Tim Mulligan is heading up a newly created rolling stock programme office at New York MTA, tasked with widening and deepening the relationship between the authority and its supply chain. He explained the plans to Nick Kingsley.
‘We want US rail car manufacturing to be strong’, emphasises New York MTA’s Rolling Stock Director Tim Mulligan as he sets out the agency’s vision for how it could rethink its relationship with the supply chain.
Underpinning Mulligan’s remit is the task of efficiently funding renewal, maintenance and operation of the rolling stock used on the New York Subway. Never far from the headlines in the ‘Big Apple’, the Subway has emerged from the pandemic facing a slew of challenges related to rising costs and a sluggish ridership recovery. And, like some of its peers around the world, the Subway is a vastly complex tangle of legacy metro routes with ageing infrastructure and some entrenched operating practices that make renewing the network a daunting task.
This challenge is arguably made even harder by the intense political scrutiny that the Subway — and its owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — faces on a near daily basis. The Subway needs a consistent funding stream to support renewal and enhancement, but over the past decade or so, the impacts of ‘superstorms’, the pandemic and wrangling about road pricing in Manhattan have all contributed to a sense of uncertainty about how the metro will get the investment it needs.
The much-delayed congestion charge for road vehicles entering lower Manhattan came into effect on January 5, reviving hopes that it could provide a long-term multi-billion dollar revenue stream to fund mass transit enhancements.
Capital Plan 2025-29
Against this backdrop, MTA is taking steps to rethink its procurement and investment strategy to ensure smoother delivery and greater integration between projects. This aspiration is set out in the latest Capital Plan, covering the period 2025-29. Issued in September last year following approval by the MTA board, the Plan is worth an indicative $68·4bn over the five years.
Fully funding this programme will not be easy — as demonstrated on December 24 when a scrutiny committee at the state legislature in Albany rejected the plan a day before it would have been due for automatic ratification and implementation on January 1.
Much hinged on the state’s executive budget that New York State Governor Kathy Hochul presented on January 21. However, the $252bn budget did not include any contingency plans for a scenario under which President Donald Trump halts congestion pricing, as he vowed to do during his presidential campaign. State Budget Director Blake Washington also admitted that the administration has not yet identified how it can fully cover an estimated $33bn hole in the Capital Plan’s funding mechanism.
The plan focuses primarily on ‘state of good repair’ works to renovate existing assets following an extensive survey of the state of MTA’s various rail and bus operations over the past three years. It calls for procurement of rolling stock worth $10·9bn, covering a further 1 500 metro cars to accelerate the Subway’s rolling stock renewal, alongside purchase of 500 commuter rail cars for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North networks.
However, as Mulligan explains, the Subway fleet renewal in particular can no longer be regarded as a standalone process, especially as the roll-out of CBTC across the network gathers pace. ‘The previous [2019-24] Capital Plan largely focused on equipping B Division routes with new trains to support the CBTC signalling’, he explains. The B Division comprises the Subway’s lettered routes and has heavier, longer trains. Most of the CBTC deployment foreseen in both the 2019 and 2025 plans covers lines within this section of the network.
But rolling stock renewal is also needed in the A Division of smaller-profile numbered routes, Mulligan adds, noting that trains being procured now will need to be passively equipped to use CBTC in the future. With this in mind, Mulligan has been tasked with leading a newly formed rolling stock procurement office within MTA, which ‘is designed to make us a better partner’ for train manufacturers and sub-suppliers, he says.
In North American terms, MTA is a major customer with ‘leverage’ that Mulligan says it is keen to use. ‘We need to keep North American railcar manufacturing strong’, he reiterates, noting the challenges that a wave of consolidation between big global players has brought over recent years. Spurred on in part by tax incentives from the Biden administration, international builders including Hitachi, Siemens Mobility and Stadler have all invested in new or expanded production facilities in the USA in the past few years.
While Mulligan welcomes these moves, he strikes a note of caution, citing the importance in particular of investment in the supply chain in New York State. ‘We especially welcome car production in New York — we want to leverage our purchasing power within the state’, he says.
