Just another one of those things in life: Red Line signal woes at Alewife

Family member lived within walking distance to Green Line and worked downtown. Service was so unreliable (and uncomfortable) that she transferred to a suburban office so she could drive. Much happier now.

You step off the trolley at rush hour, hustle into the station, look up at the sign and see "7 Min," think "well, not great but ok." Then you peer over the Ashmont precipice and see the platform already packed - children, strollers, elderly, suits, all resigned and miserable. Then the recorded voice announces delays. Signal problems at Alewife, might as well be signal problems on Mars, some inexorable law of fate you neither understand nor recognize. You breath a defeated sigh, hungover from a long weekend of overindulgence, and press your card against the turnstile. The dependable trolleys continue to roll in, along with buses. You know that today you'll be standing on the train, squashed in with everyone else, waiting longer at each stop to pack in more disappointed, harried commuters. You hope you won't be out of breath, huffing and puffing when you finally swipe your card into work that morning.

As the air gets cooler these days are starting to feel like Winter '14-15.

The signal issues are due to a system that is as old as the trains themselves, and that aged system is failing. The question before the MBTA and its finance board is whether they will make repairs to the existing system or invest in a complete new system that would allow for more trains to be added. As of now that is the way they are leaning.

To understand the issue, we need to review.

We all remember the runaway Red Line train at Braintree. At Braintree the train operator tried to over-ride the signal that was stopping the train from going forward.

The signal which shows red and green (sometimes yellow) emits a signal similar to a radio signal that tells the train if it can go or must stop. The signal matches the color of the light showing - usually. However, the Braintree signal was not consistent. It kept moving from "go" to "no go" and the train's receiver could not lock onto this signal, so it was stuck and it would not let the train go forward. This is why the train operator got out to over-ride that system so he could get the train to go.

Sadly, he also had the throttle tied down in what he thought was "neutral" but instead it was in "drive." When he hit the switch outside the train, it took off. For what its worth, he was a scapegoat as this was the process that all of the operators knew was the only why to get the trains going past a bad signal, especially on the older trains equipped with this system.

The over-ride switch used to be in the cab with the operator but in a train rebuild back in the 80s they moved the switch outside. Why? because back in the 80s they were having signal problems and the operators were always over-riding the system. The problem then was that they were not always calling in for permission to do that. Why? The radios didn't work. So the operators broke rules to make sure that people go to the next station. The operators are not always the bad guy here.

Fixing these signals is not an easy task. The cables that feed them are sometimes miles long and are similar to telephone trunk cables you see feeding dozens of homes in a neighborhood. The problem may not be at the signal itself but somewhere along a mile or so of cable, and since it is an intermittent thing, not easy to find.

The fix would require the T to hire a contractor to replace miles of buried cable (under and beside the tracks) and also trace the cable off T property where it can and does leave the tracks. Since repairs can only be done between 1 AM and 5 AM (approx) when no trains are running, this leaves a contractor little time to do it all and it can stretch on for months. The original cabling was installed by Verizon before trains even ran on the tracks because it was like a telephone installation job using copper wire. Verizon got out of that game many years ago and any warranty long since expired and they are not interested in being engaged to fix this. Why? they are getting out of the whole copper wire business in chunks and will soon be all FIOS and Wireless.

(Wait till FIOS is installed in Boston folks... all of us with copper wire connections will be dumped like a hot potato. New owner will be Fairpoint Communications. Look 'em up.)

Because of the runaway train incident, the new process requires the train to have a second person appear in the cab and witness the over-ride to get by the bad signal. This means the person has to also be qualified to operate the train, not just a pair of eyes. You cannot use just any station attendant. If you are fortunate, the train is at a station when it cannot go forward. If its in a no-man's land between stations you have to wait for a second person to walk out to the train, get driven to a nearby access gate, or arrive on a train coming in the opposite direction.

None of this is going to get better in the short term. Plan accordingly.

New trains and repaired infrastructure take money and time to accomplish.

Feel free to blame anyone you want, but the hard fact is that we are all to blame ourselves, and all of our fellow Massachusetts residents, jointly. Had necessary funding been put into the MBTA for the last several decades we might not be in this mess. However, legislators in communities not served by the MBTA do not want their tax dollars to fund it. They fail to understand that the prosperity (sic) of the state depends on the T running and running well in the densest population core around Boston and vicinity. We learned how the whole state can loose out when the T was dead during the winter of 2015. Only now are they realizing this.

The same is true or rail investment nationwide whether it is long-distance, commuter, or transit systems. If they are not served by it, they don't want to pay into it, failing to recognize how such systems that move people, like any freight commodity, is important to a state's economy as a whole.

So we can blame Charlie, Deval, Mitt, and any number of past people in office but in the end it was the failure of the legislature, to make certain that funds went into the T. Forcing the T to take over the BIG DIG debt didn't help FWIW.

So, the question the T now faces is to spend millions on fixing the existing system that maintains the status quo for train spacing (minutes between trains), or spending millions on a new system that will increase the number of trains per hour.

In the meantime, things are not going to get better.

Things to watch... The T finance board is now starting to move projects to MassDOT. They already rebuilt two locomotives and painted them in a new MassDOT livery (remember the Capt. Boomerang thread?). And recently, they transferred the South Coast Rail project to MassDOT taking it out of the MBTA's hands. Watch for more of this as Charlie and company move to disassemble the T.

If you think that politics is a problem with the T now, wait till it's all MassDOT. If you cannot telecommute for work, you need to look into that now.

During the Regan administration two liberal lions named Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill were able to secure billions for transportation projects. Who can we look to fight for federal funds?
Liz Warren- nope
Ed Markey-nope
Charlie Baker-nope
Marty Walsh-nope
The MBTA is doomed without massive fare hikes.

I'm becoming more in favor of privation of the T everyday