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The MTA revealed that the bulk of a new subway car order is damaged. French manufacturer Alstom was contracted to build 400 of 660 new subway cars for the BMT and IND subway lines, but a variety of problems will prevent the company from delivering a prototype train to the MTA this Friday. The NY Times detailed an MTA report that said two of the train car shells were damaged in shipping to a NY plant, and then at the plant, "Windowpanes, ceiling panels and brake resistors did not fit properly. The window problems were discovered when the test cars were sprayed with water, which seeped in." Yeah, that's really not good, but Gothamist wondered if there was human testing of the train car's durability - think about riders leaning on train doors, doing pullups on the bars, poledancing, you name it. And you may remember Alstom as only one of the two companies in the whole world that could make repairs for the damaged A and C lines earlier this year. An interesting footnote from the article was that Alstom's lobbyist to get the MTA contract was none other than former Senator Alphonse D'Amato.
The other 260 train cars were manufactured by Kawasaki, which will deliver its prototype this Friday. The MTA is supposed to test them for 14 months, and had wanted to put all 660 cars into the fleet for August 2006. The Times says the new trains will look like the R143 trains that run on the L; here's Kawasaki's product page for the R143. For some heavy duty reading about subway cars, Gothamist recommends Gene Sansone's New York Subways : An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars - there are diagrams of all the different train cars in the back!
You can buy this model of four Redbird train cars (1 motorized, 3 non) from the MTA's Transit Museum Store for $185.
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I'm more and more convinced that this website should be called "Subwayist". Do people honestly care that much about public transit? Excuse me while I go check out some important news from Jessica Gawker.
Gothamist loves the subway! We use it everyday - more than twice sometimes.
I spend more waking hours every weekday on the subway than I do in my apartment. And when I'm not on it, I'm reading about it. I appreciate the info.
Yeah, what does public transportation have to do with living in New York? What about all the rich folk that only travel by limo or private helicopter.. how come their interests aren't equally represented? :/
I consider the subways an integral part of every New York day and I enjoy the transit coverage. Keep it up Gothamist.
An open letter to the MTA:
Please, oh please, use these new cars on the F line.
Thank You,
Everyone in Dumbo, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Gowanus, Park Slope, Kensington, Borough Park, Coney Island, The west side of Manhattan, the people on Roosevelt Island, Long Island City, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, and Jamaica.
You people are weird; even though I may take the subway, I certainly don't want to read about its intricacies throughout the day. It's PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. Get over it.
Or at least extend the V to Brooklyn.
Lawrence Reuter's quote in the Times was priceless "The quality down there was very, very poor. We just refused to accept them." Uh, Larry, this is a $1.1 billion contract, why didn't you have someone in the factory making sure the cars were being properly built?
For a $1.1 Billion Contract, You'd think there would be penalties or Contractual Fines for a contract that big...
Has anyone seen the guy in the horse costume lately?
are horse costumes subject to random searches?
Amazing. According to the Kawasaki site, the new cars feature "lightweight bogie with air-spring secondary suspension." I don't know what that is, but can't wait for a test ride.
fucking french. first my external hard drive, now this.
Not that I am some super Patriot or anything, but why in the sam fuck r NYC subway cars not built here in the US... Is that a joke or something? It's not like we sent it over to a third world country to get a great deal or something, we sent it to France, another major superpower like the US. Can someone please explain?
To all those whining about why the trains are not made in the U.S. of f--king A, it comes down to the same reason most everything is manufactured overseas. Cost. It does cost less to allow for foreign contracting of these jobs. It's that simple.
It's not all about cost. Some of it is just plain quality. Or has everybody forgotten how rough and loud the old Budd and St. Louis cars were? But you're right. If the French submitted the lowest bid, then they should build the cars. That's how capitalism works.
Oh, I forgot. American companies are way behind in train tech, too. We still don't have anything that can match the TGV for sheer speed and comfort. And the TGV's been running for decades now. Acela is a snail compared to TGV. In fact, we're now behind the French, the Germans and even the Chinese in terms of railroad technology. That's just sad in the country that once built the unrivaled transcontinental railroad.
>>>Do people honestly care that much about public transit? Excuse me while I go check out some important news from Jessica Gawker.
Better the subways than the dopey celebrities, asses of which gawker kisses.
www.forgotten-ny.com
>>>You people are weird; even though I may take the subway, I certainly don't want to read about its intricacies throughout the day. It's PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. Get over it.
You are sentenced to an entire day in
www.subchat.com
"That's just sad in the country that once built the unrivaled transcontinental railroad."
Remember the other reason American train companies are just not what they once were. The auto industry's push towards making sure public transportation in the U.S. would be pushed to the side to make way for car.
And as far as lowest/highest bids go, remeber this is the MTA folks. The same people who chose a bid that gave them less money for the (now dead) West Side stadium. And who is now disappointed in Bruce Ratner's bid, but instead of taking the HIGHER bid from another group (Extell), they have now altered the process to accomodate... Bruce Ratner.
It sure feels like NYC in the 1970s.
Also regarding people not liking Subway posts, seriously while I think Gothamist can be a tad trendy at times, these subway posts really bring the site down to earth and we can all appreciate them. If you'd rather hear of someone who was walking down the street and saw Chris Noth wipe his brow and yell at someone, go elsewhere. I'd rather hear about real stuff any day than the endless fawning over who saw who with what and can you believe this trivial gossipy junk.
Seriously, why wouldn't you want posts about public transit? If those duct-taped trains on the B and the W are still running beyond 2006 because of some booboo by the manufacturer, that's something I'd want to know.