(The following appeared on the Patriot Ledger website on September 23, 2009.)
BOSTON — MBTA officials are stepping up inspections and ordering commuter rail engineers to throttle back for safety in areas where the railroad tracks are held down by crumbling concrete ties.
It is the latest problem with defective ties along two of the Old Colony commuter rail lines south of Boston. About 11,000 people ride the trains into Boston from Middleboro and Kingston every weekday.
And while MBTA officials are denying any other problems, inspectors are spotting similar problems involving faulty concrete ties on the relatively new Greenbush rail line.
“There are a few (faulty ties); not near as many (as) Old Colony,” said an inspector who asked to remain anonymous.
“No such issues on the Greenbush line, and no speed restrictions on the Greenbush line,” MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo wrote in a e-mail.
However, on Monday a scrolling message on electronic boards at station stops informed passengers of five- to 10-minute delays because of ongoing track work.
The so-called “slow orders,” which reduce speeds from 70 to 30 mph, began last Friday on the Kingston line. They were issued because of an increasing number of cracked and crumbling concrete ties.
The T last week ordered the a stretch of the Middleboro line shut down during non-peak hours until the end of October to allow workers to replace 14,000 defective concrete ties with wooden ones.
“The rule is (that) when we see four consecutive ties (with cracks or other defects), we issue a slow order” until the ties are replaced or reinforced, said one inspector, who did not want to be identified because he is not authorized to speak on the issue. “Everybody is concerned with safety for passengers. That’s our biggest thing.”
Pesaturo acknowledged that train speeds were reduced to 30 mph last Friday in three sections of a seven-mile stretch of the Old Colony line between Hanson and Kingston while workers inserted wooden ties. Although Pesaturo insisted that the slow orders would be lifted Monday, trains continued to slow when approaching and traveling through the potentially unsafe areas on Tuesday.
Scores of new wooden ties lay beside the tracks, waiting to be installed. At a staging area between Weymouth and Abington, hundreds of wooden ties had been dropped in bundles to be used in the maintenance efforts.
The situation appears to involve defective concrete that is vulnerable to the freezing and thawing conditions in the Northeast. The 800-pound ties carry a 25-year warranty but started showing cracks after less than a decade of use.
Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad have had similar problems. Despite the 25-year warranty, each of the rail systems has replaced hundreds of defective ties purchased from Rocla Concrete Ties at a cost of several hundred million dollars.
Faulty ties that are not replaced or strengthened with additional wooden ties could cause a shifting of the tracks and a derailment similar to one that injured passengers in Washington state several years ago. In that incident, consecutive cracked and broken ties were spotted but not replaced or strengthened, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
MBTA officials have told CommonWealth Magazine that Rocla Concrete Ties of Denver has threatened to file for bankruptcy if it is forced to honor the warranty. Rocla officials have not returned repeated calls for comment.
Locally, rail workers have identified more than 7,000 broken ties, and more are being spotted every day. More than 15,000 are being replaced or reinforced with wooden ties by the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad company, the for-profit operator of the state’s commuter rail lines.
Pesaturo has insisted that there are no safety issues.
“There have been a few isolated speed restrictions in the past to maintain compliance with MBTA maintenance standards while crews addressed any tie issues,” Pesaturo said in an e-mail. “These restrictions were removed as soon as the tie conditions were addressed.”
The problems are occurring as officials have decided to shut down the section from Middleboro to Bridgewater on the Old Colony Commuter Rail between peak commuting hours (that is, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.), at least through the end of next month to remove hundreds of defective concrete ties and replace them with wooden ones. Passengers are being bused from Middleboro to Bridgewater, with the buses leaving 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled train.
While the problems on the Kingston section of the Old Colony are not as widespread as those on the Middleboro line, they are beginning to grow as inspectors walk the lines and identify cracked, crumbling and broken concrete ties.
In addition to the potential safety issues, the breaking ties and the work to replace them are causing major disruptions and minor irritants for commuters south of Boston. The changes are affecting other lines as trains are forced to wait for other trains to pass crossings and single-track sections during times they normally would not encounter each other because of staggered schedules.