Attracting more players
Currently, MTA is part way through receiving a batch of R211 Subway cars supplied by Kawasaki Rail Car from its plant in Yonkers, NY ; KRC also has a large traction motor manufacturing plant in Lincoln, Nebraska. But the R211 procurement model is complex, involving multiple options and deliveries of small batches of trains over a multi-year period; the original framework contract was agreed back in 2018.
Mulligan suggests that MTA would like to ‘smooth out’ the production runs for future orders, with larger quantities of a train design procured in one go. ‘We’re looking to have larger base orders’, he insists. At the same time, MTA would like a steadier flow of rolling stock orders, because this mitigates the risk of problems further into the life of the train. ‘Ideally, we don’t want to have one huge fleet of trains all coming due for a mid-life overhaul at the same time’, he explains. ‘This just creates a “boom and bust” situation among our suppliers.’
This may require the authority to decouple the procurement workflow from the Capital Plan approval process and the resultant access to funding issue, but Mulligan says he also wants to know ‘what the barriers to entry are for suppliers wanting to work with us’.
More walk-through Subway cars coming
On December 17 last year, New York MTA approved a $1·27bn firm order for a further 435 Kawasaki Rail Car R211 Subway cars, including 80 R211T cars with open gangways.
This takes the total number of R211 cars ordered under the 2018 framework agreement to 1 610, of which 345 are now in service. Deliveries of the latest batch are scheduled to begin in 2027.
‘Old train cars break down six times as frequently as new cars, so replacing them is more than just a matter of aesthetics’, said MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber on December 16. ‘This latest purchase will help us get the next generation of rolling stock on the rails sooner so we can keep making the system more reliable and dramatically upgrade the passenger experience.’
The R211s will eventually replace all R44 cars on the Staten Island Railway and the R46 cars. The latest option will also allow bus and metro operating business New York City Transit to begin replacement of the R68s, which entered service in the mid-1980s. MTA said the new cars have a mean distance between failure of approximately 354 000km, compared to the R46 fleet’s 74 000km.
Some of the extra walk-through trainsets are expected to be rolled out on the G/Crosstown Line in five-car formations. That 18 km route linking Brooklyn and Queens — G trains do not serve Manhattan — is being heavily upgraded and resignalled under a March 2023 contract awarded to the Crosstown Partners consortium of Thales (now Hitachi Rail) and TC Electric. Work including fitment of SelTrac CBTC is due for completion in 2028.
Total cost of ownership
Mulligan stresses that life-cycle costs are another area of focus for the authority as it seeks to rethink its relationship with the supply chain.
‘Today, our costs after purchase of the railcar are higher than the upfront ones’, he reports. All of the maintenance of the Subway fleet is managed in-house by MTA’s operating arm New York City Transit, and there is no suggestion that this model would change to allow outsourcing as seen in some of the liberalised rail markets in Europe and Asia. Nevertheless, a closer relationship between the providers of key components and technology is envisaged, while the Capital Plan highlights an urgent need to modernise and expand some of the Subway’s ageing workshops, such as the highly constrained Livonia and 240th Street depots.
Mulligan hopes the Rolling Stock Programme Office will be able to implement what he terms ‘a centre of excellence model’, which it can apply to different aspects of the maintenance and life-cycle management task. In particular, ensuring interoperability between wayside and onboard CBTC equipment will be key, ‘because we won’t be ordering cars without CBTC provision in the future’. This approach must also take into account the key stakeholders in the CBTC roll-out programme, covering not just rolling stock and signalling specialists but also the installation and commissioning contractors who play a critical role in the way CBTC is deployed on the Subway.
Meanwhile, the nature of depot work is also changing, and MTA’s strategy in this area needs to evolve accordingly, Mulligan believes. A lot of the maintenance activity today is geared around the classic ‘electrical and mechanical tasks’ traditionally associated with rolling stock depots, and the centre of excellence approach will be used to help manage the transition to more software- and technology-focused work, reflecting the increasingly digitalised control equipment on modern metro trains.
‘Clearly we want to have closer working partnerships with our suppliers’, Mulligan concludes. ‘But at the same time, we must respect all our existing union agreements.’
