THE WASHINGTON POST on WMATA bus maintenance

[WMAveteran]

   On the road to rehab: It's a hard life for a Metro bus     Mark Gail/THE WASHINGTON POST -  James McNair, right,  and Damon Cannon tighten bolts on radiators that were rebuilt at the Carmen E. Turner Metro facility on Aug. 11 in Landover, MD.
   By  Dana Hedgpeth, Published: August 22       At the age of seven and with 250,000 miles on their engines, Metro's buses roll off the road and into rehab, a process that guts, fixes and replaces parts on the 40-foot-long vehicles and sends them out with a fresh coat of paint.
It's a bus's version of a midlife facelift.     


   

     Workers at Metro's Turner maintenance facility meticulously rehabilitate the parts of Metro buses after about six or seven years on the road. The rehab process saves Metro the cost of buying a new bus and extends the average life of a bus to 15 years.
        Metro says rehabbing a bus, even calculating the cost of labor and new parts, saves money and reduces breakdowns. The rehabilitation costs $120,000 per bus, making it cheaper than buying a new one for about $570,000, according to Metro officials. The transit agency typically keeps buses until age 15 — three years longer than the industry average. "We have a structured maintenance program in place where we are trying to stretch the dollar," said Jack Requa, assistant general manager of Metro's bus services. "The midlife overhaul is a key component of keeping the bus on the road and providing service. The whole purpose is not having it break down."
Metro's buses get ridden hard.
They hit potholes daily. The air-conditioning systems struggle to keep passengers cool with doors opening and closing frequently. Brakes and tires are worn down in stop-and-go traffic. Passengers yank cords to tell the driver to stop almost every city block. And roughly 350 riders sit on the seats of each bus every day.
"We're running them almost 24 hours a day, every day," said James McNair, 50, of Annapolis, who has worked for Metro for five years. McNair rebuilds radiators at the Carmen Turner facility in Landover.
"You gotta do this stuff because these buses are under a lot of wear and tear," he said. "You might as well catch it before it breaks down."
In its bus division, Metro spends nearly $170 million a year to train mechanics and to repair, replace, maintain and fuel its fleet of about 1,500 buses. The agency has 460 buses that run on compressed natural gas, 429 hybrid buses and 601 diesel-powered vehicles. About 2,400 operators drive the vehicles.
For their makeovers, buses go to Metro's Bladensburg facility, where they are taken apart. The parts are then trucked to the Carmen Turner facility, where they are rebuilt, cleaned and reassembled. The work used to all be done in Bladensburg, but Metro divided the work between the facilities to give crews more room.
Each year, Metro rehabs about 100 buses. The agency replaces 200 windshield wipers and 8,000 feet of the cords that are used to alert bus operators to stop. It refurbishes 4,200 seats for passengers and bus operators, and uses 10 gallons of paint to spruce up each bus. It takes eight to 10 weeks for a bus to be rebuilt, with roughly 107 employees involved in the rehab.
On the Orion 7 bus, for example, it costs $500 to rebuild a farebox, compared with buying a new one at $13,000, according to figures from Metro's bus division. And it costs $6,100 to buy a new radiator vs. $2,700 to rebuild one.
Rehabbing a bus helps it have fewer breakdowns, Metro said. For fiscal 2011, a Metro bus traveled 7,590 miles, on average, before it had a breakdown, compared with fiscal 2009, when it went 5,669 miles. The increase in performance was attributed to having newer buses and rehabbing older buses, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.   

[WayneNYC]

I think it's good that the WaPo saw fit to publish such an article.