a deal with its creditors and the French government to avoid bankruptcy.
This is the first time Alstom, one of the major rail equipment builders in the world, has provided news cars for NJ Transit. The company has had two other contracts with NJ Transit, one to rebuild the railroad’s Comet II passenger cars several years ago and one to provide 33 new diesel-powered locomotives, a job that’s scheduled to be complete at the end of this year.
Alstom won the Comet V contract by bidding the lowest price. Sarles declined to comment on whether another company would have done a better job with this model train.
But, he said, NJ Transit’s current administration prefers awarding contracts for new train equipment through a proposal process in which bids are evaluated based on the companies’ technical qualifications as well as price.
“Somebody may be able to give you the best price, but they may not be able to give you the best car,” he said.
In addition to the defects in the Comet Vs themselves, the cars also have had difficulties when they are connected to other models in NJ Transit’s 700-car fleet as part of a set of cars on one train. The Comet Vs depend on computers — including for power, brakes and communications — far more than the rest of the equipment and the Comet V systems are much more advanced than the electronics of the other rail cars.
Officials said there is no way to avoid having different types of cars on the same trains because of the complexities of running such a vast and busy railroad.
“Although you think you’ve got the integration right, inevitably when you put coaches from different eras together, glitches are going to pop up,” said Sarles.
Commuter Marc Levinson of Glen Ridge notices when he is riding on a train that is made up of different models of rail cars.
“The trains tend to give you a little jerky ride because the cars seem to brake and accelerate at different rates,” he said.