All Things WMATA 7000 Series

Sand Box John wrote: WMATA has broken tradition again by going with a cab trailer configuration on this car procurement. They first broke with tradition by going with stainless steel. WMATA will however stay with married pairs the only difference will be the B car in the pair will be cabless. (See page 10 in the above linked PDF file) If compatibility is maintained these cars will still be able to be run in 6 car consists with a pair from other car series. (A-B+B-A+pair from another series) It is also likely that these cars will be run in 6 car consists. (A-B+B-A+B-A)

Though not stated in this document, other documents published by WMATA indicate the total procurement will be 500 cars.

Honestly, it makes no sense to eliminate the cab from the B-car. What's wrong with the current setup that allows passengers to use half the cab when its not in use? The space where the cab would be would only provide additional space for two seats at most. That's only 8 additional seats for an 8-car train. Is it really worth the frustration in having to turn pairs to make sure the cab end is up front when putting consists together? It would especially be a major pain trying to put together a 6-car train from a 4- or 8- car set.

Out of all the prospective manufacturers, only the following should be considered:

-Alstom
-Bombardier
-Kawasaki
-and maybe Breda since they previously built succesful Metro vehicles

Why the rest shouldn't be considered:

Nippon Sharyo- Virtually no heavy rail experience, just the "bullet trains" in Japan, and commuter rail coaches for MARC and gallery cars for Metra, Caltrain, and VRE. The MARC-coach based EMUs used on Indiana's South Shore Line (NICTD) and LRVs for Los Angeles are the closest thing to rapid transit they've produced.

Kinki Sharyo=LRV

CAF- unlilkely the WMATA will ever award a contract to CAF again.

Rotem- hahaha Doesn't the page title say "Unit Train Experience" The WMATA isn't as dumb as SEPTA or MBTA. Or maybe they are...

"realtype"
Honestly, it makes no sense to eliminate the cab from the B-car. What's wrong with the current setup that allows passengers to use half the cab when its not in use? The space where the cab would be would only provide additional space for two seats at most. That's only 8 additional seats for an 8-car train.

The difference 40 passenger per train. The other issue is the cost of maintaining the redundant cabs.

Is it really worth the frustration in having to turn pairs to make sure the cab end is up front when putting consists together?

Yard master doesn’t have a 7k series set turned in the correction direction to make up a train, use available 1k, 2k, 3k, 4k, 5k or 6k sets in the yard to fill out the consist.

It would especially be a major pain trying to put together a 6-car train from a 4- or 8- car set.

Remove one of the middle pairs from an 8 car train of 7k car and you have a 6 car train of 7k cars. Another option is to cut 4 of the cars from an 8 car set of 7k cars and use one of the existing cars to make a 6 car train.

You are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

WMATA plans to deploy 100% 8 car trains on 4 of the 7 lines by 2015:

Red - Shady Grove Glenmont, Grosvenor Silver Spring 100% 8 car
Blue - Franconia/Springfield Largo 100% 8 car
Orange - Vienna New Carrollton 100% 8 car
Green - Branch Avenue Greenbelt 100% 8 car
Yellow - Huntington Mount Vernon Square 88.8 % 8 car
Silver - Ashburn Stadium Armory 75% 8 car
Aqua - Franconia/Springfield Greenbelt 44.4% 8 car

Is it really worth the frustration in having to turn pairs to make sure the cab end is up front when putting consists together?

I suspect they intend to operate the new cars in permanent four-car train consists ( a la NYCT) but are calling for a coupler between the second and third car so the four-car consists can easily be split up for maintenance in the existing maintenance facilties without major facilities modifications, since the shops are now all set up for two-car married pair consists and the pits, hoists, etc. can handle only two cars at time.

"polybalt"
I suspect they intend to operate the new cars in permanent four-car train consists ( a la NYCT) but are calling for a coupler between the second and third car so the four-car consists can easily be split up for maintenance in the existing maintenance facilties without major facilities modifications, since the shops are now all set up for two-car married pair consists and the pits, hoists, etc. can handle only two cars at time.

I seriously doubt that schema will end up becoming reality. One tradition I don't think WMATA will brake with is the ability to mix train consists with cars from different series. I would suspect the first time these cars turn their first revenue mile they will run those mile in mixed consists. I also happen to believe it will not be uncommon to see them running in mixed consists on a daily bases

One must remember the first 128 cars of this procurement is to increase fleet size to accommodate the Tysons, Dulles, Loudoun County route Silver line. The next 130 cars will be used to increase the overall fleet size. The next 300 cars will replace the 1k cars.

Sand Box John wrote:"polybalt"
I suspect they intend to operate the new cars in permanent four-car train consists ( a la NYCT) but are calling for a coupler between the second and third car so the four-car consists can easily be split up for maintenance in the existing maintenance facilties without major facilities modifications, since the shops are now all set up for two-car married pair consists and the pits, hoists, etc. can handle only two cars at time.

