Back tracking

Stephen Wiles leaves his New Bedford home at about 6:15 each weekday morning to drive to Middleborough to catch the commuter train to Boston. He’s been riding the rail five days a week for about five years, so he knows the route and its bumps and sways well. Lately, he’s noticed some jarring patches on the stretch near the Middleborough-Bridgewater town line.

“It’s quite rough,” says Wiles, one of the 10,000 riders on the MBTA’s Old Colony lines every day. “One evening in particular it was quite bumpy.”

That section of track is where the six-car commuter train runs at 70 miles per hour over hundreds of concrete railroad ties that are breaking, crumbling, and disintegrating. It is one of numerous areas along the MBTA’s southernmost rail lines that have been built or rebuilt using concrete instead of wooden ties to support the tracks. The concrete ties were supposed to last 50 years, but many are falling apart after less than 10.

The evidence of deterioration is easy to spot. Fasteners intended to keep the rails anchored to the railroad ties are detached from the ties, and pieces of broken concrete lie next to the track in spots. In some areas, ties are split in half. All along the track line, numerous ties in varying stages of distress have been marked by inspectors with bright green, yellow, or white paint — a color-coded triage system for workmen handling repairs or monitoring the tracks for further deterioration.

Looking down on the Old Colony line from a bridge on Plymouth Street in Middleborough, one can see painted ties stretch about a half-mile in either direction. Between some of the broken concrete ties, maintenance workers have installed new wooden ties to stabilize the track until the T can begin the process of removing and replacing the damaged cement ones.

MBTA officials say they have identified defects in about 4,000 concrete ties on the two Old Colony commuter rail lines to Boston and on the Providence-to-Boston line, but they admit the problem could affect as many as 150,000 ties, equal to more than 56 miles of track. The cost of repairing the ties is unclear, but projections using numbers from similar projects elsewhere yield an estimate that could run as high as $100 million. It’s money the debt-ridden MBTA doesn’t have.

The concrete ties are under warranty, but the company that manufactured them, Rocla Concrete Tie of Denver, has told state officials it will file for bankruptcy if the state tries to make it pay. “We have an issue with the company refusing to come forward,” said James Aloisi, the state’s secretary of transportation. “If we could go after someone, we would go after the company, but I’m not sure we can.” Rocla officials did not return calls for comment.

MBTA officials have been tightlipped about what they plan to do. MBTA chief Daniel Grabauskas twice begged off when asked by a reporter at public events about the concrete tie problem. CommonWealth’s efforts to obtain public records on the concrete tie situation have been unsuccessful. T spokesman Joe Pesaturo, after months of stonewalling, finally responded to emailed questions and said the MBTA’s commuter rail tracks are safe.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Inspections take place on a regular basis to monitor the tracks’ integrity.”

But the problem is so new that the regulatory framework for spotting problems with concrete ties is not in place yet. The federal government has few inspection and safety standards specifically for concrete ties on many classes of tracks, although it is expanding them. The Federal Railroad Administration’s accident database indicates that defective ties are responsible for a growing number of train derailments, but the database doesn’t distinguish between concrete and wooden ties. The FRA also doesn’t investigate the root causes of individual derailments unless they result in a fatality, a serious injury, or cause major property damage.

The limited evidence available suggests defective concrete ties are becoming a safety issue. Concrete ties, which have been in use since the 1960s, had a surge in installations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to the FRA, there have been 227 derailments caused by defective or missing ties since 1991. Between 1975, when records started being kept, and 1990, there were no derailments caused by defective or missing ties.

In Massachusetts, there have been no derailments due specifically to defective or missing ties since 1991, but there have been a handful of derailments caused by defective ties that had triggered a slight widening of the tracks. It is unclear whether concrete ties were involved. Concrete ties are in limited use in Massachusetts. Amtrak and freight lines have used them on some lines in Massachusetts since the late ’80s, but the T’s usage is confined to the Old Colony and Greenbush lines. The North Shore and western commuter lines do not ride over concrete ties.

One derailment that can be traced to defective concrete ties occurred in Washington state in 2005. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that a train traveling at 60 miles per hour in Skamania County derailed on a 40-foot stretch of track that had 19 defective concrete ties. The ties were cracked and worn, causing the fasteners that bind the track to the tie to give way. As the train rolled over the ties, one of the rails started to bend and move outward by just over an inch, causing the train to come off the track. No one was killed, but 14 of the 30 injured passengers were hospitalized. The NTSB has posted an animated re-creation of the accident on its website (www.ntsb.gov).

“Contributing to the accident was the Federal Railroad Administration’s failure to provide adequate track safety standards for concrete crossties,” the NTSB wrote in the “Probable Cause” section of its post-accident report.

Brad Winter, the New England region’s general chairman for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, whose members inspect and maintain the rails, said the problem is very real. “If you get enough of them [defective ties] in a row, you get wide gauge,’’ he says. “Five or six in a row, especially on a curve, you could possibly put a train on the ground [derailment], if the gauge got wide enough.”

