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Alstom 6017 was the fire car…

April 10, 2007, 11:30 PM

Once again, my travels around DC Metro take me on rail cars that later make the news. Many of you may have heard the news about a fire on a rail car on Sunday, April 8 at the Waterfront-SEU station. According to Metro in a press release, the car whose motor caught fire was Alstom 6017. I’ve ridden that car before. I rode it on January 4, 2007 on the Green Line from Fort Totten to Shaw-Howard U. I was on my way to the Infoshop, after failing to find any Yellow Line trains above Mt. Vernon Square. It turned out that my timing was a bit off. Yellow Line trains had just changed to peak service, terminating at Mt. Vernon Square instead of Fort Totten.

I just hope that they find the cause of the fire. I just took Mom on an Alstom on Monday while we were up in Washington (we got 6040), and I don’t want to have to deal with an Alstom exploding with Mom on board. She was, however, impressed by the new floor plan on the Alstoms. There’s a lot more room for standees, and a lot of new places to grab to hang on.

Meanwhile, finding out that it was an Alstom throws my guess as to the identity of the fire car right out the window. When I heard about the fire on WMAL, I’d hazarded a guess that the fire car was a CAF – the same car class that had the recent derailment at Mt. Vernon Square. Yeah, CAF came out clean this time.

Web site: Photo of Alstom 6017 at The Schumin Web Transit Center

Song: Katie and I did some necessary shopping today, and we had my iPod going with TV themes on the way back home, so you name it, I've probably been singing it...

Quote: Always something with these new rail cars... CAFs, Alstoms, and Breda rehabs (rehabbed by Alstom). Why can't these cars all run like Bredas?

Categories: WMATA