I seriously doubt that schema will end up becoming reality. One tradition I don't think WMATA will brake with is the ability to mix train consists with cars from different series. I would suspect the first time these cars turn their first revenue mile they will run those mile in mixed consists. I also happen to believe it will not be uncommon to see them running in mixed consists on a daily bases

One must remember the first 128 cars of this procurement is to increase fleet size to accommodate the Tysons, Dulles, Loudoun County route Silver line. The next 130 cars will be used to increase the overall fleet size. The next 300 cars will replace the 1k cars.

I had thought the WMATA had said that the 7000s aren't likely to be compatible with the older design. This makes perfect sense to me since it is an entirely different design in looks and otherwise.

The new cars will all proabably be sent to the Green Line for "testing." Metro said the 6000's would be divided proportionately among all 5 lines after the "testing," but to this day the majority of them are on the Green Line. The Red Line has a very high percentage of the Rohr cars, while the 6000's (and even the 5000s and rehabs) remain uncommon. The same thing will happen for the Silver Line; Metro will send all the older cars from the Green Line to the Silver Line, and keep the new cars on the Green Line.

"realtype"
I had thought the WMATA had said that the 7000s aren't likely to be compatible with the older design. This makes perfect sense to me since it is an entirely different design in looks and otherwise.

The size, cross section, guts and controls will be basically the same. The only difference between these cars and the existing cars is the bodies are stainless steel, the interiors will have different furnishings and additional bells and whistles.

The new cars will all proabably be sent to the Green Line for "testing." Metro said the 6000's would be divided proportionately among all 5 lines after the "testing," but to this day the majority of them are on the Green Line. The Red Line has a very high percentage of the Rohr cars, while the 6000's (and even the 5000s and rehabs) remain uncommon. The same thing will happen for the Silver Line; Metro will send all the older cars from the Green Line to the Silver Line, and keep the new cars on the Green Line.

There is no probably about it. One of the parts of the this long term car procurement project is the construction of a dedicated 30,000 Sq ft (2787.09 Sq m) "Commissioning Facility" in Greenbelt Yard and a 12,000' (3657.6m) test track on the west side of inbound track E2 between Greenbelt Yard and Piney Branch Parkway. The purpose of this facility is to free up the maintenance space in the Greenbelt shop to work on cars in the existing fleet. According to the document posted by tommyboy6181, 4 prototype cars will spend a year going through an extensive testing and acceptance process before full production begins.

How and where the production cars will be deployed after being processed through the Commissioning Facility remains to be seen. WMATA will likely send their maintenance employees from all of the yards through the Commissioning Facility to learn the intricacies of these cars during both the prototype and production phases of the procurement.

One of the reason why you see mostly 1k cars on the Red line is because both Brentwood and Shady Grove have contractor working in those yards expanding the maintenance facilities. There isn't a hell of a lot of room left over for storage of spare parts for all of the cars in the fleet.

"realtype"
I had thought the WMATA had said that the 7000s aren't likely to be compatible with the older design. This makes perfect sense to me since it is an entirely different design in looks and otherwise."

I wonder if WMATA has finally decided to go to P-wire control on new cars instead of their current fixed-step brake trainlines. As far as I can tell they have never been able to get consistent smooth ATO stops with the current awkward trainline arrangement. With an analog system like P-wire it should be a piece of cake.

If so, the new cars would be unable to trainline with the existing fleet.

"polybalt"
I wonder if WMATA has finally decided to go to P-wire control on new cars instead of their current fixed-step brake trainlines. As far as I can tell they have never been able to get consistent smooth ATO stops with the current awkward trainline arrangement. With an analog system like P-wire it should be a piece of cake.

All of the station stop hardware is in the lead pair of the train. Smooth station stops is an issue of the imperfection in the compatibility of the various cars series.

Back in the late 1970 and early 1980 before WMATA's rolling stock shortage 8 car trains had little trouble executing smooth and precise stations stops. WMATA rarely ran 8 car trains up until just under 10 years ago. What happen during those intervening years is the wayside hardware used to execute precise stations stops saw little or no maintenance.

There are 2,524 marker coils on the railroad that are used to tell the trains where the station platforms are. 1,260 of the marker coils are passive, the other 360 are veritable frequency. Only 4 of the veritable frequency marker coils are used. If these marker coils slip out of calibration or fail to function at all or a train fails to pick up signals from one or more of the marker coils trains have problems executing precise stations stops.

"polybalt"
I wonder if WMATA has finally decided to go to P-wire control on new cars instead of their current fixed-step brake trainlines. As far as I can tell they have never been able to get consistent smooth ATO stops with the current awkward trainline arrangement. With an analog system like P-wire it should be a piece of cake.

