The Oil Drum

70 comments on Electrified Rail: An Overlooked Mitigation Strategy for Peak Oil?

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Gail the Actuary on October 20, 2006 - 9:58am

One of the details that will need to be worked out is getting all of the new trains produced, and then maintaining them all.

I read in the Atlanta paper that they are having real problems keeping an adequate number of train cars in service. The frequency of repair, especially of the motorized doors, is extremely high, even of the new cars that have been delivered. They have been forced to cannibalize some of the new cars, to keep as many as possible operating. I think that part of the problem is that the cars are made overseas, and long-term support is a problem.

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AlanfromBigEasy on October 20, 2006 - 10:08am

At the 2004 APTA conference (where I presented a paper) that had one session devoted just to doors !

I sat through part of one presentation (boring) but I think that there are good solutions out there.

Due to "Buy America" provisions, foreign designs are built in this country. A factory is set up, cars for one or more cities are built, factory dismantled. Support from foreign sources.

One purpose of the strategic rail reserve (Step 5 in below link)

http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm

Is to create a larger reserve fleet and to help create a stable US industry.

Best Hopes,

Alan

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Gail the Actuary on October 20, 2006 - 11:00am

This is a link to the Atlanta Jounal article.

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PhilRelig on October 20, 2006 - 1:16pm

Then how about installing doors that passengers open manually? For safety purposes, it seems to me that an automatic locking mechanism while in motion would be sufficient.

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EngineerAU on October 20, 2006 - 2:02pm

From conversations I've had with people at MARTA, it appears that the door opening mechanism in the new cars were overengineered. If you look at the mechanism for the doors on the older cars, it's quite simple but on the new cars it looks like the game mouse trap. I use MARTA everyday to get to and from work and I've noticed that it's almost always the new cars that have problems with door sticking open or acting wobbly when the car is in motion.

As far as the reliability of the new cars goes, since every transit system has different cars, everything in them appear to be unique. There is no savings from producing in large scale and after a few year the parts become scarace because no one wants to warehouse or product parts for vehicles with so few numbers in service.

If the nation standardized around just two or three vehicle types for each of the different types of rail (heavy, light, streetcar), it could both reduce cost and increase reliability. Obviously if this happened then the more rail lines in service would just make the savings and reliability go up even further.