It's a very dark summer for Metro.
A 63-year-old track worker of 19 years was killed Sunday night by a ballast regulator on the Orange Line, here in my neck of the woods. There is a safety "stand-down" going on for four days.
On July 31, a train operator was high on pot and put together a 10-car consist and drove it, still high, from the yard to the Greenbelt station and handed it over to the regular road operator. It stopped at four more stations with the two extra cars extending past the end of the platform. Eventually a rider paged the operator through the emergency intercom that there were too many cars on his train. The second operator is still working, not really his fault. The original operator is in deep trouble.
I have to say, Katoe said ARINC is designing a new overlay system that "does not exist yet in any form" to protect against failures of the other systems. What is this? Why isn't ATCS sufficient?
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
You know, I have a funny recollection that in 1995, when I moved here, I did witness speeds that were over 69 mph. This in spite of whatever I already posted.
My point was that the idea that operators still "thought" was 75 mph is not supported by the evidence. The system would have slowed the train, at least the way I observed, with the not-really-overspeed audible overspeed indicator.
This was just before the winter where they allowed manual control, where an operator died in icy conditions.
The WMATA Metrorail system is shrouded in too much secrecy. It's time to start reasearching ARINC and ENSCO contract bids to understand it for real.
oltmannd Jerry Pier the WMATA Consultant, LT Klauder was instructed that no changes to the original specification would be allowed for mistakes or any other reason I've seen some stupid things happen on the RR, but, this one takes the cake! WMATA may not be the brightest outfit around. Also, their GM thought they were on permanent 59 mph max authorized speed, but the operators thought 75 mph was still allowed under good conditions and ran that way.
Jerry Pier the WMATA Consultant, LT Klauder was instructed that no changes to the original specification would be allowed for mistakes or any other reason
I've seen some stupid things happen on the RR, but, this one takes the cake!
WMATA may not be the brightest outfit around. Also, their GM thought they were on permanent 59 mph max authorized speed, but the operators thought 75 mph was still allowed under good conditions and ran that way.
75 MPH is long since gone from this system -- even though that was the originally intended max speed. This is called bait-and-switch, or taking the rapid out of transit!
Yeah, I'm not sure where the speculation came up that the operators were riding at an unauthorized 75 mph speed. On the Virginia side of the Orange Line, the beep-beep-beep goes off all the time going down the hills. When I started riding in 1995 I wondered why we rarely ventured near 65 mph on the surface.
aegrotatioThis puzzles me. The trains have audible braking indicator. You can hear it in the lead car. The tone sounds when the automatic brake slows the train, even when the trains are apparently being automatically controlled. It goes "beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep" and is really loud. Often you hear it when the operator is making station stop announcements. It doesn't seem to be an 'overspeed' indicator but it seems to act like one. In the tunnels the tone sounds when the train slows or stops due to a train up ahead (the operator often mentions the train ahead caused our train to stop, too).
It's is an overspeed of a sort. It's a "you are going faster than the current signal indication allows" warning. The onboard system on the train reacts by applying the brakes unitl the speed for that signal aspect is met.
aegrotatioOn the surface on the Orange and Red lines I never saw the speed indicator go above 65 mph
Once upon a time, the top speed was 75.
I posted a link to the new Metro control center video here. At no time do trains disappear.
http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/155835.aspx
oltmanndThat their ATP system was compromised when adhesion was bad meant that the ATP system had to enforce the max authorized speed. Letting an easily overriden supervisory system try to do it is just plain nuts. Also, their GM thought they were on permanent 59 mph max authorized speed, but the operators thought 75 mph was still allowed under good conditions and ran that way.
Also, their GM thought they were on permanent 59 mph max authorized speed, but the operators thought 75 mph was still allowed under good conditions and ran that way.
This puzzles me. The trains have audible braking indicator. You can hear it in the lead car. The tone sounds when the automatic brake slows the train, even when the trains are apparently being automatically controlled. It goes "beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep" and is really loud. Often you hear it when the operator is making station stop announcements. It doesn't seem to be an 'overspeed' indicator but it seems to act like one. In the tunnels the tone sounds when the train slows or stops due to a train up ahead (the operator often mentions the train ahead caused our train to stop, too).
On the surface on the Orange and Red lines I never saw the speed indicator go above 65 mph. Most trains you can see the speed on the cab display if you look carefully. The same audible braking indicator sounds when trains coast too fast down inclines, and the operator doesn't seem to take any action to slow the train (it does it automatically).
Catoe, the GM, doesn't appear to know how the system actually works based on what I'm hearing him say to the media. He was only on the job since late 2006 and probably should get qualified as an operator before he pisses off the union even more about this problem.
There is too much urban legend folklore about the Rohr WMATA bid to be believed.
Similar cars in broader gauge are used by BART.
As for train crashes, the object of the game is to keep the trains separated.
Rohr built much more than WMATA and BART. I would like to point out the Rohr Turboliners with 30 years' service on Amtrak.
