Michigander in Mass

Perhaps spurred by the knowledge of a soon (in geologic, er, bureaucratic time)-to-be-expanded Green Line (to West Medford), the MBTA will add 85 trolleys beginning in 2007, it was announced recently.

The Boston Globe had a more in-depth story, some of which is extracted below:

Under the agreement, [trolley manufacturer] Ansaldobreda will receive increasing amounts of the remaining money in the contract only if each trolley is able to meet an increasing ''miles between failures" goal, up to the T's system standard of 9,300 miles. The new deal keeps the one-year warranty on the trolleys.

But Carrie Russell, staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, which has monitored the controversial trolley purchase, said she is still skeptical about the Breda cars.

"The T needs to stop throwing good money after bad investments," she said yesterday.

A year ago, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officials called its Breda cars one of the worst purchases in the agency's history and talked of ordering new trolleys from another manufacturer. Despite a derailment problem that had been fixed, the cars were breaking down at three times the normal rate for subway vehicles. Water was getting into the trolleys' coupling systems, air conditioning and heating systems leaked or failed to work, and doors stayed partially open, keeping the trains from moving.

"We bought a lemon," Michael H. Mulhern, then the T's then-general manager, said last December.

Now, of the 185 cars in the Green Line fleet, 55 were scheduled to be retired five years ago but have had to remain in service despite more frequent breakdowns. As a result, the T sometimes has to run fewer than the 136 trolleys it needs during rush hour. The Green Line's lack of low-floor vehicles accessible to the disabled further slows service, because drivers had to get out and use special lifts for passengers in wheelchairs.

T officials said they have spent nearly $750,000 to retrofit and test 10 of the Breda cars to fix problems. So far, officials say, the fixes have worked, with the test cars showing a three-fold improvement in reliability. The T will not recoup that money.

The T plans to spend another $2.4 million to make the Breda cars able to connect with non-Breda cars in the Green Line fleet.

About 40 of the T's 47 existing Bredas are operating on the B branch, and T officials plan to expand their use to the C branch in the next three weeks. Ten of them have already been retrofitted and the others will be. After track repairs and improvements, revamped Bredas will head to the E branch by late fall 2006 and the D branch after that, officials said.

As track work commences on the Green Line, T officials plan to lift speed restrictions at nine locations between now and 2008. Two speed restrictions were lifted yesterday on the D branch near the stops at Brookline Village and Brookline Hills, where recent track work allowed speeds to increase from 10 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour.