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‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

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Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#21

Post by acomjean »

giarc wrote: post #13

I work in a 50 year old hospital. There was some work on the nurse call bell system and the maintenance staff had to scour eBay for old parts to fix the outdated system. I think procurement had a fit when they saw eBay receipts show up.

I worked on a radar project with a similar problem. The target system was a computer called HP superdomes. HP discontinued those (the PA-RISC version anyway) . I think they bought a couple spares. Ebay was mentioned as a source for parts, which doesn't always give you a good feeling.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#22

Post by enumBoss »

acomjean wrote: post #19
roymurdock wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green line expansion (two stops) initially budgeted at $954M in June 2010. 5 years later, costs estimated at $3.09B and project is terminated. A Reliable Project Budget is Defined as being within +10% and -5% of what it would Cost to Design and Construct the Project Costs went up over 300%. The level of incompetence on display here is borderline criminal. Have a friend who works at one of the big 4 who is being calle…

MBTA has huge project management problems to be sure, of course it should be looked into. But its really the only subway the city has, plus I think they're required by consent decree to build sometimg (Part of the "big dig" project (putting highway in a tunnel), another fine example of poor project budget control in the commonwealth of Massachusetts)

Ha. This is too true. If there wasn't some kind of construction project over budget at all times, people would think something was wrong.

Really though, the MBTA has a bunch of major issues. Not just project management. I honestly don't know what it would take to fix it but something has to give sooner or later. People are finally getting fed up.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#23

Post by Symbiote »

floatrock wrote: post #15
a2tech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While its true that they own the specification, in practice the large company (i.e. Siemens in this example) is the only one capable of producing the product at a non-prohibitive rate. I suspect what they'll find when they finally rip out all this equipment is that the new system will be unrepairable without huge long term contracts with the original vendor. These old mechanical systems have their own problems, but r…

Is owning the specification really the same thing as owning the hardware source? Why is it that you need the long-term vendor contracts? If you go beyond the spec and make all the hardware control boards, software, etc. open, could you lower that cost? Boston has one unique feature that makes public-ish ownership of specifications and the hardware running more plausible than other cities... it has a large number of t…

As the first example of the money involved in railway signalling, in 2012 "Siemens has entered into an agreement to acquire Invensys Rail, the rail automation business of Invensys for approximately €2.2 billion"

That's presumably not the kind of operation that can be run in someone's spare time, and exactly the kind of work that graduates from these universities are training towards, and would expect to be well-paid to do.

> if the concern is that technical stewardship might be out of the realm of a municipal infrastructure agency

...then they really must employ someone to do that work. Except perhaps for the tunnels, the signalling system is their most important asset.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#24

Post by EdHominem »

codys wrote: post #2

> It’s not as simple as just changing the signal. In order to change it out and modernize, you need to update the entire system. Does anyone have any idea why this is? What prevents new signals from being backwards compatible with the old system? And if this were true, wouldn't all of the signals need to be the same hundred year old type? How would line extensions ever be able to be done in that case? Is the system s…

> What prevents new signals from being backwards compatible with the old system?

Nothing, of course, despite the naysayers. You wouldn't, initially, try to replace - just augment; record and report the inputs and be a test-bed for the eventual digital replacement. In this case, because the originals are physical switches, it'd be more like a modern-machined duplicate of the original with a micro-controller stuck on the side.

The data it would send be immediately helpful for arrival timers and such.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#26

Post by acveilleux »

acomjean wrote: post #21
giarc wrote: post #13

I work in a 50 year old hospital. There was some work on the nurse call bell system and the maintenance staff had to scour eBay for old parts to fix the outdated system. I think procurement had a fit when they saw eBay receipts show up.

I worked on a radar project with a similar problem. The target system was a computer called HP superdomes. HP discontinued those (the PA-RISC version anyway) . I think they bought a couple spares. Ebay was mentioned as a source for parts, which doesn't always give you a good feeling.

In a previous job at a University, we had a couple SGI big irons from the 1999-2002 era. A 64-way Origin 3800 and a 16-way Onyx 3800. Along with a similar vintage SAN and some misc bits.

When I left in 2010, eBay was the source of something like one replacement HDD per 10-14 days for the SAN (73GB dual-port fibre channel, full-height...) and the two machines (made of modular "bricks") had been whittled down to a single franken-SGI of something like 20 CPUs. Some of the older processing workload still ran on there (i.e.: the student graduated ages ago...)

A few dual 5300-series (8 cores) Xeons had replaced the SGIs in most workloads and left the old 500Mhz R14000 far in the dust. Lots more RAM too. Let's not even get started on the advantage as far as HVAC and power went.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#28

Post by untog »

na85 wrote: post #27

A lesson in bad UX, or perhaps just bad editing: Nowhere in the article is the abbreviation MBTA expanded. I shouldn't have to guess at or Google for your article's main actor.

WBUR is Boston's NPR radio station. It's the 21st Century equivalent of a local news piece, while they could work harder to adapt it for a global audience it isn't really in their remit to do so.

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#29

Post by Animats »

For a century, replacements were not much of a problem. Most of the components were either from Union Switch and Signal, or General Railway Signal, both in the US, and they still made them. Then US&S (which used to have www.switch.com [1]) was sold to Ansaldo and then to Hitachi, and General Railway Signal was acquired by Alstom. Alstom continues to make some GRS relays.[2] But not the whole line of them. Ansaldo offers a remanufacturing service for the older components.

The New York City system uses mostly General Railway Signal components, while Boston uses US&S. NYC had to rebuild old relays after the big flood a few years ago, because all available spare stocks, both theirs and the manufacturers', had been exhausted. But they were able to get new ones from Alstom over time. Boston seems to be having more of a parts problem.

These relay-based systems are designed to fail safe, in a very literal way. "Vital" relays (the ones in safety-critical circuits) open by gravity, and the open direction is always towards a red signal. Broken wires always force things towards a safer condition. This is not a property of computer-based systems. There are modern replacements, such as Ansaldo MicroLok II, which are programmable logic controllers which emulate relay systems.[5] These, unfortunately, can be Internet-connected.[6]

Here's a simulator for a GRS relay-based signaling system, down to the relay level.[7]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080103132002/http://www.switch... [2] http://alstomsignalingsolutions.com/OurProducts/WaysideProdu... [3] http://www.rrsignalpix.com/grs_relays.html [4] http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/en/about-us/ansaldo-around-world/... [5] http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts.message-asp.com/... [6] http://www.westermo.com/web/web_en_idc_com.nsf/AllDocuments/... [7] http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/NXSYS,_Signalling_and_Interloc...

Re: ‘They Don’t Make These Anymore’: Maintaining the MBTA’s 100-Year-Old Signals

#30

Post by Symmetry »

roymurdock wrote: post #16
acomjean wrote: post #6

live in MA and take the T (what we call the subway/bus service here). Public transit is a major problem in this city and surrounding areas. It what make this city OK and expensive vs being great and affordable. While the transit system here needs upgrading badly, this piece is very political. The quoting of Charles Chieppo is a give away. "For many systems, Chieppo said, the focus is on improving stations or opening…

Green line expansion (two stops) initially budgeted at $954M in June 2010. 5 years later, costs estimated at $3.09B and project is terminated. A Reliable Project Budget is Defined as being within +10% and -5% of what it would Cost to Design and Construct the Project Costs went up over 300%. The level of incompetence on display here is borderline criminal. Have a friend who works at one of the big 4 who is being calle…

I honestly think that the $954M original price tag is a bigger problem than the 3X overrun.
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