All Metro (DC) railcars need repair

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Garry K
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Joined: Thu Sep 15, 2005 3:18 pm
Location: Livonia, MI

All Metro (DC) railcars need repair

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Interesting story at https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/loca ... 09041.html about how ALL of the Washington, DC, area's Metro 7000 Series railcars need rewiring. It seems whoever crimped wires together, did a less than perfect job. After spending $1.5 billion, Metro didn't get their money's worth! But hey, it's only 548 cars that need repairs, and they've only been in service since 2015. And 200 of those 548 cars also need some other repairs.

I was an electronics technician in a previous phase of my life, and once I had a co-worker chastise me for sometimes throwing away crimp connectors. After I would crimp wires, I tugged on the connector. If it came off, I needed to re-do the crimp with a new crimp connector. The co-worker told me I was wasting money. I told them that while crimp connectors only cost a few cents each, it costs a LOT MORE to have to return to the job site at later date and fix the problem, FOR FREE, for the customer! It would especially be onerous, having to crawl back into some nasty locations to have to perform a later repair. And that's not mentioning the time spent in finding an intermittent connection.

We also prepared many sensors and cables for crash-testing cars when I worked at the Chrysler Proving Grounds in the 1970s. If even ONE sensor or cable failed during a crash test, then the company just wrecked a perfectly good automobile for nothing. So we performed many tests on cables we made, plus ran many calibrations on accelerometers and such. And then, even after the sensors and cables were installed in the vehicles, we tested everything yet again.

Garry K

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