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NYC subway relies on decades-old, outmoded signals, switches and track equipment


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There is a nice video here. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-subway-relies-decades-old-outmoded-signals-switches-article-1.3184666

 

 

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, May 22, 2017, 5:00 AM

The city’s subway tracks are the place where mass transit and time travel intersect.

But not in a good way.

Twenty-first century straphangers are reliant on sometimes obsolete mechanical equipment installed as long as 80 years ago — when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium.

“A lot of the equipment in the field — the signals and the switches — are the original signals and switches,” said Metropolitan Transportation Authority subways chief Wynton Habersham.

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Habersham led the Daily News on a tour of subway stations to illustrate how these crucial pieces of mass transit infrastructure keep trains flowing after decades of wear and tear.

It was clear the MTA is working on borrowed time track as crews diligently replaced components of outmoded mechanical track equipment to keep unanticipated and disruptive failures to a minimum. And there’s plenty more pieces of old equipment that need upgrades along the immense 700 miles of track — even decades after the MTA launched its first major repair plan in 1982, following a series by The News that showed how dangerous the system was.

This patching must be done until the laborious and time-consuming effort to modernize track signal equipment is complete.

 

On the Sunday evening Habersham took The News into the tunnels, track workers were busy upgrading an interlocking — a system that manages train movements — that was installed at the W. 34th St.-Herald Square station in the early 1930s.

MTA lingo guide for NYC straphangers

Even something as basic as a cable is an antique.

Workers popped open a junction box to show a 70-year-old cloth-covered cable, due for the scrap heap next year, connected to newer rubber-covered wires.

“Remember 2011?” Habersham asks a track worker.

Six years ago at the crucial Sixth Ave. line interlocking, these old, cloth-covered cables — flammable and susceptible to water damage — failed. Crews were forced to replace 19 aging cables.

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“We had what could have been a universal failure of the signal system,” recalled Habersham. “It stopped the corridor probably for about two days. We had to basically manually flag trains through this area.”

Ten of the 200 track interlockings along the subway’s main lines remain in use, according to Habersham. Two will be decommissioned this year.

And it’s not just the track equipment that’s old.

At the W. 4th St. station, a dispatcher was jotting down the time as a train pulled into the station. The data was then plugged into a computer.

Dispatchers in the tower room of the station monitored train locations on a massive electromechanical machine half as big as the room itself.

Green and blue lights moved across white lines against a blackboard as big as an overhead deli menu.

high-tech-subways.jpg Lights on a section of the MTA subway interlocking switch and signal control board shows train locations, at the 4th Street MTA Supervisory Tower in New York in 2014.   (BEBETO MATTHEWS/AP)

Below the lights, the machine featured a row of red and black levers that must be manually pulled and pushed to control switches and signals on the tracks.

In a musty room tucked away in the back, drab green cabinets house 120-volt signal relays that communicate between the tower room machines and equipment on the tracks.

Habersham used a light on his cell phone and squinted to read the dates scrawled on the machines. Some still bore the name of the original manufacturer, General Railway Signal Co.

One relay was dated April 2, 1940. A second relay machine from 1940 was since refurbished — 40 years ago, in 1977.

When there's a breakdown, it’s up to NYC Transit to fix it — General Railway Signal Co. isn’t around anymore to provide tech support.

And yes, the cables in this room are also covered in cloth that's highly flammable, making the area a potential tinderbox that would take the train system down with it if it caught fire. The MTA in 2005 experienced such a blaze in a signal relay room at Chambers St. on the A and C lines.

New, 16-volt signal relays that are replacing the relics in use now will at least be fireproof.

“It’s just not as reliable. We test these cables regularly, we know that they’re safe. But it becomes harder and harder to do it,” Habersham said.

Since 1982, when the MTA launched its repair plan to rescue the crumbling subway system, the agency has had to perform triage, upgrading equipment most at risk of failing.

But 35 years later, the job is not done.

“The signal program is lagging other assets. We have a good amount in the system that’s older than we want it to be,” Habersham said. “We had to do what was most at risk. These were not most at risk in 1982.”

Transit officials say signal malfunctions are a prime cause of delays that can cripple service around the system.

On a winter night, the A and C platforms at Fulton Center were jam-packed on a thin platform as the rush hour was supposed to be winding down.

An MTA alert ambiguously said there were “extensive delays” on the A, B, C, and D lines around 7:01 p.m. from an “incident” at 59th St.-Columbus Circle. Hours earlier, at 4:30 p.m., power was cut to the system, tripping the emergency brakes on multiple trains and turning the signal lights red.

The culprit behind the power problem was a signal relay that was being replaced during routine inspection.

Long after the disruption started, six stations away at Fulton Center, the power outage was still wrecking weeknight commutes.

On the Uptown side, Lora Gerulsky, 23, waited about 20 minutes for an A train to take her to a dinner date with her boyfriend.

mta-subway-tour.jpg A worker cleans the track as workers make repairs on the New York City Subway B & D subway line.   (JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

“I may not get home until after 8 tonight, ruining my dinner plans,” she said.

“Should I take a cab at this point?” she fretted, likely not alone in that sentiment.

At that moment, the headlights of her train were visible.

The MTA’s public data on train delays actually obscures how often a signal or interlocking malfunction disrupts service.

These problems are lumped into a single category — “right of way” delays, in MTA parlance — that also includes broken rails and train traffic.

They were responsible for 10,112 delays in March, out of 78,558 for the month, according to the latest MTA stats.

