The company building Metro’s new trains will deliver the final car to Houston five months late, according to a revised schedule submitted to the transit agency.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority is reviewing the schedule, spokesman Jerome Gray said, and hasn’t agreed to the new timeline. The revision was one of the promises the rail car builder, CAF U.S.A., made when the company acknowledged substantial delays in production in January. Rather than deliver the last batch of 39 train cars in August, the company now expects to deliver the last train in January.
Production problems with the first railcar, sitting at Metro’s south Houston rail maintenance facility, led to substantial delays in production. Workers at CAF’s facility in Elmira, N.Y., are building the second car now, with a fix to a troublesome water leak that led to the problems on the first car. Once the second train passes its tests, and the fix is verified, production will accelerate.
To catch up and deal with other production issues, CAF is expanding its plant, but it still will not meet the contractual deadline to deliver the trains. Under the deal signed in 2011, Metro should already have 16 trains in Houston ready to test and start service. The new train cars are critical to starting service on the East and Southeast lines, set to open later this year.
Without the trains, Metro plans to start limited service on the two new lines by taking trains off the Red Line. Reducing double-car trains to single cars on the Red Line will lead to severe crowding, officials and riders said.
Based on the revised schedule, Metro would have 21 rail cars by the end of September, when service on the lines could begin. Not all of those trains can immediately enter service, however, as they will need testing and final assembly in Houston.
See here and here for the background. That’s longer than I’d have liked for this to take, but at least there’s a target date. Other than having to temper our expectations for the ridership numbers in the first few months of service, and continuing to be prepared to sue if necessary, I don’t know that there’s anything else to be done but wait and hope this time they mean it.
So, are there claw back mechanisms in the contract to ensure we’re getting discounted rates due to failure to deliver? And are we activating those measures?
One wonders if the recent departure of David Couch is connected to the delayed arrival of the railcars. Because of the fear of political repercussions, METRO keeps avoiding difficult situations including the Harrisburg/Hughes Street underpass and the downtown transit hub. If someone said “we blew it and we should have been on top of this” and if METRO personnel had been held accountable, then there could be some degree of understanding. As it is, it seems like the same incompetence that characterized the Frank Wilson years.