New commuter rail cars can be previewed this week

“This is really a ‘coming soon,’ ’’ said Richard A. Davey, the MBTA general manager, while leading reporters on a tour late last week.

The mock-ups are life-sized models of the passenger cars that are scheduled to begin arriving in 2012, becoming the first new coaches in seven years. They will replace the oldest among the MBTA’s fleet of 410 coaches.

The new cars will all be double-decker, retiring single-level models that date to the early 1980s.

Twenty-eight will be “control coaches,’’ meaning they have an operator’s cab at one end. The T’s locomotive-and-coach sets are designed to go in two directions on the same track, with the locomotive pushing one way and pulling the other; the operator’s cab allows the engineer to access controls at the front end when the locomotive is pushing from the rear.

The other 47 “blind coaches’’ have bathrooms instead of operator’s cabs.

The mock-ups, open for viewing from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., look the way a commuter rail coach might if it was built by Hollywood or the Children’s Museum: they are partial replicas, sliced open at one end, with faux gauges, and have plexiglass to prevent visitors from testing out the bathroom.

At first glance, the mock-ups are not too different from the T’s existing coaches, down to the Pepto-Bismol pink wall panels and the plum-colored, vinyl seats. But small details illustrate how the T expects the cars to offer a more comfortable, convenient, and reliable passenger experience.

For the first time, coaches will have LED displays showing the next station, in addition to announcements. For those who prefer to listen, the speakers will have sensors to monitor ambient noise and automatically adjust their volume to compensate.

The current system of switches, relays, and bundled wires that lies beneath the skin of commuter rail coaches will be replaced by a microprocessor control system that will reduce the potential for failure from vibration, said Jeffrey D. Gonneville, director of vehicle engineering for the T. The operator cabs will have display screens that announce faults as they arise — like a brake or HVAC failure in a particular car on the train — and the coaches will have specially designed air-conditioning systems aimed at avoiding the failures that dogged the commuter rail in summer 2006.

The coaches have been designed to the T’s specifications; buying train equipment is not like walking into an automotive showroom.

“We’re starting with a clean piece of paper and going from there,’’ said William LeLacheur, the T’s senior technical project manager. The mock-ups are three-dimensional renderings of those drawings. Next, the manufacturer will deliver four prototype cars next fall that the T will put through a battery of tests before Hyundai Rotem begins assembly of the production coaches at a plant in Philadelphia, where coaches for Southern California and Southeastern Pennsylvania transit systems are also being built.

The new MBTA coaches will eventually be scattered among the North and South Station lines. Only the South Station trains have run with double-decker, or bilevel, coaches — which number 140 out of the fleet of 410 — but that will change on a limited basis starting today, Davey said, when the T deploys double-decker coaches on the additional “Haunted Happenings’’ trains running to Salem for Halloween. More will be rotated in on high-demand North Station lines in the future, Davey said.

S. Station plan ‘really stood out’

On Thursday, US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood held a conference call for reporters to formally announce the 54 winning applications nationwide, including South Station, that would be funded from $2.4 billion available to encourage high-speed-rail projects. That money comes on top of the $8 billion the Obama administration awarded at the beginning of the year for high-speed rail as part of the federal stimulus program — “which is about eight billion times more than we’ve ever had’’ in the past, LaHood said.

The nation’s top transportation official said that “the South Station allocation is one that just really stood out for us,’’ because the 111-year-old station is a crucial bookend of the Northeast Corridor running along the Eastern Seaboard.

He also said the award bodes well for the station’s chances of winning future federal funding for construction after the preliminary design and environmental review.

“Once we’ve determined that these regions of the country have got their act together and are working and moving ahead and using our money wisely, then we’re committed to doing whatever we can to continue the progress.’’

Study looks at transit’s effects on community

Those are some of the findings in a new report, “Maintaining Diversity In America’s Transit-Rich Neighborhoods,’’ released by Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. The research center analyzed a raft of demographic and economic statistics for 42 neighborhoods in 12 metro areas that were first served by rail transit between 1990 and 2000. It found that light rail in particular magnified and accelerated change in a neighborhood.

That should matter to those who care about equity, diversity, and neighborhood balance, and who understand what the report called the “symbiotic relationship between diverse neighborhoods and successful transit.’’ And it is of particular interest with the state preparing to extend the Green Line across Somerville, a city that manages to be home both to the state’s second-highest concentration of immigrants and second-highest concentration of college graduates per square mile (as well as the second-most exposure to air pollution from traffic), according to the Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership.

“Transit planners frequently speak of the need for transit-oriented development to support ridership, but what transit stations need is transit-oriented neighbors who will regularly use the system,’’ authors Stephanie Pollack, Barry Bluestone, and Chase Billingham wrote.

The 68-page study is available at http://www.dukakiscenter.org/TRNEquity, and it includes tools for transportation and urban planners to consider along with examples of neighborhoods that successfully balanced new transit and the associated gentrification with moderate rent increases and the preservation of affordable housing.

Sales-tax cut would take toll on MBTA, group says

Carla Howell, the former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate who serves as the alliance’s chairwoman, has called the question “a job-creating machine,’’ and in interviews has singled out the MBTA as an area “full of waste,’’ believing T employees have a sweetheart deal, particularly when it comes to retirement.

A host of diverse organizations have come out against the question, saying the estimated $2.5 billion hole it would tear in the state budget would likely affect an array of state and municipal programs and services — including many with an interest in the T, which is twice as reliant on the sales tax as it is on fares to balance its budget.

The opposition includes On The Move — a transit-advocacy coalition of nine environmental-justice and community-organizing groups that demonstrated as Halloween skeletons at South Station on Friday to illustrate the bare-bones service that might result from the question’s passage — and A Better City, a nonprofit group that represents many of the region’s largest employers on transportation issues.

“A Better City has always recognized the value of mass transit as it relates to the economy of Boston and the region and the Commonwealth,’’ said Richard A. Dimino, the organization’s president and CEO. “The business community needs access to a workforce. It needs access to its customer base. So having a reliable transit system and ensuring that the funding is there for that transit system is something that’s very important to us.’’

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.