Good news for NY Subway

I had written about the Subway Fire before and at that time, the estimate was that the two lines would not be back to normal for three to five years. Fortunately, today, this has been revised downward to six to nine months. From The NY Times: Subway Disruptions Expected to Last Months, Not Years bq. Transit officials said yesterday that service on the A and C lines could be restored to full capacity in six to nine months, substantially revising their earlier prognosis that a fire in a Lower Manhattan signaling room would disrupt service on the lines for as long as three to five years. bq. The new time frame for repairs will still mean months of confusion and inconvenience on two lines that have an average weekday ridership of 580,000, and hardly diminishes how the fire underscored the vulnerability of a signaling system based on electromechanical switches that were first developed in the 1870's. This is the good news -- unfortunately, there is also bad news in this article: A harbinger: bq. Several former transit officials said yesterday that the agency has repeatedly acknowledged over the past 20 years that the signaling system was obsolete or unreliable, but nonetheless chose to devote the vast majority of its limited capital funds to other projects. Reports after two fatal crashes, in 1991 and 1995, recommended improvements in the signal system, though neither blamed the system for the deaths. The bad news: bq. Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, said at a news conference yesterday that replacing the custom-made signal relays, switches and circuits would take less time than expected. "We were just this morning able to come to the determination that we could actually do this in six to nine months," Mr. Reuter said. "We were actually able to find enough relays left over in our system that we could salvage out of other jobs we had to do this work," he said. bq. About 90 relays were found to begin replacing the 600 that he said had been "totally destroyed" in the signaling room. So they are rebuilding the existing system using the 1932's technology. They will be implementing a system that has known problems plus, electrical components age over time and I would bet that the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) on these NOS parts (New Old Stock) is a lot less than when they left their factories over 70 years ago... Buncha maroons - the company is making money, they are paying their salaries. They either need to raise their rates, take a pay cut and deal with the infrastructure. They do not seem to realize that the infrastructure is their money-machine and if they let it decay, they will have a much worse crisis in another ten years.