Harlem River Bridge Fire - 9/20

RearOfSignal wrote:Yes, but YE153 has 4 tracks capable of holding 10 cars and plenty of room in the station for large crowds, Marble Hill does not. Not to mention it would be simple to send Harlem and NH trains there around the wye.

You know, YE153 was a much maligned project. It was either a gift to the Yankees, fans wouldn't use it, it was useless as a commuter stop, a boondoggle, and so on. And here we are, seeing the great utility of the project. This is the only current operating station which all three lines can and do serve, and has the capacity to handle it, that is NORTH of the Harlem River. It is very useful as an alternate to Manhattan proper. I'd imagine you could even run a ferry from there (there is a Yankee ferry, isn't there?).

RearOfSignal wrote:Yes, but YE153 has 4 tracks capable of holding 10 cars and plenty of room in the station for large crowds, Marble Hill does not. Not to mention it would be simple to send Harlem and NH trains there around the wye.

As we know, this was all resolved before PM rush. But if it had not been, would all trains departing E153 for points North be locals? In other words, if you were trying to get home, would it just be a matter of making sure you got on a train for the correct line, or would you also have to make sure the train was stopping at your home station?

Usually, when something like this happens they won't run the super expresses or the zippers. Usually the top priority is getting as many people on the trains as possible and out of the city. It all depends on how bad the situation is. For most people who live in the Bronx if MNR gets jammed up really bad they'll just take the subway, so the need to make all the local stops in the Bronx wouldn't be as pressing.

playdough wrote:

RearOfSignal wrote:Yes, but YE153 has 4 tracks capable of holding 10 cars and plenty of room in the station for large crowds, Marble Hill does not. Not to mention it would be simple to send Harlem and NH trains there around the wye.

As we know, this was all resolved before PM rush. But if it had not been, would all trains departing E153 for points North be locals? In other words, if you were trying to get home, would it just be a matter of making sure you got on a train for the correct line, or would you also have to make sure the train was stopping at your home station?

I would imagine the basic locals. All stops to Stamford. New Haven bound will probably be express to Stamford local to New Haven. Local to Harmon. Express to Harmon local to Poughkeepsie etc. 2 trains per line splitting them in half.

metrony wrote:

playdough wrote:This was all resolved before PM rush. But if it had not been, would all trains departing E153 for points North be locals?

I would imagine the basic locals. All stops to Stamford. New Haven bound will probably be express to Stamford local to New Haven. Local to Harmon. Express to Harmon local to Poughkeepsie etc. 2 trains per line splitting them in half.

From a convenience standpoint, yes, that'd be the most-convenient -- split each line in half, first train is express to the northern half, second train gets local service to the southern half of the line. That's kinda sorta close to the usual service on all 3 lines anyway.

But operationally, I'm not sure if that would have worked out so well. Remember, there are only 4 platformed tracks at YE153, compared to GCT having many, many more platforms so more trains can be loading/unloading passengers at the same time. Adding to the bottleneck, you have all Harlem and New Haven trains sharing the single, very low-speed wye track to get around MO. (Just imagine if GCT had only 4 tracks total, and the Park Ave viaduct had only 1 or 2 tracks being shared by all three lines in both directions.)

In a situation like that, I think it would be much easier for everyone involved (MNR crews and riders alike) to just make every single train a local. Perhaps the only exception would be the New Haven Line, with its reputation for being overcrowded with riders. One track for Hudson, one track for Harlem, one track for all NHL stops through Stamford, and the last track for all NHL stops between Stamford and New Haven. Then the conductors, field employees and everyone else involved would be able to just tell people to get on any train serving their line, without having to worry about whether their stop will be made. It'd be an inconvenience for say, people bound for Beacon or Poughkeepsie, to sit through a local to Croton, but I think most would understand, given that was a very unusual event, which would have demanded an unusual solution.

That wouldn't happen, remember they do something similar at YE153 every time there's a Yankee game. The Harlem line Yankee clipper makes everything from Mt. Vernon up to Southeast. So they would only have to split those two trains.

In emergency conditions like that, would it be practicable to through-route Hudson and Harlem trains? No changing ends, no brake test (?), just unload, load, change crews, and go? Or does a crew change require a brake test? (Now that I think of it, SEPTA doesn't do a brake test at Suburban Station when they change crews.) Either way, I guess the wye at MO is the real choke point--more platforms wouldn't help much.

They might not even have to change crews.

That's what I was thinking--but if a crew came in from Harmon and didn't have enough time left to make Brewster North (and I refuse to call it anything but Brewster North) another crew could take over and be on their way.

Anytime the engineer keys out a brake test must be performed. So yes, in changing ends a brake test is conducted. As for situations where another crew hands off equipment to another, yes that happens. Been on trains to POK where the yard crew had a train in the station for us all charged up ready to take north. Also been on trains going up to NH where there was an equipment swap in the station due to mechanical problems.

As far as sending up crews who are stationed out of Harmon and going up to Brewster that would only be in extreme circumstances for various reasons. One of the biggest reasons they would hold back on that in a crews tour of duty would be for the hours of service. They don't want to send a Harmon crew who has been on duty for seven hours up to Brewster and return when they are only good for another 5 hours. They run the risk of outlawing on the road, thus creating more problems. At that point, whomever is running the show in NY would step up a trainmen to conductor and grab a Emergency Room guy to run the train.

It's easy to criticize after the fact when everything has occurred. But situations like this, the incident on the NH line with the entire north east corridor being paralyzed at Greenich, and the black out of '03, there is no game plan book they take off the shelf and go by.

pnaw10 wrote:But you're right, the 1-train is an awful alternative for getting into the heart of Manhattan... all 1-trains are local (despite the el being triple-tracked) so it takes much longer than MN. On the plus side, the walk from Marble Hill to the 225 Street subway station is considerably shorter than the walk from the MN station to the subway stations at Yankee Stadium, as long as you don't mind climbing plenty of stairs.

I'd imagine that if this had wound up being a multi-day outage on the Harlem River draw the TA would have implemented some special express subway service on the 1 line (and probably the 4 and the D as well) to get Metro-North passengers downtown as quickly as possible.

Something else occurred to me that I haven't seen mentioned: if this happened again during the middle of the day on a weekday, does anyone have an estimate of what percent of the fleet would be trapped south of the bridge?

During the week, a good amount of equipment is laid outside of NY (Highbridge, Harmon, North White.) Some equipment is yarded to the East Yard or the lower level yard tracks.

ExCon90 wrote:Something else occurred to me that I haven't seen mentioned: if this happened again during the middle of the day on a weekday, does anyone have an estimate of what percent of the fleet would be trapped south of the bridge?

Jeff Smith wrote:I'm glad service has been restored, but this does raise some questions of what the alternative plans would be if the bridge were out for a while.

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2. How much equipment is stored in GCT during the day? I.e. how much equipment would be stranded? I'm guessing less now that Madison Yard is now Highbridge due to ESA.

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Nasadowsk wrote:Any word on the cause yet?

I haven't seen anything. But first reports were an electrical box or transformer exploded, wasn't it?

I'm kind of curious to know about the ability to raise the bridge. I wonder if they've tested it?