Concrete vs. wood

Railroads have increasingly used concrete ties over the past 30 years for economic reasons. Concrete ties cost nearly twice as much to buy and install as wooden timber ties, but they are supposed to last 50 years instead of wood’s 25 years. Their relative strength also means a mile of track can be laid with fewer ties than would be required with wooden ones.

But problems with concrete ties have surfaced periodically when manufacturers failed to mix the concrete to local specifications. A concrete mix that might be suited for a dry climate like Arizona isn’t appropriate for the warm, moist climate of Florida or the freezing and thawing cycles found in northern parts of the country.

“The concrete cracks as it shrinks, with the water penetrating into the concrete and freezing there during freeze conditions and then thawing,’’ resulting in a change in the consistency and structure of the concrete, says Oral Buyukozturk of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, who was part of a team that studied the use of concrete ties several years ago and urged a mixture of preventive chemicals and reinforcements for concrete tie use.

A study released earlier this year by the railroad engineering program at the University of Illinois found that some of the major railroad systems in the United States and Canada are abandoning concrete.

“Due to their relatively higher initial costs, concrete ties are only economical in applications where they last longer and require less maintenance than wood ties,” the study’s authors found. “A primary concern is that concrete ties have unresolved performance problems that shorten their service life and require unplanned maintenance.”

Problems first surfaced with defective concrete ties in the late 1980s, when Lone Star Industries of Greenwich, Connecticut, sold to Northeast railroad companies ties that within relatively few years began deteriorating. The ties were made at the company’s now-defunct Massachusetts subsidiary, San-Vel Industries in Littleton, and they soon cracked, crumbled, split, and broke. Rail systems, including the MBTA, sued Lone Star in federal court but only recovered replacement ties and had to cover the cost of installation themselves. San-Vel went bankrupt.

Rocla is now facing many of the same problems that Lone Star faced. As many as 600,000 ties — the equivalent of more than 225 miles of track — made and bought in the mid- to late 1990s at its Delaware plant have been identified as potentially defective because of a problem in the mix used to make the ties, which weigh about 800 pounds each and were supposed to withstand the harsh and ever-changing elements of the North.

“They thought they had the problem [with climate] solved, but it came back again,” says Winter, who began as a maintenance worker on the rails in 1975. “Something happens in the batch of concrete that makes the ties deteriorate.”

The vast majority of the defective ties are in the Northeast rail corridor, where freezing and thawing cycles coupled with moisture have exposed the flaws. Amtrak and New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the Long Island Railroad and other commuter routes, have been forced to close down tracks and spend hundreds of millions of dollars replacing the bad ties. Nearly a third of the defective ties, including 80,000 in New England, are slated to be replaced along the tracks that carry, among others, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains from Boston to Washington.

“It’s been a debacle,” says P.C. Chaput, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Local 57 in Charlestown.

Rocla’s concrete ties were sold with a 25-year warranty, but that’s just on the ties themselves and not the cost to install new ones. Rocla, after initially denying culpability, has negotiated confidential settlements with New York’s commuter rail companies and Amtrak, but the settlements don’t begin to cover the total cost.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the Metro-North and Long Island railroads, told New York legislators the cost to remove and replace the defective ties will be $125 million, even after Rocla supplies new ones.

Margie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North, said the terms of the settlement have been sealed, but Rocla has agreed to provide replacements for all of the ties in question, whether they failed or not. “We have 200,000 ties that are being replaced with only about 50 percent being defective,” Anders says.

Cliff Cole, Amtrak’s spokesman, said the rail line has spent $60 million so far to replace more than 76,000 crumbling ties. He said another 100,000 are slated for removal and replacement. The work has been ongoing for two years, and Cole says it will be five more years before all the defective ties are replaced. In March, Amtrak said it would use $50 million in federal stimulus money from the Obama administration — intended for high-speed rail expansion — to replace 80,000 “deteriorating” ties in New England.

Rick Inclima, the national safety director for the Maintenance of Way workers in Washington, DC, and a member of a government concrete-tie task force, says the longer-life claim of concrete appears to have been a sales pitch. “The promise of concrete has always been, ‘well, they last 50 years,’” Inclima says. “It’s pretty obvious maybe that’s been oversold a bit.”

A question of safety

The nagging question about the defective concrete ties is whether or not they are safe. Railroad after railroad has said they are, even as they rush to replace them and, in some instances, abandon or avoid their use. But there is growing evidence that the standards for evaluating the safety of concrete ties are inadequate — and that the ties themselves may pose a greater safety concern than previously thought if they are not properly made or installed.

One problem with both the Rocla ties and the defective ones in the Lone Star suit in the early 1990s is that not each tie is tested individually, and deterioration cannot be determined until several changes of the season, long after the ties are installed and trains barrel across them daily.

The Federal Railroad Administration has few standards for inspecting and guaranteeing the safety of concrete ties on most commuter rail tracks. Most inspectors are forced to apply the standards for wooden ties to the cement ones, despite the differences in strength, rigidity, and materials.

In the 2005 Washington derailment, federal investigators found that inspectors identified problems in the concrete ties in four separate inspections following reports of “rough riding,” including one just two days before the accident. But these problems were never reported because there was no violation of existing regulations and no reporting category to cover whether the condition is reported and fixed in a timely manner.

