T to spend millions replacing ties

The debt-ridden MBTA will spend tens of millions of dollars and disrupt South Shore commuter rail service over the next two years to replace nearly 150,000 defective concrete ties that are crumbling decades before their manufacturer promised they would give out.

State transportation officials are vowing to go after the Denver-based manufacturer, Rocla Concrete Ties, even though the company has threatened to file bankruptcy if it is forced to honor the warranty.

The problems with the defective ties and Rocla’s refusal to stand behind its guarantee were first reported as part of a CommonWealth investigation in last summer’s issue. The ties were used on the MBTA’s two Old Colony Commuter Rail lines running from Middleboro and Kingston.

For nearly a year, T officials have downplayed CommonWealth inquiries about the railroad ties, insisting the problem was minimal and affected only a fraction of the ties on the railroad lines. But with every month, especially after the winter weather, the number of broken, crumbling and cracking ties grew and the T was forced to curtail rail service.

“The T had an independent analysis of the ties conducted,” T spokesman Joe Pesaturo wrote in an email explaining the change in course. “The analysts concluded that there was a defect in the make and composition of the concrete ties and that all of them are subject to failure. Therefore, the T has accelerated the program for replacement of the ties.”

The T, which has been replacing about 5,000 defective ties between Middleboro and Bridgewater, will start the full replacement project on that line in the fall. Rush hour trains will operate, although with slow orders in effect, and then buses will be used to shuttle passengers to Braintree during nonpeak hours while replacement work is proceeding.

Workers will move to the Kingston line when that is done and then the Braintree-to-Boston stretch will undergo replacement sometime in 2011. That work will also disrupt service on the Greenbush line, which joins the same stretch of track coming into Braintree.

Pesaturo, who said wooden ties will be used as replacements, said the job will go out to bid next month but said he did not have an estimate for the cost. Similar replacement jobs involving defective ties from Rocla have cost other rail lines more than $100 million even though the ties were still under warranty. Pesaturo said officials have not identified where the money will come from.

The concrete ties – which cost nearly twice what wooden ties cost but were touted to last 50 years, twice the lifespan of timber – began exhibiting defects after less than a decade of use. The ties purchased by the T were part of a batch of nearly 600,000 made in the mid- to late-90s by Rocla’s Delaware plant and sold to other lines in the Northeast, including Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad.

Rocla, whose officials did not return a call for comment, sold the ties with a 25-year warranty. But the concrete ties used in the northeast cold weather climates began falling apart and posing potential safety risks for passenger trains traveling 60 to 70 miles per hour.

Both Amtrak and New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the Long Island rail line, have replaced or are in the process of replacing all the ties they purchased from Rocla during that time period. The cost to Amtrak has been about $110 million to replace about 180,000 ties while the MTA told its state legislature the price tag would be about $125 million to remove and replace about 200,000 ties.

Both of those lines used replacement concrete ties but Pesaturo said the T will use wooden. The other lines also settled court actions with Rocla where the company agreed to supply the replacement concrete ties but the labor and other costs were still borne by the transit agencies.

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 defective ties, that’s nearly 60 miles of track, with an estimated cost of nearly $40 million.

But the T does not own a tie-laying machine and will not lease one for the project, instead installing the replacement ties largely by hand. An official with the Long Island rail told CommonWealth it costs about three times as much to remove and replace ties by hand, making the total for the MBTA more than $100 million.

New MBTA general manager Rich Davey, who until two weeks ago was the general manager of the private company that runs the commuter rail lines for the T, was not available for comment. But in a meeting with the editorial board of The Patriot Ledger in Quincy on Thursday, he said the state can no longer wait for Rocla to step up to the plate.

“The governor is not happy; the secretary (of transportation) is not happy; I’m not happy,” Davey told the Ledger . “Bankruptcy and whatnot doesn’t compensate the Commonwealth and taxpayers for what we bought 12 years ago that was supposed to last 50 years.”

Jack Sullivan is Senior Investigative Reporter for CommonWealth magazine. He can be reached at 617-224-1623 or by email at jsullivan@massinc.org.