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| Re: July Closed A Chicago CTA Era (1239790) | |||
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Re: July Closed A Chicago CTA Era |
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Posted by Mark S. Feinman on Mon Aug 5 13:57:16 2013, in response to Re: July Closed A Chicago CTA Era, posted by David on Sat Aug 3 20:32:14 2013. This is what I wrote about it in my NYCTA in the 1980s; from the third paragraph:The first Capital program allocated funding for the purchase of 1,150 subway cars. Kawasaki was not interested in building another 825 IRT cars. The Budd Company was still manufacturing transit vehicles, but the MTA didn't want to negotiate the contract with Budd alone. St. Louis Car and the American Car and Foundry Company were out of business. Pullman Standard was itself on the way out due to, in part, the botched R-46 contract. Enter Bombardier, a Canadian company best known for the manufacturing of snowmobiles, Francorail, a consortium of six French companies, and Budd, competing for the largest contract for subway cars in the United States until the R-142 order in 2001. Bombardier ended up winning the contract. Because Bombardier had a conservative approach to their railroad car business -- they wouldn't manufacture a car that wasn't already designed and tested somewhere else - the MTA set a condition for the Kawasaki contract that Bombardier would receive a license to manufacture the Japanese-designed cars themselves. This became the R-62A contract, where each individual subway car cost $803,000. The first R-62A car, car number 1653, was delivered to Coney Island Yard on October 10th, 1984, and the first R-62A test train ran on December 14th, 1984. So why didn't the Budd Company get the R-62A contract? Many people, transit enthusiasts notwithstanding, claim that the Budd-built R-32s are some the finest subway cars ever built, and they are in better shape that those built for contracts R-38 through R-46. Budd was considered an American company at the time (though it really was owned by Thyssen A.G. of Germany). The decision to award Bombardier this contract ended up having national implications during a time when it was legislated to "buy American", and clearly, awarding the contract to Budd would have been buying American. MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch testified before the Senate Finance Committee and said that Budd was not willing to extend the same amount of credit to the MTA that the foreign competitors were, that Budd intended to manufacture the cars' undercarriages in Brazil using an unproven company (the MTA didn't want to have another R-46 or Flxible crack ever again); if the design failed, a switch to the American source of the undercarriages would have added thousands of dollars to the cost of each car, and that Bombardier was willing to use the Kawasaki design -- a proven design that was very reliable. Similarities in design would also allow standardization of parts, which would reduce inventory expenses. Ravitch also questioned Budd's reliability, pointing out that the firm was a year behind in deliveries of subway cars to Baltimore and Miami.73 The committee ended up upholding the decision to use Bombardier. Budd continued fighting the decision for many months afterward, but didn't prevail. My source for this was "A Reporter At Large: Painting the Elephant," The New Yorker, June 25th, 1984, page 66. --Mark |
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