The Metro Rail crash near the Ft. Totten station on June 22 raises some questions both about the cars involved and the control system, and some of the questions may be answered once the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) finishes its investigation.
Two series of cars were involved in the crash, a train of 1000 series cars which impacted a standing train composed of a later series of cars, but I don’t know the series number or the builder of the impacted cars. The 1000 series cars – which are the oldest cars in Metro’s fleet - were involved in a collision in 2004. Some of the cars buckled in that collision and the NTSB recommended in its report in 2006 that the 1000 series cars should either be strengthened, placed in the middle of its trains, or they should be replaced. The later series of Metro’s cars were apparently built to be more crashworthy so this raises the question, why weren’t the earliest series of Metro cars initially built to be more crashworthy? Further, the 1000 series cars were retrofitted and rehabilitated so another question is why wasn’t the structural integrity of these cars upgraded then? As a result of this most recent crash Metro did take one of the NTSB’s earlier recommendations and it placed its 1000 series cars in the middle of its trains. At first Metro said it would take a long time to do this, but they did do it quickly
The later series of Metro cars have event recorders which the earliest series of Metro cars don’t have. After the 2004 crash the NTSB recommended event recorders should be installed on all o Metro’s cars so why weren’t the earlier series of Metro cars retrofitted with such recorders?
The control circuit on the track where the collision occurred has become a vexing problem. It malfunctioned before the crash, and from all accounts it continues to malfunction. A component of the control circuit called a Wee-Z bond was replaced five days before the crash, and the circuit tested ok so were the component or the repair to blame? The NTSB is investigating these questions.
Some of the reasons, other than the change order restrictions, Rohr lost all that money:
1) The option order for BART had just been completed and it had gone smoothly with all of the growing pains taken care of. (As I recall, they actually made money on this second order but not enough to zero out the losses on the first). The design for the WMATA cars was to be similar so it should have been a piece of cake. However, following aerospace practice, they had let all of the engineers on the BART program go several weeks before they got WMATA. This gets rid of the costs of people without a contract to fund them. They expected to be able to get thse people back but they failed to take into account that these were rail transit rather than areospace engineers and they did not come back. Documentation is good but you need the people and they had to start from scratch again.
2) To reduce car shipment costs, it was planned to build the cars in Winder, GA but to do the complete engineering in Chula Vista (the home plant) and send it in ready-to-build shape to Winder. Winder supervision was from Chula Vista but the labor was local and had no knowlege of transit car building. The whole program was tightly scheduled and failure to meet any of the mileposts tended to have an immediate effect on continuity of employment. As a result, when the "engineering comlete' date came up, documentation went to Winder with the assumption that it was complete. It was far from it which resulted in mass commuting of people between California and Georgia. This eventually solved the problem but it was expensive.
3) At the same time, WMATA was far from ready to accept the first car on the contract delivery date. Whle Rohr was not ready either, it looked like they could deliver the first car before WMATA was ready for it. Rohr's division VP asked me to check the contract to see if they could charge for WAMATA's delay. I reviewed the contract in detail. with help from in-house lawyers. We reported "only if you have built a perfect car". The subject did not come up again.
As you can imagine, the life of Program Manager on this project was similar to that of a tail gunner in a WWII B-17 and the Engineering manager was almost as vulnerable
Jerry Pier
WMATA may not be the brightest outfit around. I was reading the NTSB report about a wreck in the mid 90s. When it was determined that weather conditions did not allow sufficient braking to get stopped from normal operating speeds - a real honest to God safety issue, WMATA dealt with it by 1) just having supervision tell operators about the lower speed limit and 2) by having their train management system tell the trains to operate at a lower performance level.
That their ATP system was compromised when adhesion was bad meant that the ATP system had to enforce the max authorized speed. Letting an easily overriden supervisory system try to do it is just plain nuts.
With all the discussion concerning the 1000 series cars in the recent collision, some aspects their aquisition might be interesting.
1) At $92 million, Rohr Industries was the low bidder by a significant margin. Other bidders screamed that aerospace companies always bid low and made their profit on change orders. In that the Rohr bid was fully compliant, the board had no alternative to accepting it. However, to prevent Rohr from making money on changes. the WMATA Consultant, LT Klauder was instructed that no changes to the original specification would be allowed for mistakes or any other reason. While this seemed feasable to the board, its result was that inevitable mistakes in the spec could not be corrected. As an example, the spec called out a minimum acceptable life for the disk brake pads,but no mention was made of disk life. Formulating a compostion to meet the life and other performance requirements was not that difficult. A hard, highly abrasive material did it with ease. Unfortunately, the pads lasted longer that the disks. Replacing disks was a lot more expensive than replacing pads but the problem could not be corrected without a spec change.
A number of problems of this type ended up in court and were eventually resolved but in the meantime, a second car order went out for bid and, because of the litigation, the original spec with all of its errors had to be used, perpetuating a bad situation.
Eventually, all of this got sorted out but Rohr was forced out of the surface tranportation businessby itd board after losing $60 million on a $92 million contract. This was not good for either WMATA or the US car building buisness.
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