Why commuters are still waiting on Cap Metro’s train

Capital Metro in Austin, Texas, didn't know what it was getting itself into, the Austin American-Statesman reports. That might sound like a shot from one of the transit agency's critics. Instead, it is in effect the agency's explanation for why its MetroRail commuter line from Leander to downtown Austin is now 15 to 18 months late in opening. And still counting.

Capital Metro, by its own
admission, didn’t know when it asked voters in 2004 for permission to build the
32-mile line how complex an undertaking it faced, or the full scope of the
project, or the work and time required to fix glitches and malfunctions that
would arise along the way.

The agency didn’t know
that:

• It would need a
computerized track control system to coordinate train traffic rather than a
much simpler approach based on engineers and dispatchers talking on radios. The
decision was made in mid-2006 to install that network of trackside signals
connected to a central dispatch center.

• Buying components of
the track system from two suppliers, to get the lowest bids possible, would
lead to communication trouble between the equipment.

• Final installation of
the track control equipment would take as long as it did.

• The operation of
crossing gates at 65 junctions with roads would be hampered by a variety of
factors, among them rain, rusted track and electronic interference in the steel
track caused by having multiple intersections in a short interval.

And when it put the
project on indefinite hold 16 days before the March 30 opening date – the third
launch date – the agency did not know how long it would take to analyze and
repair those control systems and crossing gate glitches.

"We had anticipated
that as the construction got done and the various systems got installed and
turned on, that they would work as intended," said Doug Allen, Capital
Metro’s executive vice president and chief development officer. "Ultimately,
it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen."

The agency says that if
the line were to open soon, about five years after the referendum that
authorized it, start of service would still be earlier than for comparable
projects. The New Jersey River Line from Camden to Trenton, for instance, was
approved by its transit board in November 1996 and opened in March 2004. That
34-mile line, which Capital Metro cited as a model before the 2004 vote, uses
diesel-propelled, light-rail-style cars similar to Capital Metro’s, shares a
line with freight service – and has centralized track control.

Capital Metro officials
say the MetroRail project will come in around $105 million, about 17 percent
above the original $90 million spending estimate. That final figure, however,
does not include the cost of several items closely connected to the project,
including a park-and-ride lot built at the Leander station and money spent on
"transit-oriented development" near the stations. The agency is
losing about $40,000 in projected fare income every month that the line stays
dormant.

"The lesson to be
learned is that before we get involved with any future rail activities, we have
to be much more deliberate and careful to vet it, to make sure we get good
information so we don’t have any surprises," said Terry Bray, an Austin
lawyer who serves on a transit working group created by state Sen. Kirk Watson
and former Austin Mayor Will Wynn in 2007 to review passenger rail proposals.

It remains unclear when
the MetroRail line will open. This year, agency executives adopted a policy of
making no predictions.

In the latest of what
have become monthly status updates, Capital Metro said Thursday that it was
developing a timeline for remaining work and would provide another progress report
in October.

Capital Metro, responding
to the series of problems and at the request of its rail contractor Veolia
Transportation, recently began a "hazard analysis/risk assessment," a
rigorous last look at the system that involves a top-to-bottom examination of
the system and its components.

That work, which
officials said has already identified about 20 problems, continues. The agency
is also working to fix "vital logic" signalization software that
failed to trigger the correct track signals when Federal Railroad
Administration inspectors tested the line in late August.

Allen said the agency
will ask federal regulators to take another look when Capital Metro believes
the opening is a month away. But that "final" review could, of
course, cause another delay, should regulators find more problems.

Officials with Veolia
advised against setting the March 30 opening date. The agency had told voters
before the referendum that it could open MetroRail in spring 2008, then later
changed that to fall 2008. Veolia’s Austin rail general manager, Gord Ryan,
said he told Capital Metro at the time that "what I need is a fully
functional railway to train engineers and dispatchers. I also made it very
clear that here we have a major freight line (operating on the same track) and
we have to construct around it. And you have to expect some of those anomalies
are actually going to surface. It’s the old adage: You don’t know what you
don’t know."

Capital Metro officials
blame the delay in part on a 1997 state law requiring Capital Metro to hold a
referendum before building a passenger rail line. It is the only transit agency
in Texas with that requirement, although in practice most agencies put bonds
before voters to borrow money to build light rail or commuter rail.

The agency says that it
did not sufficiently plan the project before the 2004 vote – and then faced
time-consuming surprises later – because early planning would have cost $5
million to $10 million. That would have opened the agency to criticism for spending
that much money on a project that voters might not authorize, which could have
threatened the success of the rail referendum.

Officials could have
delayed the vote by two years – the law at that time said Capital Metro rail
referendums could occur only in November of even-numbered years – something
that agency leaders didn’t want to do.

The "agency now has
a more comprehensive knowledge regarding costs and scheduling of the project
that were not fully known in 2004," the transit authority wrote in a
"self-evaluation report" it recently submitted to the Texas Sunset
Advisory Commission as part of a legislatively mandated review of Capital
Metro. "Had more time and funds been available to adequately analyze
various options, certain unknown costs and environmental factors might have
been worked out earlier."

Weeks before the
scheduled March grand opening celebration, Capital Metro was still completing
construction on the last two of the line’s nine stations and on siding track in
East Austin. Since calling off that opening, it has been fixing a multitude of
problems. Among them:

Centralized track
control: After the system was installed in early May, the agency discovered
problems of various kinds at the 12 control points along the line. Signals,
bought from two companies and installed by one contractor, were not
communicating properly with the control system at the operations center, built
by yet another contractor.

That task is not yet
complete. The Federal Railroad Administration has been concerned that Capital Metro
have fail-safe systems to assure that freight trains, which will run at night
on the track between Manor and the Burnet area, don’t find their way into the
passenger corridor during daylight hours when the commuter trains will be
running.

"The system is
functioning for the most part very well," said John Almond, Capital
Metro’s commuter rail project manager, who said he recently rode the entire
line and observed no glitches. "Day in and day out, it’s not always like
that. We want that higher degree of reliability before we put people on that
line."

• Crossing gates: For
much of the summer, many gates either did not come down when a train
approached, came down too slowly or stayed down much longer than necessary. To
combat that, the agency hired equipment to grind rust off the tracks that was
corrupting the electronic pulses that activate the gates. It changed the
location of "termination shunts" critical to those electronic
messages and tinkered with gate equipment and even the rock underlying the
tracks to adjust for the electrical conductivity of rain. And it made
adjustments for gates that are near stations, such as at Lamar Boulevard, where
a train approaching the Crestview station would trigger lowered gates but then
stop at the station for 45 seconds or more.

• Missing gates: At
federal regulators’ behest, the agency in July installed crossing gates at two
quarry roads on the Robinson Ranch in Northwest Austin.

• Signal house fire:
Faulty wiring caused a signal installation on East Seventh Street to go up in
flames in early May. It was replaced by late May.

• Damaged track: Capital
Metro spent over $200,000 this summer fixing track damaged by years of passing
cars and trucks where the line crosses Parmer Lane and the U.S. 183 frontage
roads.

• Signal pre-emption: The
agency completed work at several crossings that are near traffic lights to make
those lights go green and allow waiting vehicles to clear the railroad tracks.
This included doing the work twice at MoPac Boulevard, where because of
inaccurate engineering plans, the pre-emption equipment was installed on the
wrong frontage road.

The Federal Railroad
Administration has had six people allocated full time to the Capital Metro project
since August 2006, said Rob Castiglione, the deputy regional administrator. In
March, in particular, he said, "we did have some extra vigilance to make
sure all the loops were closed.

"But they weren’t
ready for prime time, and here we are."