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Posted by
Gold_12th
on Thu Jan 9 12:25:23 2025
A mysterious track defect somewhere along a major New York City subway line is wearing out the wheels on subway cars, causing a shortage of trains on the lettered lines, the Daily News has learned.
The steel wheels of a subway car typically last months before needing to be refreshed and resurfaced through a process called “truing,” which ensures the wheels are round and properly tapered to glide smoothly over the rails.
But over the past two months, the wheels of the R160 cars maintained in New York City Transit’s Jamaica Yard have been wearing out in a matter of weeks, multiple sources with knowledge of subway operations have told The News.
Those cars operate on the E, F and R lines, and sources tell The News that the issue is taking dozens of cars out of service on any given day.
“NYC Transit engineers are reviewing why wheels on some R160 cars appear to have worn down sooner than anticipated, requiring nonurgent repairs,” William Amarosa, MTA’s acting head of subways, confirmed in a statement. “Preliminary review is underway to determine the root cause of the apparent additional wear on those wheels, beyond what is routinely anticipated by the planned maintenance schedule.”
The rapid wheel wear has resulted in a sizable train shortage on the system’s “B division” — the lettered lines — and has caused the MTA to shuffle around older rolling stock to keep up sufficient service across the board.
Large chunks of the territory served by the E, F and R trains — specifically the Queens Blvd. line in Queens and the Culver line in Brooklyn — operate with computerized signaling systems and require cars equipped to communicate with the modern signal network.
That means the MTA has had to pull more modern trains from elsewhere in the system to supplement the ailing R160s out of Jamaica.
Last weekend, G train riders were greeted with the familiar orange “conversational” seating of the old R68 train cars, roughly 60 of which were pulled off of the B, D, and N lines to serve on the G.
In turn, the MTA sent a dozen five-car R160 sets from the G train to Jamaica, where they were configured into six 10-car trains for service on the E, F and R lines. An unknown number of R179s from the A and C are also being sent to Jamaica.
The additional trains are meant to allow service to continue as normal on those three lines, despite the fact that trains are being taken out of service for wheel truing more frequently.
So far, MTA officials say, the subway swap has been a success — all B-division lines involved have been running with the same number of trains on the same schedule this week, according to MTA headquarters, and the only change straphangers see is a retro ride on the G.
But the cause of the rapidly wearing wheels remains a mystery — and it’s expected to affect the cars borrowed from other lines soon enough.
Multiple sources with knowledge of the problem told The News that the MTA’s engineers suspect a misaligned section of track somewhere in the system is the root of the problem, rather than an issue with the wheels themselves.
The R160 trains in question rotate between the E, F and R lines, the sources said, and are not strictly dedicated to one route or another.
The E, F and R trains run together along the Queens Blvd. line from the Jamaica Yard before splitting to go their separate ways under Sunnyside. The F train travels into Manhattan via the newly refurbished 63rd St. tunnel. The E joins the M in the 53rd St. tunnel, and the R joins the N and the W in the 60th St. tunnel.
Cars from other lines that share portions of track with the E, F and R are not showing similar wear issues, sources said — meaning that the problem is likely in a section of track used only by E, F or R trains. Such sections would include the 63rd St. tunnel, the Rutgers St. tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, or the southern ends of the Culver and Fourth Ave. lines in Brooklyn.
Three sources told The News that MTA engineers are focusing on a handful of curved portions of track, but have yet to definitively find the problem. Multiple runs by the system’s track-geometry cars — specialized work trains that use a suite of cameras and measuring devices to check the spacing and alignment of the rails — have yet to turn up anything definitive.
An MTA spokesman said the agency is expecting to find and fix the problem soon. The borrowed R160s are expected back on the G line by the end of March, when they’ll be joined by two new R211 trains.
An R160 and a set of track defects were at the center of a bizarre derailment last January, when a slow-moving F train jumped the track on the Culver Line in southern Brooklyn.
As uncovered by The News, a crucial set of bolts in the suspension of the derailed train car was discovered to have been missing in that incident. A subsequent MTA investigation found that a misaligned rail along that section of track exacerbated the suspension problem and caused the derailment.
There is no indication that the wheel-wear issue is in any way related to last year’s derailment.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/01/08/mystery-track-defect-wearing-out-nyc-subway-car-wheels-has-mta-shuffling-trains/
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