(The following story by Paul Nussbaum appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on June 26.)
PHILADELPHIA — To help ease overcrowding on Regional Rail lines, SEPTA plans to lease eight used railcars from NJ Transit.
The cars, to augment SEPTA’s existing fleet of 348 cars until new Silverliner V cars begin arriving in 2009, are to be put into service next month if the $10,000-a-month lease is approved by the SEPTA board today.
As gasoline prices rise, SEPTA rail ridership is up 14 percent this year, and many rush-hour trains are packed with standing passengers, straining the system’s capacity.
The leased cars, which are being retired by NJ Transit as new double-decker cars come on line, must be used with SEPTA locomotives because they are not self-propelled like most of SEPTA’s fleet.
The NJ Transit cars will allow SEPTA to increase the length – and the capacity – of its seven locomotive-pulled trains, assistant general manager for operations Patrick Nowakowski said. SEPTA will also “make some schedule adjustments to make these seven trains carry more people, and thus give us some flexibility to move the other equipment around to create more system-wide capacity,” Nowakowski said.
NJ Transit, with ridership at record levels and growing monthly, is spending more than $500,000 to buy 279 multilevel cars, made by Bombardier Transportation. Those train cars are all to be in service on the Northeast Corridor line to New York by the end of 2009.
SEPTA’s lease of the used cars is for two years, with an option to extend the lease for an additional year. The total cost of the contract is not to exceed $360,000.
The new Silverliner V cars are to begin arriving in the fall or winter of 2009, months later than originally scheduled.
SEPTA gave Rotem USA Corp. an extension until April to deliver the first three test Silverliner V railcars because of steel shortages and the bankruptcy of a communications-equipment supplier.
That will mean that delivery of the rest of the 120-car order will also be pushed back at least four months. Final delivery of all the railcars is now scheduled for October 2010.
Rotem, a division of South Korean automaker Hyundai Motors Group, and Sojitz Corp., a Japanese company, have formed a consortium to build 120 Silverliners for $274 million.
The railcars are to be assembled at a South Philadelphia plant from components brought in from around the world. The initial three test cars are being built in South Korea.
The new Silverliners will replace 73 railcars that were built for SEPTA in the 1960s. With the retirement of the old cars and the addition of the new ones, SEPTA will have about 400 by 2010.