January took heavy toll on T resources, chief says

The high snowfall totals and unusually cold temperatures have taxed commuters not just on the T but on highways and local roads, as well, and they have strained the state’s snow-removal finances, Davey and state Secretary of Transportation Jeffrey B. Mullan said.

In their monthly reports to the five-member board that oversees both the Department of Transportation and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the transportation officials recounted the toll that the storms have taken across the state this winter.

The heavy snowfall has caused the roof to collapse on four of the 140 roadside barns across Massachusetts where the state stores the salt it uses to treat highways and numbered routes. And the eventual cost of repairing those structures has not been figured into the tally of money spent so far on state snow and ice removal, with $75 million already expended and another $10.9 million billed, Mullan said.

That puts Massachusetts $22.5 million over budget for snow removal, meaning the Department of Transportation will need additional help from lawmakers to make it through the winter, Mullan said.

While a handful of substantial storms have made headlines and prompted residents to dig out shovels, blowers, and scrapers, the smaller storms has taken their toll, said Luisa Paiewonsky, the state’s highway administrator. The eight biggest, statewide storms have averaged 34 hours of plowing or salting apiece, but each of the six highway districts around the state have dispatched trucks to keep roads clear of snow or ice on at least 18 occasions, including 24 times for District 1 (Western Massachusetts) and 31 for District 3 (the central district that includes state roads in Worcester, Framingham, and 75 other communities), she said.

On the T, all four rapid-transit lines have been afflicted with delays and disruptions in recent weeks, but the Orange Line and Red Line have fared particularly poorly, Davey said.

The fleets for those lines are the oldest, with all 120 subway cars on the Orange Line purchased in 1979 and about one-third of the nearly 220 vehicles on the Red Line dating to a 1969 purchase, considerably longer than the 25-year useful life intended by the manufacturer.

Jeff Gonneville, the T’s chief mechanical officer, and his team are reviewing all those Red and Orange Line vehicles to develop a plan for keeping them in service-ready condition, Davey said.

In contrast, “the Blue Line cars, purchased in 2005 and 2006, performed very well during the month,’’ he said.

The winter has been particularly trying for users of commuter rail, which has been plagued by locomotive and coach breakdowns and snow-related track problems this season, making thousands late for work on many occasions. “Commuter rail struggled throughout the month,’’ Davey said.

Davey and Mullan have called a meeting next week with the T’s private commuter rail contractor, the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad, and its board “to discuss the situation and ensure local management has sufficient resources to overcome the challenges,’’ Davey said.

Age is also a part of the problem for commuter rail, with many of the fleet’s 80 locomotives and 400-plus coaches dating to the 1980s or earlier. A modicum of help arrived in the past two weeks in the form of two new, surplus locomotives purchased from the Utah Transit Authority, one of which powered a ceremonial ride that Davey, Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray, and other officials took yesterday morning. But the arrival of a significant cache of new equipment — the purchase of 75 coaches and 20 locomotives, previously approved by the T board at a combined cost of more than $300 million — is more than a year away.

Though hardly an insubstantial sum, that figure is just a dent in the roughly $3 billion that officials and analysts estimate the T needs to work through its full backlog of vehicle and infrastructure maintenance and replacement needs.

Meanwhile, the T’s operating budget this year has been taxed by $5 million in winter spending on snow-related overtime, materials, and other expenses, Davey said. In his report, Davey also said that the T is working on improving communications, determined to release service alerts in a more timely fashion, online, to cellphone text-message subscribers, and at station message boards. And it has upgraded server capacity and other hardware and software components to better handle record traffic that has crashed the T’s website in full or in part multiple times.

Davey commended T employees for their work this winter, including a team of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, machinists, and other laborers enlisted recently in an effort to shovel out more bus stops. The T received reports of just two snow-and-ice-related winter injuries from customers last month, which Davey cited as a sign of effective snow removal; in the same period, 52 employees reported slip-and-fall accidents and other related injuries, though many of those did not result in lost time.

Mullan also said he was proud of the work the state has done to keep highways clear, but he acknowledged that motorists have had a particularly difficult commuting winter nonetheless. Much of that is due to bottlenecks on local roads, where snow piles encroach on lanes and obstruct sight lines at intersections, Mullan said, adding that cities and towns face more challenges than highway crews in contending with parked cars and limited room to place cleared snow.

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