That’s double the amount of these delays from March 2012.

To keep signals in fine working order, the MTA is spending millions to upgrade its antiquated signaling system.

But under the agency’s latest capital plan, modernizing key interlocking systems to let more trains to run must wait until 2018 — there are no such projects beginning this year.

“There’s a shift in the organization. They feel like if there’s better station settings, then riders will feel better,” an NYC Transit source told The News.

But when it comes to tackling major choke points by overhauling interlockings, “I don’t foresee it any time soon,” the source said.

Those upgrades slated to start in 2018 and 2019 — at a cost of $678 million — will modernize five interlockings on the Culver, Eighth Ave. and Queens Blvd. lines.

So far, there’s just one $170 million project under the MTA’s 2015 capital plan already underway, at Kings Highway on the Culver line. It’s slated to be complete in 2021.

Overall spending on signal and communication systems was on par with money dedicated to station work — nearly $2.8 billion, a modest 2% bump in funding from the five-year plan from 2010.

Yet spending on station upgrades jumped 30%, to nearly $2.8 billion in the current capital plan, from $2.1 billion in the 2010 budget.

Gov. Cuomo, who controls the MTA, has pushed the agency to prioritize station improvements, with canopies over entrances, brighter lights, more signs and extra seating. He also jump-started a long delayed plan to bring countdown clocks to the lettered lines.

Cuomo spokesman Jon Weinstein defended the MTA’s spending priorities, saying the agency got the largest capital budget in the MTA’s history — $10 billion more than the first plan from 1982 in today's dollars, according to the agency.

mta.jpg Some of the new model subway cars approach the Avenue X station on the F line.   (JEFFERSON SIEGEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

“To suggest that modernizing signals and improving stations are an either/or choice is flat out wrong,” Weinstein said. “The MTA is rebuilding stations and modernizing signals at the same time.”

MTA spokeswoman Beth DeFalco said stations cannot be ignored, citing a 4x4 chunk of concrete that fell from the ceiling to the tracks at the F line’s Prospect Ave. station around 1:40 a.m. in June 2015. A year later, in June 2016, concrete rained from the ceiling onto the tracks of the DeKalb Ave. station in Brooklyn around 2:45 p.m.

At the same time, she said, the MTA’s pace in upgrading the system would be the same, because New Yorkers wouldn’t accept the painful and prolonged service disruptions necessary to do the work.

MTA interim Executive Director Ronnie Hakim said the agency is catching up after decades of neglect, touting the unprecedented size of the $29 billion capital plan.

“We have to work on many fronts all at once,” she said.

Vintage is not in vogue everywhere in the subway system.

The 14th St. station on the L line also has a room where trains are monitored and controlled. Gone, however, are the massive anachronistic machines that manage trains at the W. 4th St. station. Instead, that's all been condensed to a tidy setup of three computer screens.

This is cutting-edge technology at the MTA, known as Communication-Based Train Control.

Mahase Tulsie, an assistant train dispatcher, was in the tiny room watching L trains blip across the monitors as they chugged along the entire route, from Eighth Ave. to Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn.

Instead of yanking on mechanical levers to move tracks, “he actually can do routing on these monitors, as well, at the click of the mouse,” Habersham said.

The L train was the first line to get this track-signal technology, allowing the MTA to run trains closer together, therefore more frequently. The system also requires fewer parts on the tracks that can be damaged.

“When equipment is located on the tracks, it’s subject to train movement, it’s subject to water conditions, it’s subject to the environment of the tracks, vibration and the like,” Habersham said. “CBTC considerably reduces the amount of equipment on the tracks. As a result, you have less points of failure. That’s one of the real benefits.”

It was good timing as well — ridership on the L line exploded with the population booms in Williamsburg and Bushwick. But it's still not enough to handle today’s L train crowds The MTA needs $300 million in federal money to build power substations that can pump an extra two trains an hour through the route.

Meanwhile, the MTA is budgeting $1 billion over five years to bring Communication-Based Train Control technology to the Eighth Ave., Culver and Queens Blvd. lines, according to the agency. The technology will boost service on the No. 7 line this year.

But the MTA will have to pick up the pace — millennials riding the subway today would qualify for a senior discount when the agency finally modernizes its entire signal system, according to a 2014 report from the Regional Plan Association.

The report estimated it will take the MTA 50 years to fully overhaul its 19th-century-style signal system, if it sticks with updating four miles of track a year. An MTA official said the agency wants to speed up installation.

“That should be rolled out faster,” agreed Kate Slevin, vice president of programs and advocacy at the Regional Plan Association, a research nonprofit. “It’s been painfully slow.”

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Remember that the transit system's purpose is not to move people. The system exists to keep professional complainers in business (which is why the Straphangers Campaign opposed the first Capital Program back in 1982).

 

The complaints are valid.

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Remember that the transit system's purpose is not to move people. The system exists to keep professional complainers in business (which is why the Straphangers Campaign opposed the first Capital Program back in 1982).

So in other words people should be okay with the (MTA) using outdated technology?  <_< You are a piece of work.

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So in other words people should be okay with the (MTA) using outdated technology?  <_< You are a piece of work.

 

Thats only on the B division! The A Division is update!  Thats why they are able to cram more trains into service in the A division. The Trains can actually been seen and controlled!

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Thats only on the B division! The A Division is update!  Thats why they are able to cram more trains into service in the A division. The Trains can actually been seen and controlled!

You apparently didn't see why I said that. It was in response to Gotham's sarcastic remark.
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