Efforts to Repair Aging System Compound Metro's Problems

In January 2002, a 58-year-old woman's arm became caught in a door, and she was dragged along the platform at Gallery Place because of a faulty door circuit in a CAF car. An investigation found that the circuit was poorly soldered at the factory -- a problem that should have been caught by Metro and CAF inspectors responsible for testing the components before the car was put into service.

Two months later, a fire erupted on another CAF car. Metro traced the problem to an incorrectly wired heater. The problem was found on 33 other CAF cars, despite the fact that CAF and Metro employees had inspected and approved the wiring of the heaters, according to an internal investigation.

More recently, Metro managers discovered that the floors of the cars are cracking and peeling beneath the carpet, prompting concerns that they will have to be replaced. Records show Metro approved the use of a flooring material that was inferior to what was initially required in the contract.

Managers now agree that an unrealistic schedule is partly to blame for the flaws. The agency ordered a rush job because its board of directors wanted to open five Green Line stations by January 2001. "We were racing to beat the clock," White said.

As it turned out, the cars were two years late because of the corrections that had to be made.

Metro officials note that CAF reimbursed the agency $5 million for consulting fees and other costs incurred because the cars were delivered late. Metro has yet to pay CAF more than $26 million that it owes, a sum officials said gives the agency some leverage to ensure that problems are corrected.

White recognized that many of the problems should have been caught by Metro, and three years ago, he strengthened the quality assurance department by giving it more autonomy.

"We learned our lesson," White said.

But records show the agency repeated many of the mistakes it made with its purchase of the CAF cars in its next large rail car project: rebuilding older cars to extend their lives.

Backward Steps

On the morning of April 6, rail cars Nos. 2066 and 2067 clattered into the Alexandria yard shortly after breaking down on the Blue Line. Hundreds of passengers had been left on the platform at the Capitol South Station at 8:05 a.m. after a door problem prevented the operator from moving the train.

The mechanics in Alexandria were familiar with the two cars; both had been sidelined the day before with mechanical problems. Both were Breda cars, built by the Italian firm Breda Costruzioni Ferroviarie in the early 1980s. And both had recently undergone an expensive refurbishment.

Metro is spending $382 million to overhaul 364 Breda cars. The cars need new propulsion, braking and train control systems, among other upgrades.

Two at a time, they are loaded onto a special tractor-trailer and driven six hours north to the Hornell, N.Y., plant of French engineering giant Alstom Transportation Inc. There, workers strip the cars to their metal skeletons and rebuild them with new components or remanufactured parts. They sandblast the aluminum frames, repair cracks and repaint the exteriors. The interiors get a makeover in the red, white and blue color scheme of the CAF cars.

The process takes about 60 days for each car and is meant to ensure that they last another 20 years.

But it has not made the cars more reliable. Over the past year, records show that the renovated cars had major mechanical problems 72 percent more often than those that did not undergo the expensive work and were twice as likely to cause delays. Doors won't close properly, the automatic train control and auxiliary power malfunction and the trains don't always stop precisely, a Metro evaluation in late March found. The performance of the rebuilt Breda cars is so poor, it is dragging down the reliability of the entire Metrorail fleet.

"Those cars are killing me," said Feil, who needs 758 of Metro's more than 900 rail cars functioning every morning to meet rush hour demand.

White and others say quality is a problem that haunts the entire U.S. transit industry, in part because so few companies make or rebuild rail cars. Unlike automobiles, rail cars are built to order, so there is little standardization or opportunity to work out kinks from one generation of cars to the next.

He points to Boston, where the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority recently canceled a $225 million contract with Breda after new rail cars derailed nine times and were breaking down three times more often than the rest of its fleet.

Weak Oversight

During the rehabilitation of its Breda cars, White said Metro has been careful to monitor Alstom's work. "We ride these guys and manage these contracts with a level of vigilance and manpower that is very high," he said.

But auditors in Metro's quality assurance department repeatedly warned that the agency's failure to oversee the program was to blame for many of the problems.

In July 2002, Metro auditors visited Alstom's plant and concluded that while the company was committed to providing a good product, Metro was making it difficult. Metro engineers had approved questionable wiring material and techniques, for example, without justifying that the wiring would work as well or last as long, as required by the contract, auditors found.

Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultant hired by Metro to ensure quality in manufacturing, was conducting only "loosely structured inspections" of the cars without adequately documenting the cause of problems and the steps being taken to prevent them from recurring, auditors said.

Metro's oversight of the program had suffered a "breakdown" that needed to be quickly addressed, they concluded. "Time is of the essence," auditors warned.

Despite the warnings, problems persisted.

One of the first rebuilt Breda cars caught fire during a 2003 test run because of an electrical wiring problem, records show. In May 2004, Metro's auditors found that the cars that had been returned to service were hobbled by poor propulsion, badly installed door hardware and water leaks from evaporator assemblies.

Two months later, auditors once again targeted Booz Allen, saying that the ways it monitored production and inspected completed cars "clearly require improvement." Metro has paid Booz Allen more than $13.1 million for its work on the Breda contract, according to agency officials.

Booz Allen spokesman George Farrar said that "all of the issues that were raised in those various audits have been resolved to the satisfaction of [Metro's] management."

Alstom officials said in a statement that with a project of this magnitude, some adjustments are always necessary. The company said it is working closely with Metro to improve the reliability of the cars. "Both teams agree that there are problems and we are now working together to fix them," the statement said.

Rich Buettner, Metro's chief quality assurance auditor, was blunt in assessing the extent to which the problems with CAF and Breda cars could be blamed on the agency's poor oversight: "Most of it." While Buettner had raised warnings about both contracts, he had no authority to force the operations department that managed the contracts to act on his recommendations.

"It was frustrating," Buettner said, particularly because "the thing we were fighting for was to ensure that we got our money's worth."

In March, White reassigned the job of managing the projects from the operations department to P. Takis Salpeas, a Metro assistant general manager whose department built the railroad. Salpeas has since announced that his engineers have found part of the problem: faulty electronic relays in the automatic train control system in the CAF and Breda cars. Though the relays have been swapped out twice before, Salpeas said he is crossing his fingers that the latest replacement, as well as repairs to the doors, will do the trick. "If we're lucky, come Christmas you're going to see tremendous improvement," he said.

Feil said it is too early to tell whether that prediction will bear out. "I'm cautiously optimistic," he said.

Maryland Secretary of Transportation Robert L. Flanagan reacted to the Post's findings by saying it is "outrageous" that Metro's senior managers failed to disclose the role they played in the problems with the CAF and Breda contracts, particularly since Maryland and other jurisdictions have pledged $1.8 billion to the agency.

"We've made a commitment . . . for a substantial infusion of funding," he said. "This information causes us grave concern about whether we're going to get value for that increased investment."

Database editor Sarah Cohen contributed to this report.