(The Philadelphia Inquirer posted the following article by Jere Downs and Anthony R. Wood on its website on October 26.)
PHILADELPHIA — The enemy is just a few inches long, weighs 0.06 of an ounce soaking wet, and can be knocked down by a whisper of wind. Yet every fall it sends 100-ton locomotives skidding like bears on skates, throws train schedules out of whack for weeks, and turns boring commutes into white-knuckle slaloms.
It is the leaf – the banana peel of public transit – and it has never been licked.
Crushed against the rails on dewy fall days, leaves form an ice-slick coating on which brakes are useless. Trains blow past stations, back up, and slide by again – “like the Three Stooges,” says Tom Dorricott, an engineer whose train is mercilessly leafed on SEPTA’s R3 Media/Elwyn line.
Now, facing one of the heaviest, juiciest foliage drops in recent memory in the Northeast, transit agencies are bringing in the big guns: an arsenal of leaf-busting armaments that scrub, squirt, slime, dust, blast – whatever it takes to win the Friction War.
SEPTA’s secret weapons are the Gel Cars, which rumble nightly to the front.
Two gutted, 65-foot-long locomotives painted bright blue, they each carry 530 gallons of a gritty goo made of sand, hot water and microscopic steel balls. At one end of the car is a $15,000 pressure washer that blasts the tracks at 5,000 pounds per square inch. From the other end a rubber hose dangles, dispensing traction gel.
Traveling at 10 miles an hour, the pair can cover 120 miles a night, or about half of SEPTA’s rail network.
The technology was put to work shortly after the season’s first major leaf drop occurred on the windy, wet night of Oct. 15. The next day, a Thursday, slippery rails caused 167 trains (out of 763 systemwide) to be delayed by at least six minutes, and in one-third of those cases by more than 15 minutes.
That night, the Gel Cars rolled, reinforced by a platoon of workers who walked the rails and laid low-tech “sand torpedoes,” discs of compressed sand the size and color of Nilla wafers, on the most hazardous spots. On Friday, the leaves had their way with only 69 trains.
The worst weeks are still to come, but “so far, so good,” said Patrick Nowakowski, SEPTA’s deputy general manager. “There’s a certain amount of witchcraft and luck to this.”
Luck is something that SEPTA had little of last year. Leaves made 2,357 trains late, the poorest performance since 1995. SEPTA’s efforts were not helped when the sand torpedoes ran out. This year, SEPTA has stockpiled 29,000 gallons of traction gel, worth $254,000, and a double order of 150,000 torpedoes.
In South Jersey, trains on the PATCO High-Speed Line occasionally have trouble around the Woodcrest Station, said general manager Robert A. Box. But the tracks generally do not traverse old neighborhoods such as the Main Line, where woody backyards abut the rail bed and inhibit SEPTA’s operations.
The northern half of the state, on the other hand, is a regular leaf riot.
Last year, New Jersey Transit encountered such severe problems there that workers were reduced to drizzling sand onto the rails through the tips of orange construction cones.
This year, the agency’s new $420,000 Aqua Track is roaring into service. Obscured in a mist of its own making, the machine shoots water through three jets mounted above each rail, power-washing at 20,000 pounds per square inch, or four times the rate of the Gel Cars.
NJ Transit officials said they were not impressed with SEPTA’s defense. They already tried gel and abandoned it because “it would freeze or clog on us,” said John Flannery, an equipment supervisor.
By the same token, SEPTA isn’t impressed with Aqua Track.
NJ Transit “spent half a million dollars on a machine that is not proven,” Nowakowski said. “They will have a baptism by fire.”
The British most likely aren’t impressed with any of it.
Leaf drop is so catastrophic for public transit in Britain that schedules are altered each fall – padded so that beleaguered trains at least appear to be running on time.
That is not a sign that the British have given up. They spend $75 million annually to beat the leaf, mostly with train-borne sanders, gel cars, scrubbers and vegetation control.
There, however, the smart money is riding on works in progress, such as railhead moisture sensors that warn engineers of trouble ahead or light beams so intense that leaves (and for that matter, anything else on the tracks) would be vaporized.
SEPTA considered adding lasers when it drafted specifications for its 104 new Silverliner Five cars early this year. But wary of technology that it considered experimental, SEPTA decided against the lasers, asking bidders instead to include antilock brakes and on-car sanders.
“We are still trying a lot of different things,” Nowakowski said. “If there was one formula that everybody knew that worked, we would be doing it.”
Such a formula would be particularly handy this year. The rainfall of the last several months, experts say, has produced a formidable canopy.
It is impossible to tally leaf-shedding trees – “you might as well count mosquitoes,” said Tim Block, the arborist at the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania. But, based on data from the U.S. Forest Service, Philadelphia and its four adjacent Pennsylvania counties have roughly six million trees with about five billion leaves. Together, they would blanket Rhode Island.
This fall, those leaves “are coming down with all their juice in them,” lamented Ben Dwinnell, SEPTA’s chief railroad officer.
“The rest of the season will be the test.”