In a couple weeks, SEPTA Regional Rail riders could start getting noticeable relief from the shortened trains, peak-hour crowding, delays and cancellations they’ve been dealing with for the past three months.
The transit authority has received sufficient quantities of a scarce thermal wire product it needs to do federally mandated safety upgrades to railcars, and is now putting about eight repaired cars back into service every day, spokesperson Andrew Busch said Wednesday.
Maintenance crews have so far installed thermal circuits in 203 of the agency’s 223 aging Silverliner IV cars, he said. Those systems alert train operators to potentially dangerous overheating, with the aim of preventing more fires like those that occurred on five Regional Rail trains last year.
“We can get a car done in about four hours,” Busch said. “So once we have the wire available to us, we can move pretty quickly and get that done.”
Workers are also doing other types of repairs that came up during mandated inspections of the Silverliner IVs, which are more than 50 years old and make up about two-thirds of the Regional Rail fleet. As of this week 180 cars have gone through both processes.
The car shortage has forced the authority to run many two-car trains, which are often extremely packed during the morning and evening commutes. Busch said those conditions should gradually start to ease.
“We understand the frustration that customers have when they’re getting on those overly crowded trains or they’re dealing with a cancellation. That’s very frustrating. It’s been an extraordinarily difficult three months now for our riders,” he said.
“We really can’t thank them enough for their patience. We know it’s impacted them and their lives and their families and their ability to get to work,” he added.
Adding more three- and four-car trains
On Oct. 1 the Federal Rail Administration ordered SEPTA to take several steps to address the fire risk by the end of that month. That included pulling Silverliner IVs off the tracks for inspections and installation of thermal circuits.
However, SEPTA soon purchased all supplies of the wire in North America and had to wait for more to be manufactured and delivered. That made it impossible to meet the deadline, even after it was extended to Dec. 5. Affected railcars could not be returned to service without the upgrade.
The second of two shipments of wire finally arrived over the holidays, and crews are now working “around the clock” to make repairs, Busch said. After upgrades and repairs, railcars then undergo a set of checks to ready them for return to the tracks.
“Just over the last couple days, we’ve been adding more three- and four-car trains back,” he said. In addition, “we were able to [restore] some of the express service that is scheduled in the morning and the evening. That’s helping us clear out some of the high passenger volume locations that had gotten backed up when everything was running local.”
SEPTA has been able to continue running Regional Rail using its 120 newer Silverliner V cars as well as its 45 coach cars, which don’t have engines and are pulled by locomotives. The system has a combined 388 passenger cars.
The authority is also leasing 10 coaches from Maryland’s MARC system. Crews are being trained to operate those cars and the vehicles are undergoing modifications for ADA accessibility, Busch said. They will become available for use in the coming weeks, which will allow SEPTA to maintain full Regional Rail service in the long term.
“We have cars that have to be taken out of service just for their regular maintenance, or something comes up during the day, so we need to have a decent spare count available to substitute for those,” Busch said. “So it’s getting all those things back to a much more manageable level. We’re not there yet, but we think we’re very close.”
SEPTA may lease or purchase more cars from other states in the near future, he said.
Keeping cars going a few more years
Last year’s fires and the federal response have also spurred SEPTA to finally start the long-delayed process of buying new railcars. The agency is soliciting expressions of interest from manufacturers, and expects the process to take five to seven years and cost perhaps $2 billion.
“The funding piece of it that — that had really been the thing holding us up for years, a decade or more, from doing it,” Busch said. “We’re looking into some financing programs that are available through the federal government.”
The length of the procurement and funding processes add to the importance of keeping the Silverliner IVs in as good condition as possible, he said.
“We’re confident that, with what we’ve been doing to upgrade the existing fleet, we can have it be viable through that time,” he said. “But at that point, you’re looking at that fleet being about 60 years old. You can have the best maintained fleet in the world — when you’re getting to that kind of age, you really are reaching the end of the line.”
Some riders on the Fox Chase line are also being inconvenienced by an unrelated project that began Monday. New track is being installed along the line, which SEPTA says “will result in a smoother, more comfortable ride.”
As a result, mid-day trains aren’t running between Fox Chase and Wayne Junction stations on weekdays through April 3. They are being replaced by buses, which will operate from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on those days between the Fox Chase, Ryers, Cheltenham, Lawndale, and Olney stations. Trains will continue to run between Wayne Junction and Center City.
Separately, SEPTA said Friday that it finished replacing damaged overhead wires in its trolley tunnel between Center City and West Philadelphia, which has been closed since early November. The agency said the tunnel could reopen by mid-January.
