T just can’t catch a break
New delay as they announce cause of the June derailment
MBTA riders faced yet another round of delays Monday night when a smoking train tied up the Red Line — just hours after the beleaguered transit agency revealed that the summer’s catastrophic derailment was caused by a buildup of “grease” that caused an electrical arc and broke the axle.
On Monday, according to the T, a “possible motor problem” caused a southbound Red Line train just outside Broadway station in South Boston to belch smoke, requiring the authority to bring in fans to clear the air as delays lengthened. The T attributed the problem to a “malfunctioning breaker.”
Earlier Monday, the T released its report on the cause of the June 11 derailment, when a Red Line train car headed south into the JFK/UMass station derailed shortly after 6 a.m. causing “significant damage,” demolishing infrastructure so seriously that the repairs to signals remain ongoing and service still lags slightly behind normal, three months later.
“The cause of the derailment was the axle broke,” deputy T general manager Jeffrey Gonneville told reporters.
He said the steel ground ring on the front axle of the car in question had become pitted and no longer successfully was keeping electrical currents grounded. Thanks to that bad connection and a build-up of grease on the ground ring, electricity instead had been lancing up the axle for about six months, weakening it until its eventual fracture, Gonneville said.
“We should not be getting grease inside that unit,” Gonneville said. He said it appears a cover that should have shielded the parts was gone, but that it wasn’t clear why.
Last week, the T finally restored full signalization to the Ashmont branch of the line. The agency hopes to get the Braintree line up to normal by the end of October, Gonneville said.
Gonneville said the T has inspected the ground rings of the oldest two of the three Red Line fleets — and found two other rings that had pits larger than 1/16th of an inch, big enough for the T to take them out of service.
Since the June derailment, the T also has conducted ultrasound inspections on all its trains’ axles, and found seven defects that warranted the axles being brought in for repairs, Gonneville said. The T has conducted ultrasound inspections every two years, but now will do so every year, he said.
Boston Carmen’s Union chief Jimmy O’Brien, meanwhile, slammed the T in a statement, saying, “Cuts to the operating budget and the elimination of jobs resulted in cuts to inspections and testing — including the ultrasonic testing that could have detected the problem that resulted in the Red Line derailment. There are no corners to be cut when it comes to ensuring safety and service for our riders.”
But Gonneville told reporters, “We will do everything we need to to ensure the safety of our fleet … for as long as I can remember we’ve been doing those ultrasonic inspections every two years.”
The Red Line derailment followed others on the Green Line and the Commuter Rail. An independent safety review is ongoing.