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First of 86 refurbished Green Line trolleys rolls back into service

Refurbished Green Line trolley

The MBTA reports car 3614, the first of four score and six Green Line cars being refurbished in upstate New York, started carrying passengers again this week.

The next refurbished car is scheduled to go into service over the next few days - with all the rest trucked back into Boston by the end of 2016. In a statement, interim T General Manager Frank DePaola said:

This rehabilitation work is preserving the integrity of the vehicle structure, roof, and exterior, all of which experienced water damage and corrosion over the last two-and-half decades. Each car’s renewed condition and enhanced appearance will improve the Green Line experience for tens of thousands of daily customers.

A look at the new trolleys now on order from a Spanish company.

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Any photos of the interior of the cars refurbished?

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User RickW posted a link to this photo on an article on here a few months ago about the refurb'd trolley's arriving in Boston (in March)

Here's RickW's picture (post in-line)

IMAGE(http://i58.tinypic.com/dyox3m.jpg)

So yeah nothing much has changed. Which I'm OK with as long as they are reliable.

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For being seen for safety or something equally silly? ;-)

Look nice. Hope everything works well below the surface too.

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So you advocate for people to wear those colors but it bothers you if the same thing is on the floor of a motorized vehicle?

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Reflection of the red footwell lights. I'd assume it's much less obvious to human eyes, and especially if there's somebody standing there.

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These have always been there. Look next time you ride in a old Kinki car. They probably just replaced them with better, more brighter, LEDs, since LED technology has gotten far better in recent years.

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had clear incandesent lights in the footwells. As part of the Kerasiotes "economy drive" when he indirectly oversaw the T as Transportation Secretary, he had maintenance crews convert them to LEDs, with the idea (IIRC) that the cars would use less current that way.

Because clear LEDs hadn't yet been perfected to the level of reliability for a transit application, and were much more expensive then red ones, the red LEDs were used in the footwells.

Given that clear LEDs are much more reliable now, and are priced comparable to red ones, I'm surprised that Alstom retained the red ones. Then again, it could also be that changing out those fixtures wasn't in the contract specifications for the rehab.

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Cite?

When I first saw those red LEDs, they didn't do much to light up the stairs, so I assumed they were sensors for alerting the driver when not to close the doors. But that's not actually the case.

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which happened a couple of months after Kerasiotes became Secretary of Transportation, a good friend of mine (since retired and moved away) who was a senior Green Line inspector told me the backstory behind the conversion.

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IMAGE(https://elmercatdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bowdoin-lights.jpg)
The newer fluorescent lights are so bright, the old spotlights aren't doing very much except generating heat and wasting electricity!

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I like that they went back to the classic white and green paint scheme.

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given that it has higher visibilty than the grey and green scheme did (think cloudy winter morning).

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Or the orange line, which is rust and rust.

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I think I saw one of these spiffy-looking cars rolling through Park Street the other day (D line). It caught my eye because it was so shiny!

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First one falls off the tracks on _______.

First failed new traction motor on _______.

First one catches fire on _______.

Some systemic problem (entire bad run of traction motors, jamming doors due to design/measurement flaw, unintelligible intercoms, whatever) discovered on _______.

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the Type 7s are still NOT low-floor cars. And, since Type 8s are now used on all trains, the T has scrapped most of the portable platform lifts they used to have in stations to get wheelchairs onto the Type 7s.

So what's the deal with it seems odd to have the accessibilty symbols on the ends of this car.

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I'm betting it's because they haven't replaced the seats originally taken out to accomodate wheelchairs. Also nots all of the portable lifts have been scrapped, there are still some around. I believe they'll only be running these cars in tandum with low-floor cars so that it will be possible to get a wheelchair on even if there isn't a lift available.

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Are you sure they've been removed? I seem to recall one of the Brookline stops on the D line (Brookline Hills?) has a ramp and not a high platform, so handicapped passengers can only use the Type 7's there. (At least this was the case when I took the D line regularly, two years ago)

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My bad for momentarily forgetting about the surface Green Line stations that haven't yet had platform modifications. Of course, the existing station designs should have been accounted for when designing the bridge plates on the Type 8s, but that's another story altogether.

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How does that work? Does a wheelchair passenger boarding the train at Park Street have to know to board a Type 7 or 8 depending on the type of platform at their destination station?

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I can't recall ever seeing a wheelchair on the green line. I have seen a ton of baby strollers. Baby strollers are the new wheelchair.

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Years ago I was waiting for a train with a friend at the Brookline Village stop. A wheelchair rider was waiting as well. The train arrived and the small operator got out to use the mechanical lift only she was too small to put much pressure on the foot bar to raise the platform. My friend and I helped by us using all our weight and force together to lift the platform. Even with two people (300lb) it still took a lot of work and many presses of the bar. But the rider made it onto the train.

When we got on the operator wouldn't let us pay -- she said we had earned out fare. Nice gesture. But too bad that's what it took for a disabled rider to board the train.

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wheelchair users on the Green Line three or four times a week. And, as BostonDog points out, getting a wheelchair on or off a Type 7 with the platform lift was not exactly an easy task.

The resulting delays from using this apparatus were certainly not the fault of the person in the wheelchair, but clearly the fault of MBTA management for adopting such a Rube Goldberg approach to accessibility. As the saying goes, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

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My son spent a year+ in a wheelchair a few years ago. He had appointments at Children's at least twice a month then. Initially we rode the Green Line in (E Line to Longwood Medical), which was our route before he needed the chair.

We often had trouble getting on and off the cars because of other passengers, even on non-crowded rides. People would just crowd the low doors, and apparently T riders don't understand "excuse me." It was terrible. We soon learned to take the bus there (usually one of the CTs), where the drivers would ask people to move for us if need be.

This was with me pushing his (smaller than an adult's) chair, and not afraid of being somewhat aggressive. I can't imagine having to do this alone.

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The consent decree with the BCII calls for keeping the portable lifts and mini-highs for as long as there are high-floor cars in the fleet. The 3700 series Type 7s that were delivered in 1997, after the passage of the ADA in 1990, must be accessible on their own, not just when operating with a low-floor car.

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since I've seen a platform lift in any of the Central Subway stations (the basis for my original post on this matter).

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You're not looking very hard, they are there. The one at Park St. northbound is usually sitting near the pay phones in the center of the platform. Many times they are at the very ends of the platform to stay out of the way, since they are seldom used.

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I was glad to see the seating is the same as the seating in the older green and white cars. The newer cars have bench like seating where passengers are squeezed in all in a row, very unpleasant. It is also easier to walk through the cars without climbing steps leading up to a second level. I have seen folks fall while climbing the steps on moving lurching cars.

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