by dwlevine
I don't know. One imagines that while they know the basics, the devil may well be in the details. The wiring was installed over half a century ago, and one imagines there's been a *lot* of maintenance over the years. How carefully was it all documented originally? How completely do they know what's been done over the years? For added sport, one has to assume that there was plenty of physical damage to the ends of all the cable runs into the room.
I expect that simply identifying all the cable runs, and getting to a point where you have all the pairs neatly labled is going to take some time, especially since you almost certainly need someone down in the tunnels, at the switch and signal control units to verify each cable run. I suspect you can do some of that work without disrupting traffic, but I'd bet some of it can't be done while trains are running. Even with hundreds of cable runs to sort out, that isn't years worth of work, but I bet it's plenty.
In terms of parts, the best news is that you don't need all 600 relays in place, in order to get the basics running. I'm sure that some bright boys an girls in the engineering group are bosy laying out the minimum repairs needed to increase TPH on the As and then allow the most straighforward possible set of moves to permit the Cs to start running again. I'm willing to bet that long after they've "restored" service they'll be doing work to enable all the oddball options that permit alternate service patterns, skipped stations, moves between express and local and the like.
In the mean time, I also hope someone is being told to go and figure out what the story is in all the other relay and control rooms, and see if we can't prevent this sort of thing from happening again. If some homleless guy can do this much damage it by accident, someone working with hostile intent could almost certainly make a bigger mess.
- David
I expect that simply identifying all the cable runs, and getting to a point where you have all the pairs neatly labled is going to take some time, especially since you almost certainly need someone down in the tunnels, at the switch and signal control units to verify each cable run. I suspect you can do some of that work without disrupting traffic, but I'd bet some of it can't be done while trains are running. Even with hundreds of cable runs to sort out, that isn't years worth of work, but I bet it's plenty.
In terms of parts, the best news is that you don't need all 600 relays in place, in order to get the basics running. I'm sure that some bright boys an girls in the engineering group are bosy laying out the minimum repairs needed to increase TPH on the As and then allow the most straighforward possible set of moves to permit the Cs to start running again. I'm willing to bet that long after they've "restored" service they'll be doing work to enable all the oddball options that permit alternate service patterns, skipped stations, moves between express and local and the like.
In the mean time, I also hope someone is being told to go and figure out what the story is in all the other relay and control rooms, and see if we can't prevent this sort of thing from happening again. If some homleless guy can do this much damage it by accident, someone working with hostile intent could almost certainly make a bigger mess.
- David