NJ Transit approved a contract on Thursday, October 10 to overhaul the trucks on 100 Multilevel II cars, which were ordered in 2010 and built by Bombardier in 2012–13. The overhaul is slated to cost almost $26 million, to be funded by the Transportation Trust Fund. It will be performed by Alstom, which purchased Bombardier in 2021. Each car has 2 trucks, which comprise the wheels, axles, and assembly that holds them together and is attached to the underside of the car’s body. The agency has 429 cars of the Multilevel class, including 329 that were built between 2006 and 2009. Similar cars are in use in the Montreal area and on Maryland’s MARC trains to Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
It is literally unclear whether or not the proposed overhaul will address a major complaint among riders: the cloudiness of the windows on the cars, caused by degradation of the polycarbonate material of which they are made. Larry Higgs reported in the Star-Ledger on October 10, 2022—fully 2 years before the recent board meeting: “The cloudy windows that have inspired complaints from riders on social media for several years need more than a squirt of window cleaner and a wipe down. The need to be replaced, and NJ Transit officials said that will happen as part of an $8 million program.”
Two years later, riders are still complaining about the windows, some of which are approaching translucency, if not outright opacity. The Board item scheduled for approval on the second anniversary of Higgs’ report did not specifically mention replacing the windows, nor was there any mention of windows on the Multilevel I cars, some of which are now 18 years old. In a statement prepared for the Board meeting, Coalition Chairperson Sally Jane Gellert said, “we remember that Kevin Corbett said last month that nontransparent ‘crazed’ windows would be replaced when rail cars were overhauled. However, . . . we do not see any mention of window replacement in Action Item 2410-56. Is that an oversight, or were last month’s promises not all they seemed? It has been at least two years that folks have been asking to be able to see through all train windows” (emphasis in original). The agency has drawn criticism from riders generally, including those with hearing impairments who need to see through the window so they can recognize the station where they intend to get off the train, and those with sight impairments who need transparent windows just to see through them. While the multilevel cars have the worst windows, some single-level Comet cars have clouded windows, too. The clearest windows are on the Arrow III electric cars, built in the late 1970s, and scheduled to be replaced by new Multilevel III cars that are currently on order.
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