Thursday, March 17, 2016

CURIOUS

East Coast-West Coast. For the record.

In Washington D.C, via NPR:

Starting at midnight Tuesday, the D.C. Metro rail system will shut down for 29 hours while authorities investigate potential dangers related to a cable fire on Monday, Metro's General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said at a news conference Tuesday.

Referring to trouble early Monday that caused delays on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines throughout the day, Wiedefeld said the incident showed "commonalities with the cable fire in [the] L'Enfant Plaza [station] a year ago." In that incident, a woman died after being trapped on a train filled with smoke.

And CNN:
"The investigation into yesterday's cable fire at McPherson Square is ongoing,"
Wiedefeld said. "As a preliminary matter, the conditions appear disturbingly similar to those in the L'Enfant Plaza incident of a year ago, and our focus is squarely on mitigating any risk of a fire elsewhere on the system."
After the L'Enfant Plaza fire, the National Transportation and Safety Board released a statement saying "an electrical arcing event" sparked the incident.
"There was an electrical arcing event involving the trackside power cables (the third rail)," said a statement from the NTSB's Peter Knudson.

Then this via the San Francisco Chronicle:
 For the second time in a month, a mysterious power surge knocked out numerous BART cars Wednesday — puzzling agency officials who thought they had the problem under control the first time around, and making life miserable for commuters packed into shortened trains.
BART was able to repair some of the 25 or so cars that lost their propulsion systems on the Pittsburg-Bay Point line, but not all of them — raising the likelihood that many trains will be short of cars for the Thursday morning commute.
BART engineers worked into the night trying to find an answer for what is becoming a major problem for the aging rail system.
   -RW

4 comments:

  1. Well, let's face it: BART ***always*** sucked. If you want to learn everything you need to know about government, study the development and current status of BART. As for the D.C. mess, I can only guess.

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    1. Resource (yeah that's a loooong URL):
      https://books.google.bs/books?id=yXFGxmy0xL0C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=Bay+Area+Rapid+Transit+critic&source=bl&ots=lklQ7xg6yJ&sig=bPk-pe4pWJzv3jOQkW_IQq_Ks2o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjB1OKY9cjLAhXF9R4KHQfDBq8Q6AEIZTAP#v=onepage&q=Bay%20Area%20Rapid%20Transit%20critic&f=false

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    2. Capn Mike, maybe you should try Bitly to shorten those URLs.

      I just ordered Mr. Hall's book on amazon. Written in '82, one wonders how much more writing material exists today.

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