“The Safety Board is concerned about the lack of Federal requirements to help inspectors identify when concrete crossties . . . have deteriorated to unsafe levels,” NTSB chairman Mark V. Rosenker wrote in 2006 to Federal Railroad Administration officials following the investigation of the Washington derailment. “The serious nature of this accident highlights the need for the FRA to ensure adequate safety standards exist for concrete crossties in all track structures.”

Following the NTSB investigation, the FRA set up a task force to come up with new regulations for concrete ties. In part, they have called for automatic inspections, new safety standards, and mandatory reporting of defects. After two years of meetings, the task force issued its draft regulations in May, but they are not expected to be implemented until at least June of next year.

A different response

MBTA officials insist they are doing everything by the book, but the agency doesn’t appear to be dealing with the issue in the same way as other systems that have grappled with the same problem. While other public rail agencies have ordered trains to slow down while going over defective concrete ties and even closed some lines down for repairs, the T is insisting that the problem is not widespread, that commuters are safe, and that repairs can be made without service interruptions.

But T officials are also warding off inquiries into the problem. A public records request for information on the original contract, warranty information from Rocla, the extent of the problem, and the cost to replace the faulty ties was met with a bill for $1,500 for the records, including a charge of $65 per hour for 23 hours — the equivalent of $135,200 in annual salary — for an unidentified T employee to compile and copy the public documents. That is being appealed.

Not only has MBTA chief Grabauskas fended off questions, including at a recent graduation ceremony at South Station for new locomotive engineers, officials at Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail, the for-profit company that operates the commuter lines, have not returned calls for comment. T spokesman Pesaturo said there’s been no need to make the public aware of the problem. “Our customers haven’t asked about it,” he says.

But a lawsuit filed in federal court in 2006 by New York’s Metro-North Commuter Railroad and Long Island Railroad says that strikingly similar and unexpected failure of the ties on their lines placed their operations and their passengers in danger.

“[T]he railroads have observed that a significant number of the Rocla ties are undergoing varying rates of failure, ranging from hairline cracks to extensive ‘mapped’ cracking to severe deterioration, where the tie is actually falling to pieces,” according to the since-settled lawsuit. “The condition of the ties in general has been found to be progressive, in that apparently normal ties are seen to develop cracking, and ties already evidencing cracking have subsequently failed. The defective ties are creating major safety and operational concerns for the railroads.”

The New York and New Jersey railroads shut down lines temporarily and instituted schedule changes in order to speed up replacement. Anders, the Metro-North spokeswoman, said part of the reason for shutting down sections of the rail to replace the ties is economic — that is, to be able to use a tie-laying machine for long stretches at a time, to have workers fixing the rails during regular business hours on straight time rather than on overtime for nights and weekends, and to avoid having to slow down trains riding over rough areas.

“It’s not efficient to spot replace them,” Anders says. “By hand would be three times as expensive.”

But that may be what the MBTA is forced to do. Unlike the other rail lines, most of the T’s commuter lines are single track, which means there are no alternative routes if they have to shut down the tracks. The T also does not own a tie-laying machine. So far, all the concrete tie repair work on the T’s rails has been done late at night and on weekends.

Winter, of the Maintenance of Way Employees union, said his members have been “busy all the time, changing on overtime over the weekend.” He added: “It’s usually half a dozen ties at a time.”

It costs about $660,000 a mile to install concrete ties, compared with about $308,000 per mile for wooden ties, according to industry figures. With 150,000 potentially defective ties, that’s nearly 60 miles of track, with an estimated cost of nearly $40 million. Add in the cost of removing the broken ties, as well as Anders’ estimate of the cost increasing by three times to do it by hand, and the price tag for the T, its customers, and the state’s taxpayers could exceed $100 million.

Another consequence of riding over broken rails is the potential effect on the train’s speed, and in, turn, commuters’ willingness to take the train. Federal regulations require “slow orders” — which would reduce an Old Colony train’s speed from the maximum 70 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour — to be put in place when, depending on the track classification, a certain number of consecutive ties show deterioration; wide gauge measurements begin to appear; or a number of other unsafe conditions are apparent to inspectors. In some cases, tracks have to be shut down in order to replace defective sections.

But T officials said they have had to issue few slow orders regarding the concrete ties. “There have been a few isolated speed restrictions in the past to maintain compliance with MBTA maintenance standards while crews addressed any tie issues,” Pesaturo wrote in an email after initially denying that there were any slow orders on MBTA lines due to defective railroad ties. “These restrictions were removed as soon as the tie conditions were addressed.”

Some engineers may be implementing their own slow orders. One engineer on the commuter rail’s southern runs, who asked not to be identified, said he throttles back through some of the rougher stretches. “I do that, I do that a lot,” he says, “but the goal is to be on time.”

Engineers who are at the throttles say they see the concrete tie problems increasing on Old Colony every day. “The ride is not as smooth as it should be,” says George Newman, an engineer on the Kingston to Boston line and an official with the engineers’ union. “There’s definitely a need for tie replacement, but I don’t think it’s unsafe.”

After a pause, he adds, “But I don’t have the details.”