The MTA previewed the eight new cars Tuesday, taking Long Island Rail Road President Phillip Eng and other MTA officials between Jamaica Station and Hicksville.
The original order for M9s, part of a joint purchase with Metro-North, was placed in 2013. Metro-North’s cars are still to come, as are M9a cars subsequently ordered by the LIRR as part of the East Side Access project. Eventually, the fleet will number 202 cars. The order, originally to have been completed by January 2017, now will not be finished until March 2021. The LIRR received its first cars for testing in May 2018 after initial trials at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colo.
“These new cars will offer new amenities and a better environment for our customers,” Eng said.
The cars incorporate and improve on features of the LIRR’s M7 cars and the M8 cars used on Metro-North’s New Haven Line. They offer exterior destination signs on cab fronts, visible to platform passengers on approaching trains. Interior features include electrical outlets in each row, wider seats with closed-loop armrests that won’t tear garments or catch bag straps, and six additional seats per married pair of cars. Every other car in the pair has push-button doors between cars. Lavatories have no-touch devices for toilets, sinks, soap ,and hand drying.
An in-car display lets passengers know in what car within the train they are seated, important at short-platform stations where boarding and disembarking is possible from only part of the trainset. The cars also feature additional vestibule speakers, threshold illuminating lights at the side and end doors, reduced sun glare with more window tint, and promise a smoother ride than the M7 cars.
After this morning’s debut, the new equipment is scheduled to run this evening on LIRR train No. 762, the 5:06 p.m. departure train from New York’s Penn Station to Hempstead, N.Y., and on train No. 190, a 10:35 p.m. departure from New York to Babylon. The equipment is scheduled to run on the same trains on Thursday.
On Friday, the LIRR expects to lengthen the trainset to 10 cars and assign it to different trains. On Sept. 20, it will be expanded to a 12-car trainset and again placed on a different schedule.
Kawasaki Rail Car built the 14 prototype cars in the order in Japan. The remainder are being manufactured in Lincoln, Neb., with final assembly in Yonkers, N.Y.
To me a rail car is an unpowered unit pulled by an engine as when I grew up on the Oyster Bay Line. From the above discussion it appears these are EMU’s.
If NYCTA’sKawasaki built R-68 are any indication these will be around a long time.
Four years late. It’s no wonder that Kawasaki is considering getting out of the rail m manufacturing business (not just in the US but worldwide).
Good looking cars. Maybe SEPTA in PA should look at these.