engineerboy6561

I'm not saying anyone has to; my thought was primarily that given the perception of increased crime on the subways it might be useful to have conductors start using the cameras to track incidents and coordinate with MTAPD/social service agencies/EMS/etc. when something doesn't look right. It would be a relatively easy PR win, but would also possibly actually deter some crimes and maybe even save a couple lives (someone collapses on an train while it's rolling through the express tracks at 103 St; if the conductor sees that on the camera they can have EMS meet them on the platform at 125 St without having to wait for scared and confused passengers to call it in, and the extra couple minutes of response time could go a long way for something like a heart attack or a stroke). I'm mostly wondering if there's a particular reason for the MTA to not adopt that approach that I wouldn't be aware of as a civilian.

That's fair; it makes no sense to have surveillance that can't be used in normal operation, but that sounds like something that people need to take up with the MTA rather than something that individual line employees should pick a fight with their bosses over; that said it makes no sense to spend the money to have such a system and not use it.

It never ran to GCT, only to Willis Av; I don't believe they ever ran through trains to NYP or GCT before they went bankrupt. My argument here is that trying to connect to NYP would only really allow for 2 tph or so, and trying to connect to GCT would get you like 0.5tph and tie up Highbridge job on every move); both of those would be a huge downgrade from the 12-15 they currently get in service.

There's no good way to tie that into Metro North; the tracks come into 180 St at something like 30-40' above road level and the NEC tracks are at something like 30-40' below road level; the grade would be atrocious, and there's no way to connect the bottom of the NEC with GCT in a reasonable fashion (technically the Oak Point track exists, but that's unelectrified single track and would require a reversing move through Highbridge Yard that renders it entirely impractical to use in regular service) which means everything would have to go through an already congested East River Tunnel and take already scarce slots away from Amtrak/LIRR/NJT. You'd be lucky to get 2tph under those conditions, which would be like an 85-90% loss in capacity for the folks who live up there (and would make their commutes much worse than they currently are). I've definitely reused the upper part of that ROW in some very crayon-y proposals for intercity rail service (think NYC-Boston via White Plains/Danbury/Waterbury/Hartford/Worcester via the upper NYW&B/I-684/I-84/I-90), but even on those plans I basically had a pair of connecting tracks to the New Haven Line for commuter service to Danbury and put the intercity portion of the line south of MNR on the Hutchinson River Parkway ROW with a connection to the NEC in Goose Creek Marsh near Split Rock Golf Course.

It probably doesn't feel much different; within a set the trailer car is also going to be getting pushed by the cars behind it as well as pulled by the cars in front of it, and the traction motors are loud enough that you can hear them regardless of which car you're in. As far as the connectors are concerned, the nice thing about having draw bars within sets is that you don't really have to worry about coupling slack as long as the tensile strength of each bar is significantly more than the maximum difference in tractive effort between the two cars that are connected (and if that tensile strength is much higher than the maximum difference in tractive effort then it wouldn't stress the drawbar too much. For an 82,000lb car decelerating at maximum rate (3.0mph/s) that would be about 50 kN. In theory, you could use a steel bar with a three-square-inch cross-sectional area to withstand that and have a safety factor of two before the bar started to deform (steel yield strength is about 50,000psi, and when you divide 50kN by 25kpsi you get about three square inches of cross-sectional area. This is basically the simplest possible way to calculate this, and there are probably a lot of subtleties I'm not accounting for here); I'm guessing the drawbars are much thicker than that so as not to make it an issue.

