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Ashmont Line is down, riders gonna frown
By adamg on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 9:47am
It's buses between Ashmont and JFK/UMass because of track ish at Savin Hill.
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Comments
Sliver Line equally a failure
Over 200 people waited upwards of 30 minutes for any Silver Line bus. No communication from the T. Considering plenty use the bus to ride to the Courthouse station the T would have helped by letting people know what to expect. Walking this morning would have been much faster (albeit colder) than using the T.
No amount of money will solve problem caused by people who don't care.
Were Silver Line buses pulled
Were Silver Line buses pulled for the Red Line shuttles? It's not as though the T has a fleet of dozens of buses ready on a moment's notice to replace subway service (though perhaps it should, given the frequency of breakdowns).
It started running again
It started running again shortly after 10.
CSI got on at Savin Hill
This afternoon I was on a red line train to Ashmont when a bunch of state troopers carrying a large metal box got on the train and stopped the train a couple of hundred yards down the track and got off with the box which someone said was an x-ray machine. Does anyone know what really happened at the station ?
Track failure scare?
That's equipment they use to check the tracks for invisible damage that could cause a failure/derailment. They were using the same equipment just yesterday to examine the tracks in the vicinity of the Haverhill mess. Perhaps they had reason to believe there was an imminent track failure in this area, too.
Since when are Mass. State Police
considered to be experts in track inspection?
"Winter Hppens"
Seriously??
T says Red Line rail likely broke due to temp drop
A piece of broken rail forced shuttle service along the Ashmont branch of the Red Line during rush hour Tuesday morning, an issue the MBTA believes resulted from a quick drop in temperature this week.
“The exact cause remains under investigation, but it is believed to be related to the extreme drop in temperatures (from fairly mild to bitterly cold),” MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said in an email. “Such a drop can be very stressful on a running rail.”
The broken rail near Savin Hill was temporarily replaced with a piece of equipment “to preserve the integrity of the rail,” until it is permanently replaced overnight, Pesaturo said. Regular service resumed around 10 a.m., about two hours after the T reported the issue on Twitter.
Boston temperatures were between 8 and 15 degrees during the morning commute. Temperatures dipped below freezing Monday morning and continued to drop throughout the day. Sunday’s high temperature was 43 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
The Red Line issue was not the only track problem on the first very cold morning of the winter. A commuter rail train also derailed north of Boston early Tuesday due to a “track failure,” according to The Boston Globe . The incident caused delays and cancellations throughout the morning. Mac Daniel, a spokesman for Keolis, the private company that manages the commuter rail for the T, said the reason for the failure remains under investigation.
After last February’s weather caused deep service issues across the T, the agency has invested more than $80 million into preparing the system for the coming winter. It faced its first snowfall of the season last week, and saw some issues throughout the day—though not all were weather-related.
http://www.boston.com/news/2016/01/05/says-red-line-rail-broke-due-temp-...
On the one hand, I want to
On the one hand, I want to post mocking the T's "winter resiliency" horn-tooting again. It's too easy to make fun of these schmucks that allegedly run some kind of transit system.
OTOH, this kind of winter failure is completely outside of the scope of the class of failures they were trying to mitigate with their "winter resiliency" upgrades, which were to address issues like ice-coated third rails and ice-clogged switches and signalling equipment. A sudden and extreme drop in temperatures presents an entirely different kind of problem - metals shrink and crack, akin to how they expand and warp under extremely hot temperatures - which was not a factor in last year's debacle, so the T didn't do anything to mitigate that this year.
The Herald Scoop
The Herald is reporting that that the state police have been called in to investigate the incident and the photo in the newspaper shows the troopers carrying metal suitcases.