(The following story by Michael Dresser appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on October 8, 2009.)
BALTIMORE, Md. — The beleaguered MARC commuter train system received hopeful news this week as the Maryland Transit Administration welcomed back to its fleet the first of four electric locomotives that have languished in an Amtrak repair yard in Delaware for much of the past three years.
Terry Schindler, Amtrak’s deputy chief mechanical officer, said the railroad expects to return a second locomotive to the MTA by early next week. He said Amtrak believes it has found a way to repair an electrical problem that had sidelined MARC’s 23-year-old fleet of AEM-7 locomotives and hopes to deliver the remaining two to MARC before the end of the year.
“I think we’ve hit on a positive fix here,” Schindler said. “It’s taken us much too long to get to this point.”
A shortage of electric locomotives has been the main reason that MARC has been forced to run short, crowded trains on the Penn Line in recent months. When too few electric locomotives are available, MARC has to substitute less-powerful diesel engines that can pull fewer cars. The locomotive shortage also leaves the system vulnerable to breakdowns that have forced train cancellations.
A spokesman for the Maryland Department of Transportation confirmed that the MTA has received one engine from Amtrak. He said MARC has put that engine through two rounds of testing and that so far it has passed. It underwent a third phase of testing – pulling a scheduled Penn Line train with a second locomotive as backup – Wednesday evening and could return to full service as early as next week if it passes two more tests.
“The phrase ‘cautiously optimistic’ is one you will hear repeatedly from us,” said spokesman Jack Cahalan.
The MARC fleet of locomotives is made up of 35 engines – 10 electric and 25 diesel-powered – that haul trains on the Penn, Camden and Brunswick lines.
The electric locomotives, which can be used only on the Amtrak-owned Penn Line, are more powerful and can pull trains with more cars, but in recent years they have shown greater fragility, contributing to frequent service problems.
Of MARC’s 10 electric locomotives, four are AEM-7s that came on line in 1986. The remaining six are HHP-8 models (known as Hippos) that were put into service in 2003. Amtrak maintains the locomotives under a contract with the MTA.
In 2006, MARC began a cycle of midlife overhauls of the AEM-7s that was originally expected to take 18 months, Cahalan said, but workers at the Amtrak repair yard in Wilmington uncovered problems that added 11 months to the expected downtime, Cahalan said.
The two AEM-7s that went into the shop in 2006 were returned to MARC in October 2008 and January 2009. But those locomotives were soon found to have a puzzling electrical glitch that led to frequent breakdowns. They were returned to the Amtrak repair yard last spring and remained there through the summer alongside two other MARC AEM-7s as technicians struggled to find a fix to the electrical malfunction.
Schindler said one complication was the difficulty of procuring compatible spare parts for switches that were made during the 1980s. He said Amtrak, which has 20 AEM-7s of its own, had to scout world markets to find a company that would manufacture the parts to its specifications. Once Amtrak received the initial replacement components, Schindler said, MARC’s locomotives were scheduled to be the first to receive them.
“They’re at the front of the line,” he said.
To operate its Penn Line schedule at full capacity, MARC needs a minimum of four electric locomotives to be fit for service, Cahalan said. But in recent months, he said, there have been times when it couldn’t muster that many and had to replace them with diesels, which pull fewer cars.
MARC’s diesel fleet is more than 30 years old and due for replacement with 26 modern diesel locomotives – the first of which had been expected to go into service this summer. But their debut was delayed by a dispute with the manufacturer over safety certifications – an impasse that was resolved last month. If no problems arise in certification or testing, Cahalan said, the MTA expects to deploy the first two new diesel engines by the end of this year and to add two per month next year.
If the AEM-7s are returned to service as predicted and the delivery of new diesels picks up, MARC could be operating a substantially transformed fleet by late 2010.
Rafael Guroian, MARC Riders Advisory Committee chairman, expressed cautious hope about the return of the locomotives.
“I’m glad to hear that they think they’ve found the fix. Of course, they thought they found the fix before,” he said.