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R211 Discussion Thread


East New York

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As someone who does product development and engineering design for a living, I'd say that most modern subway car systems are incredibly complex in their own right, and the car itself has to make sure that all of those systems play nicely with each other under a wide variety of conditions. Under ideal conditions each system comes with a datasheet and a specification that describes how it will behave under normal operating conditions, and the car manufacturer will have specified everything so that the most extreme conditions the subway car is likely to see in service fall under that heading; under absolutely ideal conditions they get the car in, boot everything up, run it for a few miles, and turn it loose on passengers. In practice, it's almost never that fast; a few weeks back I had a simple test that would have taken 20 minutes if everything had been put together properly and more realistically half a day to a day to do, and it took us five and a half days because of a bunch of harness assembly issues and connection mistakes that were a mix of technicians misreading things and a couple errors on cable drawings.

The MBTA is having a hell of a time right now with their new equipment, for a variety of reasons (this is CRRC Changchun's first time working in America, and in order to actually make good on their low bid for the cars themselves they're trying to hire assembly techs at like $17 an hour, so of course you'll get nonsense and mistakes), and even if the car assembler is perfect it's possible to get weird bugs because something in the subsystem specifications the assembler gave the subcontractor was either slightly off or unspecified because you didn't think it would be an issue but it absolutely is and now you're in trouble.

Like the Class 180s in the UK that Alstom built were absolute shitshow lemons, even though the family of trains (the Coradia) they were derived from runs perfectly fine on the continent; the issue was that Euro trains are significantly wider and taller than British trains, and so they were trying to cram a full suite of underfloor systems under something like 10-20% less floor area, and this resulted in some really weird design decisions.

That sort of thing is also why the Class 220/221/222 units in the UK intermittently smell of sewage; space constraints led Bombardier to put the toilet tank right near the exhaust (which heats up the contents and makes them offgas) and put the pressure relief valve right near the HVAC inlets (so sewer gas goes into the passenger cabin).

Like if you want trains to not require a ton of testing the way to do that is to overdesign and overbuild most subsystems (which shifts the design and testing risk onto the subcontractors who make those subsystems), and then once you get a subway car working with a given configuration change as little as possible in future orders; you lose out on all the benefits that new technology will offer you but you wind up being able to get away with far less testing on introduction, and your operators and maintenance people only really need to understand the quirks of one particular set of systems (to my understanding that's how the SMEEs were, and the NTTs are that way to a lesser but still nontrivial extent).

I'm biased as an engineer who likes designing state of the art stuff; I'd love to see aluminum honeycomb construction, Jacobs bogies, plug doors, and silicon carbide traction inverters come to NYC, but I don't want to minimize the amount of work needed to make that happen.

Edited by engineerboy6561
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2 hours ago, RTOMan said:

That's not how they work...

They know the foamers are out there ready to act up...

The source is correct..

So the MTA can’t inform to the public about it because of some cringey lil kids that want to act up on the subway??? There should be laws implemented to limit foam activity

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16 minutes ago, Chris89292 said:

So the MTA can’t inform to the public about it because of some cringey lil kids that want to act up on the subway??? There should be laws implemented to limit foam activity

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.

Edited by engineerboy6561
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18 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

So this is a one trip test?

Maybe it might run how it was proposed yesterday - ~2-9PM. but since it is an "Extra train" the trip direction is not yet known (if its going to be a Rockaway (A) or Lefferts (A)).  It might even be a short-turn (A) to Euclid Av to have direct access to Pitkin Yard in-between trips.

Edited by darkstar8983
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1 minute ago, darkstar8983 said:

Maybe it might run how it was proposed yesterday - ~2-9PM. but since it is an "Extra train" the trip direction is not yet known (if its going to be a Rockaway (A) or Lefferts (A))

Assuming that the departure prior is Ozone Park, I would guess the logical branch would be Rockaway.

Edited by Lawrence St
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1 hour ago, Lawrence St said:

Assuming that the departure prior is Ozone Park, I would guess the logical branch would be Rockaway.

According to MTA subway time, out of Inwood-207 St, there is 1:53PM Rockaway (A) trip, followed by a 1:58PM Lefferts Blvd (A) trip, then a 2:08PM Rockaway (A) trip (which matches the base schedule for the (A)), so foamers won't be able to track the R211 as easily as they hoped to via mta subwaytime, like the R32 trip was tracked as being a (Q) to Brighton Beach instead of a Coney Island (Q). This is again considering that the R211 trip is extra and not taking the place of an R46 or R179 train. 

Edited by darkstar8983
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14 minutes ago, darkstar8983 said:

According to MTA subway time, out of Inwood-207 St, there is 1:53PM Rockaway (A) trip, followed by a 1:58PM Lefferts Blvd (A) trip, then a 2:08PM Rockaway (A) trip (which matches the base schedule for the (A)), so foamers won't be able to track the R211 as easily as they hoped to via mta subwaytime, like the R32 trip was tracked as being a (Q) to Brighton Beach instead of a Coney Island (Q). This is again considering that the R211 trip is extra and not taking the place of an R46 or R179 train. 

I caught the train. It’s the 1:53PM out of Far Rockaway.

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This might be the run times for the trips:

2:08 outta 168

4:12 outta Far Rock

6:08 to Lefferts

7:48 outta Lefferts

(I could entirely be wrong but those are my guesses).

Edited by NBTA
Someone just said the right time, so I had to change it.
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