(The following article by Joie Tyrell was posted on the Newsday website on April 5.)
NEW YORK — Commuter Ray Xerri employs his own strategy when boarding a new M-7 Long Island Rail Road car at Oceanside:
Look for the skinniest person to sit beside. “Those are the seats that go first,” he said.
As the M-7 cars continue to roll into service, some commuters have found the train seats uncomfortable and too tight. “They haven’t clicked on the fattening of America,” said Neil McPherson, 39, of Huntington, who works as a security analyst in Manhattan.
The railroad completed the first purchase order in February with 226 cars and has just launched a second order that will add more than 400 into service. By April 2006, the railroad will be running 678 M-7 cars on all electrified lines, making up the bulk of the LIRR’s electric fleet. The cars, manufactured by Bombardier Transportation Inc. of Canada, cost about $1.7 million apiece.
Railroad officials defend the seating, saying that extensive market research and planning went into their construction. There are 24 fewer seats per pair of cars than the older M-1 and M-3 equipment, due mostly to federal law requiring handicapped accessible bathrooms on board.
Railroad officials and some passengers give the cars high marks.
“They are great cars,” said LIRR President James Dermody. “They ride very well and from a railroad point of view, they perform very well … The train crews like them, and by and large the customers like them.”
“They’re much nicer,” said Aaron Rokosz, 28, who was traveling yesterday from Manhattan to his parents’ home in Lawrence.
There are several design changes from the older M-1 and M-3 cars. Most of the M-1 cars, the bulk of the current fleet, were built between 1968 and 1972 and are being decommissioned. The M-3 cars were rolled out in 1985 and will continue in service.
For the M-7, Federal Railroad Administration requirements instituted in 1999 require thicker sidewall construction on all new passenger trains for greater crashworthiness, but the trains also had to fit into the East River tunnels. So while the carriage is 4 inches thicker, railroad officials said that through design work, the interior is only 2.3 inches narrower than the old equipment.
That works out to about half-an-inch less per seat, but the middle seats on the three-seat-across rows remain the same width.
The seats were designed after an ergonomics consulting group from the Netherlands rode dozens of LIRR trains and noticed where and how passengers sat.
“They observed how people slept, read, worked on the train and they built a model which had a series of sensors that identified hot spots to maximize comfort,” said Dave Elliott, the LIRR’s general manager of fleet support.
A mock-up of the M-7 car was made for focus groups in early 2000. The focus groups asked for more leg room and the seats were reconfigured to include a concave back shell and sculptured arm rests that made them more open, to allow for more side-to-side leg movement.
Railroad officials said customers in the focus group felt the seats cradled their bodies.
Gone are the half-seats on the three-seat rows of the old equipment.
“Some of the perceptions of the customers that there is less room is caused by the full high back that was an answer to customer demands and lumbar support. They might feel that it’s tighter, the seat is designed to be ergonomically correct,” Dermody said.
But Peter Haynes, president of the advocacy group the LIRR Commuters’ Campaign, said that “perceptions are very important. A lot of people perceive them to be tighter and harder than the older seats. … but there isn’t much that can be done about that at this point.”
For commuter Marc Fuhrman, who stands 6 feet, 3 inches tall, the daily commute means a tight fit on the way to work from Bethpage.
“America’s a big country and so is its population and so are the size of a good percentage of the people that ride the LIRR,” he said. “Hopefully gas prices will come down and I will start driving again.”