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| Re: BL-20G's For The LIRR ? (748875) | |||
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Re: BL-20G's For The LIRR ? |
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Posted by WillD on Wed Feb 25 18:50:01 2009, in response to Re: BL-20G's For The LIRR ?, posted by Broadway Lion on Wed Feb 25 16:02:45 2009. Wow, the bullshit is so thick here I think I need waders. First of all it is more than a little amusing that you parrot the traditional "outsource it" line which has served our business community so well for the past 10 years. That is the 10 years prior to last year, when everything went to hell because they were all outsourcing their functions to third party contractors.Secondly your example could not be any more of a non sequitor if you tried. Just because they both involve railroads does not mean they have a damn thing to do with each other. Supplying 110vac at a few amps for a few crossing gates, hotboxes, and signals is just slightly different from supplying 750vdc at a few thousand amps for electric train operations. No power utility in their right mind is going to volunteer their scarce resources to get linemen railroad certified to maintain a few hundred tiny little 10 megawatt substations. They may do it if the LIRR pays them enough, but this exercise is about saving the LIRR money, not giving them another way to be fleeced. In any event because the LIRR's linemen are already railroad certified, and the LIRR would be stuck maintaining their existing substations the only possible outcome of your ludicrous plan would be the wholesale duplication of positions, which would only result in more costs for the LIRR. but you must believe me that power infrastructure is NOT a one-time expense in any event. If LIRR owned the sub stations they would have to maintain them which means hiring more electricians. They would have to replace them every x number of years. The cost is a push. You came so close. Power infrastructure is not a push. There is less power infrastructure with a high voltage AC installation, and it is concentrated at selected locations for easier maitenance. There'd be fewer than 15 AC substations, as compared to more than 100 with a third rail installation. Parts would of course break and need to be swapped out from time to time. It is a lot easier to diagnose a problem when you're not driving miles up and down a railroad trying to find out why the SCADA system is giving flukey readings. But you do at least come close to making the point that one way or another the LIRR pays for the infrastructure. The big difference is that if they do it in-house they can simply expand their existing ranks of linemen, who can also work with signal and switch power, to maintain the equipment. With LIPA as the third party contractor supplying DC power the manpower redundancy would be a huge drain on the LIRR's operational budget. |
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