Slow trainitis spreads to the Orange Line
By adamg - Wed, 05/13/2009 - 9:00am.
It's one of those mornings on the Orange Line. Tom Lee tweets:
I've been stuck in the Sullivan Square Orange Line station For the past 30 mins while the Fire Dept investigates why an alarm is going off!
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I got stuck in that mess
And waited for about 15 minutes at Mass Av before abandoning it for the 43 Bus. In the time I waited, there was not one announcement informing passengers of the delays.
It's a switching problem.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Got two alerts this morning indicating a
signal problem on the Orange Line. The second one advised North Station and Haymarket passengers to use the Green Line instead.
Also, the info boards on the Haverhill/Reading commuter rail line were advising passengers of "Orange Line delays due to major signal problem".
So much for the brand new signal system it took them almost four years to install.
Yesterday too
I got an alert that they were having signaling problems yesterday too. I guess it takes days to fix signaling issues.
Again This Evening
More signal problems causing delays this evening according to the T-alert text I just got.
According to my sources, they
are currently running manual block operation on the Orange Line, which means they allow only one train at a time (each way) in each section between stations. A very slow way to operate trains.
It's like the Needham Line, only orangier!
What would cause something like that?
It's most likely due to either a
power failure (the signal system runs on different circuits than the train power does) or a problem with the computer system that controls the signal system itself.