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Accomplishments: Monday, April 9, 2012

The second round of MTA New York City Transit's FASTRACK, an ambitious maintenance initiative, began last night on the Seventh Avenue Line from 34 St-Penn Station to South Ferry and to Atlantic Av, Brooklyn. Because a segment of the subway is closed to train service for seven consecutive hours (10 PM to 5 AM), FASTRACK is a safer and more efficient way to maintain and clean New York City's vast subway—a system that never closes.

With no trains running along Seventh Avenue, more than 800 Transit employees were able to inspect and perform maintenance work on signals, switches and associated components. The workers were able to replace rails and cross ties and scrape track floors, thereby removing muck and debris. In subway stations, paintable areas not reachable during normal train operation were scraped, primed and painted. Workers also took the opportunity to clean lighting fixtures, change bulbs and repair platform edges while performing high-intensity station cleaning. These maintenance activities improve train performance and efficiency while also providing an aesthetically-pleasing station environment.

Significant accomplishments from last night's maintenance effort includes removing more than 1,250 bags of debris (18,500 pounds) from the tracks, installing 50 linear feet of handrail, and replacing six running rails (sections of track). Sections of track were serviced by the vacuum train and seven drains were cleaned. Nearly 300 tunnel lights were replaced, 43 square feet of tactile warning (ADA) tiles were replaced and at Hoyt Street, six new platform edge signs were installed. On elevators and escalators, fire alarm and sprinkler systems were tested on three machines and maintenance and cleaning work was performed on 11 Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) monitors and 8 cameras.

FASTRACK was credited for the quick cleanup of a water main that broke last week disrupting subway service between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Thousands of gallons of water entered the tracks of the trains around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, April 5 when a 12-inch water main installed more than a century ago fractured under West Broadway between Warren and Murray Streets (between Chambers St and Park Place Stations). Transit workers quickly responded and cleared the tracks, and service resumed shortly after 8 AM. About seven inches of water had accumulated and reached the top of track rail but, was swiftly removed by external pumps and track drains that were recently cleaned as part of the previous FASTRACK which shut down service on the lines for four weeknights in February. "Those drains were all recently cleaned, so they were handling water amazingly," said Senior Vice President of Subways Carmen Bianco. "All the hard work put into FASTRACK several weeks ago, paid off.

How this impacts service?

Reliable service – where you can depend on getting to where you need to go when you need to get there – requires constant care and attention to critical components you never see. To improve safety and reliability, pumps, signals, track, and power are just some of the vital system components we are focusing on repairing and maintaining so that we can continue to provide our riders with safe and reliable service.