Washington, DC Metro Has To Pull Half Of Fleet For Safety Issues
It’s going to be a rough Monday on the Washington, DC area Metro as the troubled mass transit service is forced to pull half their cars offline for safety issues.
Metro on Sunday night pulled more than half of its rail cars out of service before the Monday morning rush after an investigation discovered multiple axles out of compliance with manufacturer specifications.
The suspension of Metro’s latest train model — the 7000 series — comes after a National Transportation Safety Board investigation found the issue after probing a Blue Line derailment last week, according to the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, an agency that Congress created to monitor safety at Metro. It found multiple cars in the fleet had similar problems.
The 7000 series makes up more than half of Metro’s nearly 1,200-car fleet.
Metro said in a statement it will operate about 40 trains Monday, “offering a basic service pattern on all lines of trains departing about every 30 minutes.”
“As Metro continues to work closely with the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission and NTSB and more information develops, we will update the public about service for the remainder of this week,” Metro said.
I guess the ‘good news’ is that ridership is still down to about 20% of pre-pandemic levels, and ‘rush hour’ is where the difference is most stark.
https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/ridership-portal/Rail-Data-Portal.cfm
plus, this week looks to be perfect fall weather (60’s and sunny) for alternatives like biking or walking a bit further.Report
I kinda expected an Atlas Shrugged joke by now.Report
The series-7000 cars have been somewhat problematic from the beginning: unable to handle tighter curves in a couple of areas, hazardous for blind passengers getting on or off, vibration and noise problems, requiring service at half the specified interval. Now that there’s a really expensive problem, I expect at least several months of “Your car design is inadequate,” countered with “Your tracks and roadbed don’t meet the spec you gave us to design to.”Report
If you had to venture a guess, what do you think actually happened?Report
Guess? Metro spec’ed their requirements at 80% of what they actually needed and Kawasaki left no margin for error. Now we’re seeing structural failures because the limiting components have been subject to excessive force for a few years.Report
Is that normal for both parties?
I remember Metro having derailment issues back when I lived there circa 2009.Report
The metro system has been in a death spiral for, by now, decades. Elected officials get more of a benefit from expanding the system than from maintaining it. The system has gotten bigger as the can gets kicked down the road. Essentially bankrupt, they have to raise fares, which lowers the ridership, so the system loses more money. The one group that could absorb the cost was government workers, who were reimbursed for the increasing fares (robbing Peter to pay Paul). But increasing telework and now the virus have reduce that revenue stream as well.Report
What Pinky said. The federal workforce has been quietly going remote since well before the pandemic. They either need to bite the bullet and give it dedicated federal funding since thats still who primarily uses it or fundamentally re-imagine (and down-size) its mission. Instead they keep taking it further out even as the various scandals emerge.Report
Of two minds about “gov’t workers going remote:”
1) More security details!
2) Fewer people bleeding to death on the other end of zoom calls.Report
Early reports say the problem is wheels spreading on their axle, so being able to “climb” off the track when they go over a switch. This afternoon I’ve been on one of my occasional engineering binges, reading technical papers on how railcar wheelsets are made, the forces involved, etc. Sidenote #1: the wheels are held in place on the axles by simple friction; incredible amounts of friction. Sidenote #2: the internet is much worse as a distraction than being able to bicycle to a large university technical library.
First guess: No one in the business as long as Kawasaki failed to catch that many wheelsets being out of spec. Metro’s crappy tracks put abnormal stresses on and resulted in wheels spreading on the axles. Initial sanity check: History of derailment problems before the Kawasaki cars went into service.Report
All this jives. Thanks for the explanations.
When I lived down that way, I didn’t ride Metro much. I lived on one end of the Red Line and worked on the other end so it was much easier/cheaper/faster to just drive across. I think that is why they were trying to build the Purple or Silver Line… whichever it was. Not sure if that ever came to pass.
I always appreciated how clean the Metro was compared to Boston and NYC plus they were ahead of their time with the “Next Arriving Train” boards. And the Art Deco vibe was cool. But the service itself always felt like a chore and the pricing scheme felt screwy for someone so accustomed to flat rate subway fairs.Report
Silver line is out Arlington Way and mostly done. Purple Line is well underway construction wise but probably 18 months-ish from initial service.
As to pricing – you have 4 entities funding Metro with 4 different political realities. You won’t ever get rationality out of that.Report
Please note that all I’ve done here is the same trick I used to get paid for sometimes as a systems guy: become an “instant expert” and make a guess that seems to be consistent with the known facts, within a (usually short) time frame that the real experts wouldn’t touch. In six months, it may turn out to be completely wrong.
The Vogtle nuclear power reactors are in that category. There’s just no way that I would come up with the actual reason that they are so late and expensive: every single major contractor would screw up the work.Report