Thursday, March 29, 2007

When One Derailment Is Insufficient

Why have one, when two are twice as nice. PATH suffered the second derailment of a subway train in the span of a week last night. It appears to have occurred in the same general area as the first one that happened on Sunday.

The track was fixed for the morning commute, but it appears that speed limits were reduced in the area as I came into New York City this morning.

Sadly, there is no additional information available from the Port Authority website about the derailments, their cause or what is being done to prevent the problem from reoccurring (other than slowing traffic to a crawl in the vicinity of the derailments).

UPDATE:
It would appear that my impression was correct. They are running the trains slower. Instead of 15mph through a section of track where the derailments occurred, they are running at 5mph.

The PANY-NJ isn't sure whether age of the subway cars played a role or whether there was some other factor. The average age of the PATH cars is 33 years old, though help is on the way as new cars are set to enter the fleet beginning in 2008. In the meantime, engineers are trying to figure out how to prevent a repeat.

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