PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 The new rail cars SEPTA bought in March have finally arrived in the Philadelphia area, but the transit agency says it may still take some time to put them into service.<\/p>\n
The two dozen surplus cars were purchased from Montreal\u2019s Exo transit system for $8.6 million, which the agency\u2019s board approved to beef up its fleet after its aging Silverliner IV cars were retired last year.<\/p>\n
Those new cars showed up at Woodburne Station in Bucks County on Sunday \u2014 after some delays from using a third party to ship them across the U.S.-Canada border. Their next stop will be the Frazer maintenance yard, where SEPTA crews will prepare them for regional rail service. <\/p>\n
The work will take a few months and involve a variety of additions and modifications: installing a Positive Train Control system, new batteries, shortening exterior doors to accommodate SEPTA\u2019s higher platforms, and even changing some signage from French to English. <\/p>\n
SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch said that once the trains are ready, they will likely be used to both supplement and expand service.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we need extras for trains that have to go out of service, or if we want to look at some spots where we can add some service where there\u2019s demand,\u201d Busch explained. \u201cIt just gives us a lot more flexibility overall.\u201d <\/p>\n
For the time being, the new cars will be used to lessen the impact of losing the old Silverliner IVs, but SEPTA is expected to award a contract for new Silverliner VIs by the end of the year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 The new rail cars SEPTA bought in March have finally arrived in the Philadelphia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,21073,13035,2618,25995],"class_list":["post-291043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-public-transit","tag-regional-rail","tag-septa","tag-silverliner-iv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}