Firm lacks brake sets to fix Acela
Bombardier Inc. of Canada, the company that helped manufacture Amtrak's sidelined Acela Express trains, said yesterday it does not have enough new brake sets to replace all of the damaged ones found in Amtrak's 20-train fleet.
A company spokesman said Bombardier has a total of only 80 new brake sets for the five-year-old high-speed trains. Acela's fleet has a total of 1,440 brake systems, of which 300 have developed cracks. As a safety measure, Amtrak officials have suspended the flagship service and said that it could take ''months" to repair the cracks found in the spokes of the brakes' rotors.
Bombardier does not know when more brake sets will be available because the task will likely require the unique systems to be manufactured from scratch, said company spokesman David Slack. ''We're talking to our suppliers, and they're working out what and when they can deliver," he said.
The brake systems are made by Germany's Knorr Brake Corp. A woman who answered the phone at the company's US headquarters in Westminster, Md., said executives were working on the problem and declined to comment.
The brake discs, where the cracked spokes were found, are manufactured by subcontractor Wabco Locomotive Products in Pennsylvania. Company officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.
The national rail carrier stopped its high-speed service Friday after an inspector found cracks in the brake systems following a test conducted to see if Amtrak could increase Acela's speed. Amtrak officials said the tests did not cause the cracks because they were found throughout the fleet.
Slack, of Bombardier, said the train's brake systems were inspected daily, but the spokes of the brake rotors were not part of those inspections. ''These are in a difficult place to find," he said. ''This is not something that we would regularly look for, but daily inspections [in the future] will look at them every day." Slack said investigators and engineers ''have made no conclusions as of yet" on what caused the cracks.
Amtrak officials said they may unveil their repair plan for Acela Express today, though spokesman Cliff Black said that was uncertain late yesterday.
Amtrak stopped providing substitute service for Acela between Boston and New York starting yesterday, cutting its rail service out of Boston nearly in half. Acela riders on that route can take scheduled slower regional trains.
Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com.