All of the station stop hardware is in the lead pair of the train. Smooth station stops is an issue of the imperfection in the compatibility of the various cars series.

I agree that is likely much of the problem. (Caveat-- I have not been involved with WMATA cars for 30 years and have no idea what they have been up to since. All this is pure speculation.) What I have noticed on my limited trips on WMATA trains is that the ATO stops are very rough and ragged at the lowest speeds. Sometimes the train stops, then jumps ahead. This is not a marker coil problem. As I remember the marker coils tell the ATO system that it is at the incoming end of the platform and make sure the train enters that station at the appropriate speed. After that the ATO uses a speed sensor to count gear teeth to determine how far down the platform the train has gone and how fast it is going. It compares this information with a profile stored in memory and requests, via the brake trainlines, either more or less braking effort from the train to get the stop back on profile. The issue is that the braking trainlines on WMATA are ( were?) set up so that the ATO can only request one of five braking levels ( B1-B5) and coast. What if near the end of the stop the ATO "wants" to feather the brakes into the final stop and would "like" a brake effort equal to 1/2 of the lowest available trainline command? The only thing it can do is rapidly cycle the trainlines between B1 and Coast. With a great deal of effort one can tweak the system to give a smooth stop if all cars in the train have exactly the same brake response time. But the different series of cars probably have slightly different brake response times to rapid trainline changes, making it impossible to program the ATO for smooth accurate stops with all combinations of consist.

The more typical trainline scheme would use a continuoiusly variable trainline ( P-wire) that loop through all cars in the train, where the current level in the trainline is interpreted by all cars as the level of brake required. If the ATO wants a rate equal to half of the current B1 rate, it just requests exactly that rate from the train. Requested changes in brake rate can be much smoother and I would guesss the stop would be less dependent on detailed brake response times.

I was just speculating as to why WMATA would decide to specify cars not compatible with the existing ones ( if indeed they are). Realy the only reasons for incompatibility are mechanical coupler or trainline differences, and I was guessing trainline.

I wonder if WMATA has finally decided to go to P-wire control on new cars instead of their current fixed-step brake trainlines. As far as I can tell they have never been able to get consistent smooth ATO stops with the current awkward trainline arrangement. With an analog system like P-wire it should be a piece of cake.

If so, the new cars would be unable to trainline with the existing fleet.

Speaking of P-wire console, when the NYCTA's R46 car fleet was being rebuilt, it was decided to do away with the P-wire control coach and convert to regular car control, which I favor, although I have not seen R46 cars run with R44s but now, that both types have been rebuilt, these two car types which are identical in exterior appearance could trainline together.

And as far as the new 4-car5 configuration, I have mixed feelings about it, they'll have to do like the R46 which the bulk (5482-6207) were built as 4-car sets and the remaining units (6208-6258) were built as married pairs, so I hope that some 7000-series are built as married pairs and the rest as 4-car sets like the New York R46s

quote="Robert Paniagua"
And as far as the new 4-car5 configuration, I have mixed feelings about it, they'll have to do like the R46 which the bulk (5482-6207) were built as 4-car sets and the remaining units (6208-6258) were built as married pairs, so I hope that some 7000-series are built as married pairs and the rest as 4-car sets like the New York R46s

All of the 7k cars will be built as married pairs. The only difference between the 7k cars and the rest of cars in the existing fleet is the 7k cars will not have cabs in the B cars. That being said yard masters will able to put together consists of 7k cars with cab ends of mid train married pairs pointing in either direction.

The cars will be structurally different then the aluminum cars to comply with the recommendations that were handed down by the NTSB as the result of the wrecks at Shady Grove and Woodly Park-Zoo.

All of the 7k cars will be built as married pairs. The only difference between the 7k cars and the rest of cars in the existing fleet is the 7k cars will not have cabs in the B cars. That being said yard masters will able to put together consists of 7k cars with cab ends of mid train married pairs pointing in either direction.

Ah, ok. It'll be like the R44-R46 car order which was made as married pairs initially with the odd # cars had no cabs and even no's have cabs, but then after Mid-life overhaul, they just permanently coupled them as 4-car sets, but the 7000s will just be A-B car coupling

"Robert Paniagua"
Ah, ok. It'll be like the R44-R46 car order which was made as married pairs initially with the odd # cars had no cabs and even no's have cabs, but then after Mid-life overhaul, they just permanently coupled them as 4-car sets, but the 7000s will just be A-B car coupling

The reason why fixed 4 cars sets will not be built is because as stated elsewhere in this thread all of the lifts in the shops are configured to handle married pairs only.

Yeah that's good then, I hate to see 4-car sets, I like married pairs better.

Those things just don't look very good. Even the interior LCD strip map looks bad in the car. My question is why don't they just use bench seating instead of 2x2? There would be more capacity with that kind of formation.