A-Line firm pledges chaos won’t return

The contractor running the University of Colorado A-Line vowed Tuesday night to treat “every disabled train as a full-scale emergency” following a breakdown last month of the high-profile commuter rail line that stranded more than 200 passengers aboard two trains without bathrooms, food or drink for three-plus hours.

That claim emerged at an RTD board of directors meeting, during which Denver Transit Part-

ners got an earful over the botched rescue after the trains lost power April 20 between the Denver International Airport and 61st/ Pena stations.

“We left them on a train for (three) hours without any explanation and that’s unacceptable,” Regional Transportation District Director Chuck Sisk told executives from the contracted operator Denver Transit Partners during a board meeting Tuesday. “(It’s not enough to say) there are lessons learned -- this can’t happen again.”

The meeting marked the first time that RTD’s private sector partner has been called to publicly account for a breakdown on the A-Line, which it has managed for nearly two years.

That stoppage, RTD Director Barbara Deadwyler said, is akin to delays air passengers experience when they end up sitting for a long time on an airport on a tarmac.

“It almost feels like we’re the airlines,” said Deadwyler, who stressed the need to help passengers before moving stalled trains. “People don’t like that.”

Denver Transit Partners, in an account it gave to the board Tuesday and also provided in writing, acknowledged that it mishandled the breakdown, saying its personnel didn’t have adequate experience and had “not encountered this type of incident before.”

It also concluded that it failed to properly inform stranded passengers -- 234 in all -- about how severe the delay was, characterizing its communications with passengers and RTD as “disjointed, unreliable and inaccurate at times.”

“RTD has expressed major concerns about our communication with our customers and RTD,” the account reads. “The criticism is well founded.”

Frustration expressed by those stuck on the trains, which were four miles from the closest station, exploded on social media as minutes stretched into hours. Some passengers demanded RTD compensate them for missed flights.

According to Denver Transit Partners’ account of the breakdown, which occurred two days shy of the A-Line’s two-year anniversary, a train leaving the airport around 4 p.m. lost power between DIA and the 61st/Pena station due to its pantograph — a device on the train’s roof that collects power through contact with an overhead wire — becoming dislodged from the wire.

Operators dispatched another train, packed with passengers, from the airport with orders to link up with the disabled train and push it to the 61st/Pena station.

That train also quickly found itself without power and became stuck.

“Two disabled trains are stranded with passengers on-board – a major service disruption begins to unfold,” Denver Transit Partners wrote in its account.

Attempts to couple and tow the first train with an A-Line train sent from the other direction took more than two hours because of bad weather and a “steep grade,” according to the contractor.

From the time both trains had rolled to a stop to the time they were towed to safety, more than three hours had passed.

Denver Transit Partners said it needed to re-examine the training it provides its workers for emergency situations.

And it said the focus going forward needs to be on the passengers.

“Operational tactics need review – focus on taking care of the passengers first – moving the train is secondary,” it wrote in its account.

Anne Herzenberg, general manager at Denver Transit Operators -- a DTP subsidiary -- told the board Tuesday that her firm would from now on “treat every disabled train as a full-scale emergency.”

“There’s no question our efforts were not good enough,” she said.

Last month’s episode isn’t the A-Line’s only challenge. The train also is still saddled with the requirement that it use expensive human flaggers to monitor crossings because of safety questions regulators have raised about crossing-gate technology.

Those issues have in turn delayed by more than a year the opening of the G-Line, which should connect downtown Denver to Wheat Ridge. That line is also overseen by Denver Transit Partners.

“This is a highly visible piece of the RTD system and (an incident like this) definitely impacts RTD’s reputation,” agency spokesman Scott Reed.