Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.
A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.
As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour.
The good news is that Metrorail ridership is still well below pre-pandemic levels, so less frequent service will mean longer waits for passengers but won’t mean crowded trains. The bad news is that Metro’s safety culture is still lacking. After receiving a report about the derailments, Metro’s board of directors had no comments or questions, which shows how much agency leaders care about safety.
Meanwhile, speaking of ridiculous rail projects with huge cost overruns and project delays (which I also wrote about in Monday’s post about the Hawaii rail debacle), Central Japan Railway (JR Central) has announced that its planned Tokyo-Osaka maglev line is now expected to cost ¥10.5 trillion (roughly $95 billion). This is up from the original projection of ¥5.1 trillion made in 2007.
Japan has experienced less than 5 percent inflation since that year, so this represents a near-doubling in cost projections. The project is also expected to be indefinitely delayed, due partly to environmental objections to the line made by officials in the Shizuoka prefecture. JR Central originally planned to finance the line privately, but now is counting on low-interest government loans.
Speaking of JR Central and low-interest government loans, JR Central is the backer fo the Texas Central Dallas-Houston high-speed rail plan. Like the maglev line, this was originally supposed to be privately financed but, like the maglev line, cost projections have greatly increased. As a result, like the maglev line, JR Central is counting on the Biden administration to offer Texas Central low-interest loans to build the project.
As much as Biden likes trains, his administration has done nothing to promote high-speed trains. After looking at what happened to the $10 billion spend on high-speed trains by the Obama administration (it all got spent and no high-speed trains resulted), the administration would rather spend money on something that could happen while it is still in office. So JR Central shouldn’t get its hopes too high.
One possible reason the Feds may find a way to loan Texas Central the money —> geopolitics. It may be a small bit in encouraging Japan to continue to work with the US, especially when dealing with China.
Derailments used to be front page news, and heads would roll. If anyone loses even one day’s pay due to the derailments–that would be front page news.
It is obvious that none of the hundreds of billions of pandemic money was used for safety upgrades.
Thankfully my sister and her boyfriend, who live in Bethesda, just got a car a few weeks ago. I suspect a lot of Metro’s regular riders will follow suit with this debacle