Railroad Forums
Moderators: sery2831, CRail
jwhite07 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 7:07 am The T has every right to be gun shy considering their (pardon the pun) track record with rail vehicle acquisitions, but this prolonged semi-testing-semi-revenue-service thing is new. Used to be you tested the heck out of whatever number of pilot vehicles you spec'd, which would tell you what mods you needed to make, then the production vehicles would come out with those mods and for the most part all you'd need is a few thousand miles of burn-in and then release the hounds for full unrestricted service. There was little need to limit service of production vehicles because the bugs were supposed to be just about all worked out by then - that was the whole point of intense and exhaustive testing of pre-production or pilot cars. Sure, even after that, there might be some hiccups along the way and you might need to pull cars briefly, but they should be relatively minor things that are easily rectified at that point. That's how it was with the subway/light rail acquisitions I was relevant enough to witness (Type 7s, 01700s, 01800s, 0700s).Could it be that it's slightly more effective to do it this way, so that the vehicles are sort of in service, operators are being trained on the new type, AND the cars are tested for issues at the same time? With these cars being more computerized than the previous generations, more testing might be required, as there are more systems to test, and more things that can go wrong.
Note no mention until now of the Type 8 utter debacle, which is I suspect what really changed things. Maybe this is the "new/better" way of doing it. I don't get that, but I'm not a highly paid consultant either, I'm just a guy who pays for and uses the service and wants to see the new cars improve it. I guess in the end if it results in solid, reliable vehicles and service, all's good. In the meantime it's painful and aggravating to watch the tentative half-steps. If a vehicle is accepted for revenue service it should be fully and absolutely able to operate in unrestricted full time service, not limited to a couple of trips and scurry back to the barn for a download.