Same; I grew up on the system and was basically on it all the time before September 2011, and from Jan 2016 to Jan 2018, and the only one I ever heard about taking over a cab was Darius McCollum (who apparently got into so much shit because he just kept taking buses and trains out for a ride to the point where he's been arrested nearly thirty times for it, he was skilled enough that he could pass for an employee (so that unless you knew what he looked like or knew who was on the roster off the top of your head you wouldn't think twice about seeing him sign out a train), and apparently (according to Wikipedia) at one point he talked people on the LIRR into giving him their shift), and he just really wanted to drive trains and that's all it was. Now granted nobody on here (including me) is very happy with him because his behavior made the whole community look like the sort of idiots who want to drive trains so badly that they don't terribly care who they endanger in order to do so (especially considering that people on the spectrum are more likely to be part of this community than the general public), and the whole thing was just a mess.

Dumb question; I thought you couldn't do anything in a cab without a key, and I would assume that even if you had a key you wouldn't be able to wrest control of the train away from the T/O and C/R who are already logged in and operating. Like if someone got their hands on the relevant credentials and either got into a yard or took advantage of a shift change they could wreak havoc, but it sounds like a serious design flaw if a teenager can break into a cab halfway through a run and do anything worse than sing dirty songs on the PA or maybe turn off the lights. Also, how many people are actually breaking into cabs and doing dumb shit? Like I'm not seeing it happen but I'm also out of town and don't spend much time on the stupid side of Tiktok

My guess is CBTC odometry; if a train has a known start point and it knows how may miles it's traveled from there it's easy for the train to build an internal map of where it is in the system. You can use revolution counters to keep track of train miles traveled, but only as long as there's no wheelslip, and the only way to guarantee no wheelslip is to let the axle freewheel.

Thanks! This is Solidworks I'm curious to hear what @Kamen Rider thinks of the plug door solution I outlined a post or so back (use a piece of steel on a linkage to jam the track when the door gets locked out); they're fairly standard on most newer non-American subway cars, and they make the excess windows possible. Plug doors mean you no longer need a pocket to stash the doors in, which is the thing driving the ever-shrinking windows in NYC subway cars as the doors widen; you can have windows anyway that are modified to make room for the door pocket, which is what the London Underground does, if you need to keep the current door design. Good catch on the dividers; they're like 30-36" wide and I could probably reduce that to 21-24" to make them useful but not intrusive. Yeah; the idea was basically like "what if we took a Class 345/777 and modified it for runs on moderately well used longer express services" and then the 40-45' car length fell out of looking at how I was going to keep everything aligned well enough for open gangways to work on tight curves while still having an overall train length that would use all the space on BMT platforms in both divisions but not be long enough to overhang signal blocks or platforms.

Actually, you should be able to give a plug door that level of safety; this is what the actual mechanism looks like: / It shouldn't be that hard to take the same key y'all use for cutouts now, and cause it to drop a shaped piece of steel into the 90 degree curved in the door track via a linkage (which would then make it basically impossible to force the door open), as well as cutting out the door motor. That piece of steel would essentially jam the track and make it impossible for the door to open (and the door motor could easily be specified strong enough to open the door normally, but too weak to do anything to the shaped piece of steel).

For once he's kind of right; it's a weird quirk of American railroading law. Coaches need to be inspected every 90 days; locomotives are I believe every 30 and the inspection is far more stringent, and MUs count as locomotives. As far as I'm concerned that wouldn't preclude running them; once you're running mostly fixed-length trainsets you might as well distribute the traction motors, engines, and power converters across the set, and even if you need flexibility it wouldn't be terribly hard to do a design where cars that you expect to need to add more of are configured as powered trailers that can couple with an otherwise MU'd consist.

I mean, you probably can do it but it would be difficult and a lot of the train would need to be very light in order to offset the weight of the wheelchair lifts. You could use something like this at each end of the car if you went with a multilevel structure, or one in each car if you went with a Superliner-style architecture where the through passage is at the top. It wouldn't be impossible to do, but the question would be reliability and uptime; the lift would probably be the most finicky part of the car.

