BOSTON — The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s issues with new rapid-transit equipment built by China’s CRRC have eased, CEO Phillip Eng said last week, with the equipment now arriving on the revised schedule developed earlier this year and performing reliably.
“Just last month was the first month they were required to deliver three married pairs, six cars, and they did that,” Eng told a Nov. 21 meeting of the CRRC board.
In March, the MBTA reached an agreement in which it paid CRRC an additional $148 million and forgave some contract penalties as part of the development of the new delivery schedule, under which the entire order for 404 Red and Orange Line cars is to be completed by the end of 2027 [see “MBTA to pay more …,” Trains News Wire, March 29, 2024]. The entire order was to have been completed by 2023, but would not have been done until 2029 at the earliest without that agreement, Eng said then.
Since the contract was revised and MBTA and CRRC management began meeting regularly, Eng said, “we have seen that every scheduled delivery has been met. The cars continue to perform above the contractual requirement of 90,000 miles between failures, and in fact, they are now exceeding 200,000 miles between failures. And that’s a testament to the work to get them to this level. …
“Quality has not shifted. Quality in fact, has in fact gotten better. All of the learning curve that took place on the Orange Line [order] … is being factored in, so now the Red Line cars are performing right off the bat.”
With the Orange Line equipment in service and operating well, Eng said, that line is now seeing an additional 96 trains on weekdays, an increase of 36%, and headways have been cut from 12 to 6 minutes. The Red Line will see similar service increases, as well as retirement of its older equipment, as its new cars continue to arrive from the Springfield, Mass., factory of affiliate CRRC MA.
Eng said the agency’s involvement in addressing the manufacturing process had not just been with CRRC.
“The leadership team here has had many meetings with their vendors directly, and has really focused in on their needs, to make sure they have the ability to meet the needs of CRRC,” Eng said. “And that has been an important piece. Because it’s one thing for CRRC to make commitments, but we need to make sure their material suppliers and the others can fulfil them.”
Maintenance outages to continue in 2025
Eng also said that the service suspensions that marked the Track Improvement Program in late 2023 and this year will continue in 2025, although to a lesser degree. One of the focuses next year will signal upgrades on the Red and Orange lines — “That is really the next key piece to running reliable service,” he told the board — along with continuing state-of-good-repair maintenance.
“While there will be some outages needed to continue the work,” Eng said, “it won’t be to the level that we had tis year. And the public can really begin to enjoy the fruits of what we’ve been able to put together for 2024.” That will be a mix of weekend outages for signal work, some station work, and suspensions “we do know we have to do some more state-of-good-repair work on the tracks. But this is to build on the success of this year.” A plan for the 2025 outages will be released soon, he said.
