Re: PASSING SIDINGS
Author: Lloyd Christmas
Date: 05-20-2017 - 10:24
In SMART's contract with Nippon Sharyo they had an option to buy more cars at the original price which I believe was exercised in April of 2016. Their last set of cars arrived in December 2015, I think. The purchase of the four additional ones was done to beat the expiration of the option. So, unless I misread or something happened later, they are going to get that extra two sets of cars.
But the main thing I'd like to know is why they believed in April 2016 and earlier that they would be able to run a 6 train service with 7 trains, which seems to be the case. The discussion in 2016 when they exercised the option did not include anything having to do with being able to run six trains. It was a decision to not use the C cars because they hadn't been designed yet.
Even in November of 2016 they released a schedule that showed 6 train service.
So the thing that needs to be looked at is what happened o change SMART's operation from six trains to four trains.