(The following article by Joe Malinconico was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on April 11.)
NEWARK, N.J. — NJ Transit commuters never know what to expect from the doors on their trains. Some days, they open. Some days, they don’t.
One thing’s for sure — when the doors malfunction, they produce aggravation and delays. The grief comes in many forms for rail riders.
Lois Horbatt gets annoyed when she finds herself standing waiting at a broken door that never opens.
Joe Caputo fumes when he trudges through a train car with 100 other people who are all forced to use one exit.
Scott Schmitt can’t understand why time after time his trains linger at stations while crew members check every door for malfunctions.
“So what’s going on here?” wondered commuter Glenn Ball in a recent e-mail to NJ Transit. “The door problems seem as bad as ever, and you can’t blame it on the cold weather because it hasn’t been that cold lately.”
Officials said the main culprit in the door fiasco has been NJ Transit’s newest passenger cars, the ones with the red seats. Rail insiders call the new cars by their model name, the Comet V (Five) and they cost the agency about $890,000 each.
The first batch of the Comet Vs, which mainly run on the Midtown Direct, the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast lines, went into service in the fall of 2002. Since then, the railroad has made nine changes in the door mechanisms. No other train model in NJ Transit’s fleet of about 710 passenger car uses doors that are computer-operated.
“We’re as frustrated as our customers and our crews,” said Bill Duggan, NJ Transit’s vice president and general manager for rail operations. “There’s no question we’ve had door problems with the Comet Vs that are significantly higher than what they should have been.”
Duggan said the ninth modification in the Comet V doors — a change in the system’s software — went into effect about a month ago.
“We think this will fix the problem,” Duggan said.
But a 10th adjustment also is in the works, just to improve upon the improvements already being made, officials said.
NJ Transit has 134 of the Comet Vs in operation and another 66 on order. Duggan said the door changes will be incorporated in the rest of the cars coming from the manufacturer, Alstom Inc.
Agency officials said they have been negotiating with Alstom for an extension of the warranty on the Comet Vs as compensation for the door problems.
There was a time when rail riders shrugged off the fickle doors as another routine annoyance during their commutes.
But last month’s terrorist attacks in Madrid and the recent FBI warnings that American trains might be targets this summer have changed their perspective. John Mooney of Fanwood has had second thoughts while standing in a passenger car, waiting to get out through one working exit.
“What if something happens and we have to evacuate?” he asked. “It would be a lot better to have two open doors instead of just one.”
Rail officials, however, say riders have nothing to worry about. Every portal has an emergency handle that swings the door open, even if it is locked shut because of a malfunction, officials said.
The handles are clearly marked, with instructions, officials said, so passengers could use them even if there wasn’t a crew member in a particular car.
Also, the windows can be used as emergency exits, said agency spokeswoman Penny Basset Hackett.
Passengers are not convinced the emergency handles would work during the chaos of an evacuation.
“I think there’s a liability issue here,” said Ball, who rides the Montclair-Boonton line from Glen Ridge station. “What happens if someone gets hurt because they can’t get out fast enough?”
Exactly how many of NJ Transit’s train doors have malfunctioned is hard to determine because the railroad’s maintenance records are not computerized.
Transit officials and employees say there also have been problems with the agency’s 161 Comet II cars, which had been rebuilt in recent years. Other models of train cars have had isolated malfunctions with their doors, but nothing as pervasive as the failings with the Comet Vs and Comet IIs.
Rail crew members say riders probably are not even aware of one of the consequences of the Comet V problems.
The trains have a safety feature that prevents the engines from drawing power and going into motion unless all the doors are properly shut. But the door malfunctions sometimes have prompted train crews to shut off, or “by-pass,” that safety mechanism so that trains can continue on their way.
When operating in “bypass” mode, crew members say, they run an increased risk of heading out of a station with someone in between the train’s doors.
“It’s a very serious accident waiting to happen,” said Bob Vallochi, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Division 373. “I dread the day I drag some kid or one of my crew members down the platform.”
But transit officials said the railroad has safety procedures in place for when trains have to operate in “bypass” mode.
The rear brake man, who is stationed in the last car, is supposed to look down the length of the train to make sure all the closed door lights are on and that no one is between the doors, officials said. Also, conductors on the passenger cars are supposed to check their doors before trains leave each station.
“At no time do we think the safety of our passengers was compromised because of door problems,” said Duggan. “We wouldn’t operate if that were the case.”