PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA expects to receive 10 coach cars from Maryland on Friday to add much-needed capacity on the Regional Rail in the coming weeks.
The agency is leasing the cars from the Maryland Area Rail Commuter system, known as MARC. They will make their way from Brunswick, Maryland, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., before finally arriving at 30th Street Station around 10:30 p.m. The
SEPTA is tapping into the $220 million that Gov. Josh Shapiro allotted for the agency in November to help pay for the one-year lease.
The cars are destined for SEPTA's nearby Powelton rail yard, but will not be used right away. There is a process to implement them that may take a few weeks, officials said.
"We have to do some training with our crews. We have to make sure our mechanics are trained on anything that we're going to need to do," said SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch.
SEPTA is paying MARC $22,000 per car per month — that’s $2.6 million a year. Busch said the MARC cars are not being assigned to any particular line. They'll be deployed where needed.
The MARC decals will remain on the cars while they're in Philadelphia.
"[Commuters will] be able to spot trains that are being pulled by a SEPTA locomotive, but the coach cars are MARC cars," Busch said.
SEPTA said adding the rail cars will ease some of the burden that Regional Rail riders have been dealing with the last few months — delays, cancellations, packed trains and skipped stops.
The problems stemmed from the federally mandated Silverliner IV car inspections and repairs that needed to be done. Friday was supposed to be the deadline to install thermal units on all the cars, but SEPTA isn’t meeting it because of supply-chain issues, including difficulty obtaining wiring. About one-third of the fleet still needs those units.
About two-thirds of SEPTA's Silverliner fleet is back in service. Busch estimated a return to "normal" Regional Rail service by mid-December.