Are new rail cars win-win for China and Massachusetts? Not yet.
At a 2018 ceremony to celebrate delivery of the first two MBTA trains completed at a Springfield factory that’s operated by a Chinese company, China’s consul general from New York told distinguished guests — including Governor Charlie Baker — that the partnership showcased “China-US win-win cooperation and will benefit everyone’s life.”
So far, the benefit ledger favors China. The state-owned Chinese rail manufacturer CRRC has a nearly $1 billion contract with the MBTA to build 404 cars to replace the entire fleet of aging Red and Orange line trains. The local benefit sounds good: a $95 million factory underwritten by CRRC MA — a subsidiary of CRRC — and the jobs that go with it. But the project is behind schedule. Only a fraction of the 404 cars have been produced, and technical problems have forced them out of service.
When the contract was awarded in 2014, during the administration of former governor Deval Patrick, the state gave up federal funding so it could require rail car assembly to take place in Massachusetts. Breaking ground in Springfield “was a really big deal,” said Patrick this week on Bloomberg Radio. But even Patrick now seems unsure about whether a big deal was also a good deal. The commitment to local jobs “doesn’t mean that the people of Massachusetts should settle for shoddy work,” he told radio hosts Tom Moroney and Joe Shortsleeve. Patrick said he’s frustrated by recent reports of mechanical problems, but “someone else is responsible today for chasing down who is responsible.”
That would be Baker, whose administration expanded the contract in 2017. “I have a feeling this is going to become a really significant flagship for manufacturing and assembly of rail cars here in the US,” Baker said during a tour of the facility back in 2017. That could be. But in Massachusetts, T engineers are currently grappling with a malfunction tied to a pad, described by the Globe’s Adam Vaccaro as “a thin strip of synthetic resin-like material, about a foot long and five inches wide, wedged between the heavy machinery of the vehicles’ trucks, which carry the wheels and the bolsters, which connect the trucks to the cars’ bodies.” The problem was discovered after an Orange Line train derailed last March. A CRRC MA spokeswoman told the Globe the company believes other factors contributed to the malfunction.
Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/19/opinion/are-new-rail-cars-win-win-china-massachusetts-not-yet/