The Summer road construction season is here!  We are all too familiar with summer road maintenance or repaving or whatever it is they’re doing as we crawl through the Work Zone.  

The same summer maintenance happens on MetroLink and it will require single track service during many evenings and weekends so we thought we would give you a better idea of what Metro is doing to improve your trip.  In this instance, it will be particularly difficult to see exactly what was done after the work is completed.

Sections of the overhead catenary wires – which provide electricity to power the trains — are being replaced.   The trains collect the electricity through the pantograph on top of the train.  The pantograph has a carbon shoe on it that rides along the copper wire which then experiences some wear over time from that pantograph contact.  The Traction Power Electricians inspect the wire every night to determine when it needs to be replaced, and some of the wire on the original MetroLink line is ready to be replaced.  To do it properly, power must be turned off and the area cleared of trains so the maintenance crew can work safely and efficiently.   Here is our rider alert for the work being done between July 20-26 and here is the alert for the work to be done August 3-9.

One thing you will notice when we are finished is the new wire will have its shiny copper color visible for awhile.  It looks a little strange at first, but will turn black shortly with the exposure to the weather.

Or $6 or $8 or $10…what would it mean to you? Most of us would probably prefer to ignore those thoughts, but Christopher Steiner gave it some thought, enough thought for a book described in yesterday’s article in the Chicago Sun Times. The author of the article described $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better as “surprisingly optimistic”, and Steiner’s examples are, indeed, rose-colored.  He envisions a world with better public transit, reduced obesity, and revitalized urban cores, but also surburban ghettos, prohibitively expensive travel, and the end of “big box” shopping.

How do you see a future of ever-increasing gas prices? Is the glass half full, half empty or is that even the question? Perhaps the question, instead, is what will we do with the remaining contents of the glass?

While we search far and wide for interesting links for this blog, sometimes the best can be found close to home. Check out this article in the St. Louis Beacon about everything we are doing to get ready for August 3 when we will be restoring part of the transit service cut last March. We continue to thank our funding partners at the Missouri and federal governmental levels for funding this temporary service restoration.

     I start with this disclaimer:  I’m in an awkward position…I need highways…I use highways as well as the Mississippi River bridges to travel around the region…I am not anti-interstate-infrastructure and don’t want to be perceived as such. Nonetheless, I spotted an intriguing article that was so interestingly counter to conventional wisdom, that I wanted to share it.
     We’ve probably all heard about the community’s desire to improve the physical connection between Downtown St. Louis, the Arch grounds and the riverfront. And the underground interstate always seems to be an impenetrable barrier.  However, this article from The Infrastructurist provides an intriguing approach: remove the highway completely. It’s a radical idea and one which undoubtedly required much thought and community conversation in each instance. But look at the pictures, especially Portland, and see if the “before” doesn’t look familiar. And then wonder how our own “after” could look without the cars (replaced by MetroLink, MetroBuses, bikes and pedestrians instead).

A “bus bridge” is the use of MetroBuses to “bridge” between MetroLink stations when the train cannot continue its normal schedule due to a rail blockage or operational problem. (There are times when a blockage or operational problem occurs and our controllers can use a “single track” — one of the two existing tracks — to keep trains moving. Single track operations move at slower speeds, however, since trains use one track to travel in both directions but in alternating patterns.)

There are two kinds of bus bridges, ones that are scheduled in advance, and here is a Rider Alert that was posted for a planned bus bridge.

For an emergency bus bridge, the situation varies depending on the day, time of day, type of incident, number of stations affected and length of service outage. Here is a Rider Alert posted when there was an emergency electrical outage.

We encourage customers to check our Rider Alerts during bad weather and sign up for Metro’s RSS feeds for notification as Alerts are posted.