Metro is planning to spend more than a half-million dollars and take more than two years to upgrade the doors of a series of rail cars that federal investigators told the transit agency to get rid of three years ago.
Metro is slated to ask its board of directors Thursday to spend $638,000 on a contract to repair door controls on the Rohr 1000 Series rail cars after doors on those cars opened on the wrong side at stations three times, leaving passengers potentially exposed to dangerous tracks, according to a board memo.
“It has to be done. The cars are still in service,” said Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel. “Right now, there’s no other viable option. We believe the cars are safe.”
But the National Transportation Safety Board ordered the transit agency to ditch those cars or upgrade them in 2006, calling them “uncrashworthy” because they can collapse in during a crash.
The push to replace the railcars was renewed this summer after one was crushed to a third of its size in a crash that killed nine people and injured dozens more. The cars were not thought to cause the crash but may have made it more deadly.
Yet Metro has said it cannot get rid of the 290 cars because they make up about a quarter of its fleet. It would cost nearly $900 million to replace them, money the agency says it doesn’t have. The agency also decided not to retrofit the cars to make them sturdier upon impact.
Metro officials have said they plan to replace the cars as soon as they can. But even if they ordered them tomorrow, it would take about five years to build them. “Getting rail cars is not something you can buy at a car dealership,” Taubenkibel said.
Fixing the doors will take up to three years, he said.
The agency needs to hire Alstom, which made the cars’ automatic train controls, to add some hardware to stop electromagnetic interference that caused the doors to open when running in automatic mode, he said. The trains have been operating manually since the crash.
This is the second door-related upgrade the rail cars will have this year. In April, Metro began a $1.6 million campaign to add emergency door release handles to more than 800 rail cars, including the 1000 Series cars that date from the 1970s. That work isn’t slated to finish until next summer.