This is something I've been working on for a bit, inspired by some conversations I've been having on Discord, and also somewhat by @ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ's comments about having a somewhat more comfortable train with more seats and fewer doors for longer routes that don't quite see the same passenger volumes as the and do and so don't need the sheer volume of standing space the R211s have. The basic design is similar to an extended BMT Triplex, with 40' intermediate cars in the set and 45' end cars, as well as Jacobs bogies and open gangways within the set. Each car seats 32 with two dedicated wheelchair spaces, and has two double-leaf sliding plug doors per side similar to most modern trains in the UK and the Berlin subway. The idea would be for the BMT Eastern Division to run 12-segment trains (490' end to end), for the Franklin shuttle to run four-segment trains (170' end to end) and for the rest of the B Division to run 15-segment trains (610' end to end); I'd estimate capacity to be around 120-150 per car (32 seated, 88ish standing under normal loading, 118 standing under crush load with no wheelchairs), so full trains would have a capacity of 1800-2250. The short length of the car segments serves two purposes; it allows the cars to comfortably navigate tight curves like Crescent St with minimal misalignment at car ends or overhangs, and it allows for lower axle loads (a 15-segment train would have sixteen bogies, so the same number as an 8-car 75' train). I was able to pull images of an NYC transit console from the R211 contract, and basically just used that here. Other fun features I'm playing with on this design are aluminum construction with crumple zones instead of stainless steel, and a novel bogie design that takes advantage of the ridiculously high power and light weight of modern permanent magnet motors to allow individual wheels to be powered independently; I found a really cool paper here that talks about using active steering on a bogie with independently powered wheels, and pulled together a rough draft of an actuator system designed to allow steerable axles (no more screaming wheelsets on tight curves) that I added to a bogie with individually driven wheels. I'm still fleshing out the details, but I'd love comments and thoughts, especially from folks like @RTOMan and @Kamen Rider who work with NYC subway trains here on a daily basis Here's a look at the front of the set head-on (I'm still working on the design, hence the lack of destination signs, headlights, etc): Here's a look at the side of the end car: And the intermediate car: Here's the operator's console with combined brake/throttle lever on the right: And a look from above to show the seating layout of a car more clearly; the empty areas with the yellow/orange boundary are the wheelchair areas, and I shamelessly stole the seat design from the Class 345 trains on the Elizabeth Line in the UK. . Finally, here's a closeup of the bogie showing the spherical bearing and slide mechanism for the pivoting axle: And another closeup showing the permanent magnet motors on the axle, as well as the central bogie member:

Seconding this; we're still having issues with certain components where I work (power electronics manufacturer), so it's not surprising that something like a train car which is likely chock full of interesting electronics that require all sorts of specialized ICs got really delayed. That makes a lot of sense; if you wouldn't mind I'd love a summary of what's different from your perspective, and whether you (or any of the other RTO folks on here) would consider this "another NTT" or the start of a third generation of train (after the SMEEs and Gen 1 NTTs).

I mean, the larger question is what does the MDBF of each individual set look like? There are a lot of distributions that can share a mean, and it's possible that the R32s were bimodal (meaning that you had one large group that were doing well and another large group held together by spit and prayers, the former group was on the and the MDBF data lumped them together. It's also possible (and probably more likely) that as a low frequency entirely underground part-time line the was in a position to be able to run a smaller set of better performing trains in a kinder environment and give them more TLC in the shops. I don't know, but I'd be curious to hear from RTO folk based out of CI, 207, and Pitkin.

Using Option Order II to clear out the R68s would leave the MTA a solid 5-10% short on trains

I mean, that would be nice, but what would make the most sense is to use the R211s to cull the R46s down to a smaller fleet with higher reliability and then ride the increase in spare factor for a procurement cycle, then when it comes time to let the R68s and R68As go we can either do the same sort of cull with them, or just place a much larger order to remove the OTTs from the picture without reducing car availability or spare factor.

That's fair; honestly what would be more likely would be that we keep them until we can either start the next round of procurements or until the option orders start coming in (at which point you could let the R46s go except for one train for the museum) and you would keep a majority of the R68 fleet in service until the next B Division procurement after the R211 (you'd need 1715 R211s to replace all of the R46s, R68s, and R68As and the current R211 order is only 1612 cars; tbh if the plan was to use the R211s to wipe out all the old tech trains the TA should have ordered about 2000 cars).

I mean, I'm agreeing with you. Say you need to replace 720 R46s (90 trains); I'd recommend ordering 930 new cars (a one-for-one replacement would be 900 cars) to start, and then use the first tranche of the order to one-for-one replace the bottom 10-20% of the R46 sets MDBF-wise; hopefully the bottom 10-20% are the ones that are mostly shop queens anyway so even if you have an issue with the new cars you still get better overall uptime out of them than the old ones. From that point on, though, for every ten new trains you bring in only retire eight or nine old ones (depending on where the kink in the MDBF distribution is; ideally you'd be able to save the top 10-25% of the R46 fleet, so you'd have 10-25 R46 trains left that wouldn't be scrapped) and harvest as many good parts off the ones that are to be scrapped as you can. The remaining 10-20 trains would be a small-ish oddball fleet, but they'd have spare parts for years because mechanics would be able to harvest the best stuff from the other 70-80 trains that are going to the scrapper and assuming the car bodies are in decent shape they could probably be kept running into the 2040s. At that point you end the procurement cycle with 103-113 full sets, as opposed to the 90 you started with, which is a 13-23% fleet increase, and because the only old cars you kept are the ones that were running really reliably you can keep them going without having them be a huge burden on maintenance staff. Then, when you start getting into the 2040s you can just replace those R46s alongside the best R68s and the worst R143s.

Honestly it seems like the ideal thing to do when you get a new car class in is to order a couple percent more complete sets than you think you need, use the new trains to pull the least reliable members of the class it's replacing out of service, then wait a while until everything looks good before getting rid of the bulk of the old class, and keep a few of the best-performing sets from the old class around (which shouldn't be that hard given the ridiculous quantity of parts that just became spare when the bulk of the old trains retired).

Seconding this; NYC is far from perfect but at least it has trains that run 24 hours and the infrastructure doesn't spectacularly shit itself or catch fire on a regular basis. I moved up to Boston a few years ago for school, and for the first time in my life I got a driver's license and am getting a car because the T wasn't all that great before it started falling apart and these days forget it. Hell, as of a few days ago the whole system was under a 10-25mph slow order for some reason (internet scuttlebutt says track maintenance gangs got caught pencil-whipping a whole lot of work and so everything got slowed down while they figured out how bad the problem was)

That's really interesting; I'm curious how much the 143/160/179 all share internally hardware-wise, and how much the R211 has no longer been held back by having to maintain some level of compatibility with the 143/160/179 sets.

They're beautiful; I'd love to see a version with more longitudinal seating and more doors come here at some point in the future

I suspect part of the problem here is that the incentives local politicians have (maximize the coolness of the ribbon cutting, maximize money spent in their district, maximize money spent on contracts to their donors) just aren't aligned much at all with the incentives that the rest of us have (maximize ridership and infrastructure quality/flexibility per dollar). Like 96 St looks amazing in glamour shots in a way that West 4th St or Newkirk Plaza don't, but the glamor doesn't add anything real to efficiency or capacity, and in fact it detracts a great deal if it drives costs so high that we wind up getting 3-4x fewer track miles laid per dollar than a project built to older BMT/IND standards.

I mean, presumably there are laws against disorderly conduct, vandalism, and tampering with TA equipment; if people do something sufficiently stupid you could bring charges under any of those laws. Like if people want to hang out and photo/video new trains there's nothing wrong with that; if they're acting out in ways that pose a risk to the equipment, the T/O, C/R, or the public then that should be addressed, and that can be addressed without cracking down on photography the way PATH does or developing special laws that specifically target being a dumbass in the presence of trains.