(The following story by Paul Nussbaum appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on October 17.)
PHILADELPHIA — While rail commuters eagerly await new SEPTA railcars, a skirmish is going on at the front of the train.
Train engineers, unhappy with the subway-style operating compartments planned for the new cars, have asked for cabs that extend the full width of the cars, like those in current SEPTA trains. They say it’s a matter of safety, security and privacy.
SEPTA officials, who met again this week with engineers, say the new, smaller compartments will be safer than current ones and will make room for more passenger seats. They say they don’t plan to further delay production of the cars to redesign the cabs.
For commuters, the biggest concern is getting new cars soon, regardless of the size of the cabs, said Matthew Mitchell of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers.
SEPTA has ordered 120 new Silverliner V railcars, with the first ones expected to be put into service next fall. The new cars, purchased for $274 million, will replace 73 cars built in the 1960s. With the retirement of the old cars and the addition of the new ones, SEPTA will have about 400 by 2010, up from 348 now.
Passengers have been clamoring for relief from standing-room-only commutes, as rail ridership has jumped more than 12 percent over last year, to a record 35 million rides.
The new Silverliners are designed with the engineer’s compartment at the right front. Fold-down passenger seats are at the left front. The passenger seats are designed to be folded out of the way when the car is the lead car of a train, with an engineer in the compartment. The rest of the time, they’re available for passenger use.
Engineers have several complaints about the smaller cabs.
They say it would be harder for an engineer to escape in case of an imminent collision. They say training would be more difficult, since a trainee and engineer could not both fit into a one-person cab. And they contend that an engineer and conductor could not have a private conversation about the train’s operation.
They also say there isn’t room to store their timetables, rule books, operating tools, and other required equipment in the smaller cabs.
Marcus Ruef, a national vice president with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, compared a train cab to an airliner cockpit and said a cab should be similarly secure. He invoked post-9/11 security concerns as a reason to provide a full cab that prevents passengers from seeing the rails and signals ahead.
“We don’t think the forward view of the right-of-way should be available to whoever wants to watch . . . and the conductor and the engineer should be able to talk privately,” Ruef said.
Pat Nowakowski, SEPTA chief of operations, said the smaller cabs pose no security risk. “I have never heard that from a security expert,” he said.
Nowakowski said the new cabs were designed with advice from engineers, and he said the final decision to go with the smaller cabs was a balancing act.
The larger cabs would take six seats out of a 107-seat car, by SEPTA’s reckoning. The engineers say that would be true only in lead cars; in trailing cars, they say, the loss would be only two seats.
“We want seats, they want a larger cab,” Nowakowski said. “We want to do everything we can to give them every opportunity to do their jobs safely. At the same time, we want to give customers as much comfort as possible. We’re trying to find a happy middle ground.”
He said having people other than the engineer in the cab can be a dangerous distraction. “We’ve had problems with people in the cab that should not be there. The distraction of talking is not a good one.”
Luther Diggs, SEPTA’s chief officer of vehicle equipment engineering and maintenance, said stronger steel reinforcements around the cab made it much safer than the current full-width cabs. He said the smaller cab was ergonomically designed to be more comfortable, with controls easy to reach and large windows and mirrors for visibility.
“It’s almost like an operating pod,” Diggs said. “When technology changes, you have to change with it. They [engineers] had a lot of input into it.”
The cab door will have a “panic bar” to allow an engineer to escape quickly into the passenger aisle if a crash is imminent, Diggs said.
An equipment compartment will be built under the fold-up passenger seats, he said. And when engineers are being trained, he said, the entire front end of the car will be off-limits to passengers.
“It’s change,” Diggs said. “They’re not used to it. They’ll get used to it, and they’ll find it’s much more comfortable than the old cars.”
Nationwide, engineers have been pushing for federal standards to mandate bigger cabs. In a filing last year with the Federal Railroad Administration, the engineers’ union said that cabs “where locomotive engineers are confined to essentially small cages – into which they barely fit – creates both safety and security issues that are foreseeable and avoidable.”
Other railroads feature both types of cabs.
Ruef said New York City’s Metro North commuter line switched from small cabs to full-width cabs when it recently bought new cars. A spokeswoman for Metro North said the new cars actually have a “convertible” cab design, with a door that can transform a small cab into a full-width cab.
On NJ Transit, most cars are pulled by locomotives, so the cars don’t have cabs. SEPTA’s new cars are self-propelled units.
For SEPTA riders, who have been waiting six years for new cars, the chief interest is simply getting rid of the old ones.
“The Silverliner V cars will have a lot of passenger and crew safety features that are lacking from the 40-year-old cars they will replace,” Mitchell of the passengers’ organization said. “So, the best thing SEPTA can do from a safety standpoint is to avoid any further changes that would delay delivery, and get them into service as soon as possible.”