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Red Line trains dropping like flies; should this really be a surprise?

The MBTA is reporting "moderate" delays on the Red Line due to a train near Davis that thought it could, but coudn't.

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Moderate delays in this weather is acceptable.
It's machinery people.

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These delays are never "moderate" - it's not just trains slowing down on the tracks, which makes sense. This is trains dying all over the line all day long.

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A few days ago I worried about this, particularly the air hoses that handle braking duty. The good news is that unlike motor issues, this can be fixed soon. The bad news is that soon doesn't help when the train is stuck on the tracks needing to be sent to the shop for repairs.

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If you don’t think that cold weather can cause problems with machines, you don’t think cold weather can cause problems with machines.

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No I'm saying the T is reliable and the press is the problem. Adam Gaffin blows it out of proportion.

"Most days the MBTA is reliable here, it's just that when something happens it gets spotlighted by the press.."

Red line shits the bed in cold weather, moderate weather and hot weather. Orange line fails regularly, blue line fails, green line fails, moving stock catches on fire, commuter rail fails. T ridership is falling as population and auto congestion increases.

Either the press is doing a bad job or Charlie Baker is. Walsh is useless.

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Either the press is doing a bad job or Charlie Baker is.

Neither Mr. Baker nor the mainstream press appreciate the value and importance of reliable, rapid-transit in Boston.

Universal Hub and many of its followers have a vision of how much better things could be, and should be — so you'll hear problems discussed more often here than elsewhere. A big difference with Universal Hub, is the participants contribute real-life experience and first-hand knowledge.

The mayor and the governor never ride The , so they can't possibly know what they're talking about. If their opinions about the system are based solely upon what their staffers tell them, it shows a pitiful lack of leadership — that's a big part of the problem!

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Though with the growth of social media, every problem gets magnified. For example, I was on the Red Line yesterday afternoon, which doesn't happen that much. I got on at Downtown Crossing. The PA was announcing delays, but in the end a train arrived and I was able to get from A to B with a minimum of fuss. Then, I checked in here and saw there was a dead train.

Swirly noted yesterday rightly that the Red Line was in fact more of a mess in the late 80s and early 90s. The difference is that we hear about it more.

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And this applies to a lot of situations"

"The difference between [whatever] today and in times past is that social media makes things sound worse than they are."

For example, Adam regularly posts about trucks getting into trouble on Storrow Drive. Was this a problem in the past? Look, some of us remember some of the attempts to keep trucks off the road back in the 1980s. The difference between then and now is that people have smartphones and twitter accounts, which means just about every time a truck takes the wrong turn, we hear about it.

No, it's not acceptable, but the reality is that by and large the T is more reliable than social media makes it out to be. Some time when we are not facing extreme weather, take 2 weeks and note how your commute goes. The odds are that 9 out of 10 days you won't be adversely affected by broken signals or trains that refuse to budge. And no, these 2 weeks don't count.

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Seriously. My commuter this morning was a joke, and it was one of the better days. Over three months: 9 dead trains, 35 delayed trains.

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But I take it to work every day. Today I left for the bus stop 3 minutes early and got to work 5 minutes early- margin of error. This afternoon, I missed an Orange Line train and had to wait 9 minutes for the next one, which is 3 minutes more than the listed headway so technically late, but the next train was on the board 2 minutes out, putting the average where it should be.

How many T delay rhymes did Adam tell us today, a day where the T told us to expect delays?

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You have got to be kidding me. Does Adam have to make a rhyme during each disaster? The Red Line collapses again on a much warmer day with zero snow. There are no excuses. The new Hingham ferry dock, NOT EVEN A YEAR OLD, breaks down. I am curious, if you don't work for the T, who do you work for? You're always Pro-T, Pro-GLX, Pro-CLF. Do you work at the Dukakis Ctr? Northeastern? MassDOT? the CLF?

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You are seriously blaming the T for Hingham Harbor freezing over? This is their fault how?

As far as the Red Line goes, it still hasn’t been above freezing since Christmas. Water in air lines don’t react well to cold weather. Do you know why they call 32 degrees freezing?

So there you have it, one example in 2 days in the 9th day of a cold snap.

As for, me, I love public transit. Been riding it since high school, but never worked for anyone directly related to the field. Had another good ride on the Orange Line today. The buses outbound were messed up, but that’s called traffic. They should do something about the traffic at Forest Hills.

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2 out of 5 are reliable each work week

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Plus they have an entire new fleet on order for the Red and Orange lines, which is essentially the most they could possibly do to deal with any problems caused or exacerbated by the condition of the existing fleet. Too bad Gov Patrick waited until the very end of his 8 years in office to order those cars.

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on a cold day. Thnx mang

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It's winter. It's not even snowing.

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If you haven't noticed.

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And every year it's like it's the system's first winter. Esp on the red line.

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Not for so many days in a row.

The building that I work in was built in 1984. It is having problems with the cold, too. We had a fire alarm go off and everyone needed to leave the building until they thawed out a water line for the sprinkler system.

Nothing around here is built to take 0-10F for more than a day. It should be, but it isn't.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/07/how-cold-are-boston-winters...

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That is the last time the temperature at Logan Airport was above 32 degrees.

There's cold and there's very cold. As I note above, things like air hoses do not react well to very cold weather. Publically held Class I freight railroads have to deal with the same thing, and they spend a lot of money on maintenance.

The last extended cold snap we had like this was in February 2015. While the snow was the thing that we remember and that took the motors down on most of the Red and Orange Line trains, the reality is that cold weather is bad for transportation. Same thing with motor vehicles.

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Is that 5 for the day? You must be running out of rhymes

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The Red Line got so bad that a friend and I printed up and handed out flyers at morning rush at Alewife announcing:

NEW RED LINE SLEEPER CAR SERVICE!
BOARD BY 9PM - ARRIVE AT PARK ST. BY 8AM

Needless to say, the MBTA folks were not amused and had people grabbing them out of the hands of the commuters we had handed them to.

If only they put that much effort into maintaining the trains during that bitter Pinatubo winter?

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