Crossing fingers for a good ending to this Philadelphia story

Borrowed MARC cars from Maryland mix with out-of-service Silverliner V cars in SEPTA's 30th Street Yard as seen from Philadelphia's Drexel University neighborhood. Philadelphia's downtown or 'Center City' is in the background. Photo by Steve Sweeney

PHILADELPHIA — The message came on Monday shortly after I mailed a post card at Benjamin Franklin's original post office, but before I ate an obligatory cheesesteak. 

The email was brief, but polite: There was more trouble with the Silverliner V cars over the weekend and I needed to speak with SEPTA's public relations' person. The immediate reason is that I have an interview scheduled this week with a SEPTA manager and the PR people needed me to know that some of the answers to my questions were now going to be more tentative.

I didn't understand until Monday evening that the Hyundai-Rotem-built cars had to be pulled once more for structural defects on Sept. 11. This is just weeks after Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority management released a handful Silverliner Vs back into service after making repairs to the cars' truck frames. It appears there were more truck frame problems.

And that is really bad news.

From railroad critics and supporters, SEPTA did the right thing in July to pull all 120 of its newest regional rail or commuter cars because an inspection found truck frame cracks. Despite the obvious embarrassment, the railroad showed it put safety ahead of all else. Were the cracks the result of design flaws that SEPTA and Hyundai should have caught or because of a manufacturing defect that went unnoticed? I don't know. And at this point, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that Hyundai and SEPTA get the cars fixed and rolling again to put the controversy behind them. The longer the repairs drag out, the less trust the public will have in railroad management, which is already under fire in Philadelphia for trains that are late and poor infrastructure — problems new cars were supposed to help address.

A drawn-out controversy is also bad for builders and suppliers which depend on popular demand and public support to get new equipment or just plain spend money on commuter rail. Hyundai-Rotem is but the latest maker with problems. Japan's Nippon-Sharyo infamously had a bi-level car shell prototype that failed a structural test in 2015. There's no word yet on when their might be a new test, let alone when the bi-level cars for California and the Midwest service will ever see an assembly line. And Bombardier? We know the Canadian company is still kicking, but quietly reeling from the need for a cash infusion from a Quebec pension fund in 2015 while being late for Canadian streetcar orders. As far as good news goes, France's Alstom won a new contract to augment Northeast Corridor high speed equipment to the tune of $2.45 billion, but delivery is years away.

Streetcar makers aside, that leaves Siemens with its passenger locomotives and Brightline coach production, CAF and its Amtrak order, and a handful of rebuilders scoring clean successes in North America. And for the industry's sake and to make advocate's lives a little easier, we can't afford any more failures.

To SEPTA and Hyundai-Rotem I say: Good luck. We're all counting on you.