Light rail repairs are adding up

09:08 PM CST on Wednesday, March 3, 2004

From 11 News Staff Reports

Click to watch Nancy Holland's report

Drivers and light rail trains have certainly been on a collision course ever since service started. And another accident happened Wednesday.

It is certainly a problem, the number of accidents is now up to 22 in just 14 weeks, two this week alone.

The number of car vs. light rail accidents in Houston is very high, potentially the highest in the nation.

In the latest crash witnesses say a driver stopped at a red light at Fannin and Rosedale, but the nose of his car was sticking out at the crossing and it got smacked by a train.

There were no injuries, except to the vehicles involved.

11 news has been asking Metro what all this is costing for more than a week. The total bill is more than $600,000 to fix the damaged train cars. That's before Wednesday's accident.

Repair crews have been kept busy at the facility the rail cars go to after a crash. And an illegal left turn can lead to that facility.

While it is also a place for preventive maintenance, up to a quarter of the work now being done on the trains there is fixing the results of accidents.

"We're waiting for the front covers to be fabricated and it goes back into service," said Scott Grogan.

Metro hopes to recover most of the damages from drivers involved in the accidents and their insurance companies. That's because as of yet all of the accidents have been deemed the fault of the drivers of the cars not the trains.

Grogan's job is to make the damage go away. "Put Humpty Dumpty back together again," he said. "And put it back in service."

While much of the work is done on the fiberglass skirts, Grogan said that's a good thing. And said they have actually kept the damage down, absorbing the brunt of the impact, and making for relatively easy repair.

People in maintenance said that if all the pieces are available it takes, on the average, about eight hours to repair one of these trains after an accident and get it back into service.

Grogan has actually ordered extra spares of those fiberglass skirts to make sure there is always one ready to go. While he calls the performance of the trains themselves outstanding, even in the shop there is acknowledgement that it's hard not to run into trouble.