Sweating the details

It is not uncommon for a malfunctioning monitoring device to shut down complex machinery. What regular airline passenger hasn't been victimized by an errant cockpit warning light?

In mid-December, a faulty pantograph alarm on the Acela Express train took my workday hostage. Ninety minutes into the trip to New York and Washington from Boston and just west of the station in Westerly, RI, the hapless train glided to a swift stop.

The Amtrak crew swung into action. Two-way radios crackled, and an announcement came over the intercom that a computer had crashed in the lead power wagon, pulling down two pantographs, which is akin to unplugging a table lamp from a wall socket. We were powerless in a vehicle that depended on electricity for everything. Except for the lights and doors, which apparently switched over to a 72V dc battery backup system, vital systems were kaput. Those systems included HVAC; Café Club microwaves to heat coffee; locomotives; and flushable toilets, which quickly became a foul problem in what would stretch into a two-hour delay.

Carrying as many as 304 passengers and crew, the Acela high-speed train consists of six cars and two power wagons on either end, which together deliver a continuous 4600 kW, or 6000 hp. Amtrak ordered 20 such train sets in 1996 and 1998 from Canadian manufacturer Bombardier, which uses technology from Alstom, the company that built the high-speed TGV trains that have for more than three decades raced across the French countryside between Paris and Lyon.

The Acela maxes out at 165 miles per hour and employs unique microprocessor-controlled hydraulic tilting technology to mitigate the lateral forces of curves.

Few technical details grace Bombadier's Web site, and the technical brochure e-mailed to me talk up its world-class maintenance facilities. World class?

As 15 minutes turned into 30, the crew informed the passengers that the engineer was on his cell phone "running through procedures" trying to reboot the power wagon's computer, suggesting that action would raise the pantographs to once again draw power from the catenary overhead. Cell phone? Talk about hanging on by a thread.

After the Washington passengers boarded another Acela following us, the New York-bound passengers boarded a nearly empty local behind that. How do they pull this off in the middle of nowhere? The train taking on passengers slips alongside the cripple and aligns two doors. An emergency gangway links the two trains, and passengers simply walk from one to the other. Nary a tootsie touched the ground or track, and the crew did a good job.

The delay caused me to miss my briefing so I got off, turned around, and headed back to Boston.

Wanting to learn more about the malfunction, I called a Bombardier spokeswoman, who provided some basic technical details, but referred questions about the incident to Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. He read to me the incident report. As it turns out, the pantographs were fine, but a related alarm had triggered, which opened the forward power wagon's main breaker. Try though they might, the crew could not close the main breaker.

Amtrak dispatched two diesel-electrics to deadhead the crippled train back to a Boston maintenance facility. When I called Black two days later, he said the train was back in service but couldn't explain how mechanics repaired it—seemingly nothing a good whack with a hammer couldn't fix.

"It was something pedestrian like a mouse in the pantograph," Black said wryly. Was this a case of the missing manual override?

Write me at john.dodge@reedbusiness.com.