DMU Purchase

DutchRailnut wrote:the power packs provided 660 volt DC for hotel power, not 480 volt AC, so they would be useless for any of today's cars

Who says you need today's cars? For a short term some older equipment could be leased as a stop gap.

Why? The clock starts on the ramp-up to the new joint equipment procurement in no more than a few years. By the time you get the new equipment leased and refurbbed the RFP on the DE/DM30 replacements and MLV coaches will have already been issued, and then it's just waiting for the units to start coming out of the factory and out of testing. There aren't infinite single-level commuter rail coaches just sitting out there for the taking. NJ Transit has cleared out its Comet boneyard. The MBTA's BTC/CTC-3 Comet clones from MBB have substantial floor rot issues requiring moderate rehab if those are going to be viable candidates to transact to another agency. The MARC IIA's from Nippon Sharyo are very worn out and would have to undergo 3rd rail clearance testing because they aren't exact Comet carbon copies (e.g. CDOT's non-Comet lineage Mafersa coaches on Shore Line East have known 3rd rail clearance issues keeping them out of GCT, so any such snags like that would have to be ruled out first with the MARC's). By the time they've hunted for this car supply, done the paperwork and testing, and patched them up enough for a 5-10 year life extension the MTA will have already awarded its MLV contract and both LIRR/MNRR will have shifted into overdrive doing furious amounts of advance prep work collecting clearance data and upgrading their shop facilities in the 2-4 years prior to those next-gen push-pull locos and cars going into service. Advance prep that'll be timed simultaneous with the most hectic middle of the M9 order being accepted into service.

They don't have time to juggle all that simultaneous with bringing in makeshift supplemental equipment that can't mix any existing equipment. If the paperwork kickoff of the next-gen P-P order were 10 years away instead of 2-4 and not overlapping with the M9 blitz it would be a different story...but it isn't. Logistically the rest of this decade is going to be a crappy time to attempt a multitasking of some old/new/borrowed/blue. All we've established here is that, yes, in a contextual vacuum it is technically possible to cobble together some old junk for supplemental trainsets. Nobody in this thread has established a value proposition for doing so when the next-gen order is that close, or established that the current car shortage is so mortally severe that there's no option to wait for the MLV's.

What is the real world value proposition in doing this stopgap? Not a "technically correct is the best kind of correct" hypothetical scenario...but why is this an action plan LIRR needs to work in pronto despite the chaos of that new EMU and push-pull equipment-ordering blitz eating so much of their internal bandwidth for the next 7+ years? Establish the practical why's and how's of supplemental P-P trains being something they can't wait another day to address.

Are they replacing the LIRR C3s? I can understand the DE/DM30s because of reliability problems but isn't the C3s designed to last 30-40 years. Wouldn't it be a better idea to overhaul them?

No. Maintaining heterogeneous P-P fleets didn't price out nearly as well as cleanrooming both LIRR and MNRR coach fleets with one make to rule all.

MNRR/CDOT's order of MLV's tops out at over 200 units if all contract options get drained to completely and totally displace the east-of-Hudson Shoreliners. LIRR then at minimum needs its necessary fleet expansion (~25-50 more coaches than today, or whatever) to pad out their car shortages. At that level of starting scale it costs less to keep the factory humming ripping out another +134 C3 replacements for a total MTA/CDOT order of 375+ cars than it would cost to just do the small LIRR expansion order and then bid out an entirely separate C3 overhaul contract. The per-unit costs for buying new get even more favorable when factoring in that the MLV spec the MTA is going for is virtually identical to NJ Transit's MLV's. NJT will be plunking down for another 300-400 MLV's in the same timeframe to mass-replace its Comets. Maybe SEPTA, MARC, and AMT tagging along too if they're in a mood to purge their last single-level residuals. Whether it's Bombardier or some second-source manufacturer like Kawasaki building to the same spec, the "Buy America" factories are going to have a solid 8 uninterrupted years of cranking those cars out with all the base orders and spread-out option orders on those contracts. Those efficiencies of scale get passed down to the buyer in form of optimal per-unit cost.

C3 rebuild wouldn't fare as well on price point. It's probably a 100-unit base, 34-unit option one-and-done contract without nearly as efficient a paydown of startup costs (e.g. equipping the factory, pilot car testing, etc.) on the back end like the MLV's which have 2-3x as many total units. At a +10 year life extension they'd go out-of-sync with P-P equipment cycles on the rest of the MTA, making their ultimate replacement order circa 2030 considerably more costly on a per-unit scale than if they gutted everything all at once. They would have to have electrical modifications above-and-beyond what usually gets done in a midlife overhaul to ditch the LIRR-custom HEP hookup and let them trainline with the new locomotives and run in mixed consists with the new coaches...making the per-unit cost of the overhauls a little less favorable than the typical going rate for rebuilds. And LIRR's maint costs are going to be higher having to stock parts for two unlike coach makes.

Tally up the math by units over time, and you come up with an outright lower Total Cost of Ownership with a wholesale replacement vs. a rebuild. Same sort of scales Amtrak can point to in its math justifying a decision to cleanroom the whole diesel locomotive roster on one procurement cycle rather than rebuild 20-year-old GE Genesis locos and maintain a heterogeneous mix of GE, Siemens, and EMD units all on fragmented procurement cycles. The fact that it is technically feasible to rebuild 20-year-old cars does not mean it is cost-effective. The MTA has a bigger responsibility to the taxpayers to show value-for-money with their procurement decisions than they have responsibility to maximize equipment lifespan for maximizing lifespan's sake. In real dollars they're getting better value retiring the C3's at 20 and banking on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for primo per-unit scale by syncing orders with MNRR/CDOT (who are de facto syncing with NJT).