US Standard Light Rail Vehicle

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The US Standard Light Rail Vehicle was an attempt at a standardized light rail vehicle promoted by the United States Urban Mass Transit Administration and built by Boeing Vertol in the 1970s. Part of a series of defense conversion projects in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the LRV was seen as both a replacement for older PCC streetcars in many cities and as a catalyst for new cities to construct light rail systems. The USSLRV was marketed as and is popularly known as the Boeing LRV (not to be confused with their prior lunar roving vehicles for NASA) and is usually referred to as such.

There was also a similar program for rapid transit called State of the Art Cars (SOAC). SOAC was also funded by UMTA and managed by Boeing Vertol. The SOAC cars were built by St. Louis Car Company and made demonstration runs in several cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The Seashore Trolley Museum acquired the cars when the test program ended.

1 History
2 Problems
3 Replacements and retirement
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

The original concept of the USSLRV came to fruition in the late 1960s as the limited number of cities with PCCs in North America were looking for modern replacements for their aging rolling stock. When Muni in San Francisco and MBTA in Boston were looking at creating new vehicles or importing European vehicles, the UMTA decided to create a committee (the BSF Committee) to create a standardized design. At the same point, a flood of defense conversion projects came to fruition as the result of government encouragement to help defense suppliers busy as the conflict in Vietnam was coming to an end (and to force vehicles bought with American money to be made in the US).

By 1973, the UMTD gave Boeing Vertol the rights to produce the USSLRV and Muni (which ordered 100 vehicles) and the MBTA (which ordered 150 vehicles) put in their orders with the first demonstrator models being produced in 1975. The first revenue service runs of the USSLRV were on December 30, 1976 on the MBTA's Green Line "D" Branch; the first regular runs on the Muni system came in 1979 in the months leading to the opening of the Muni Metro. The USSLRV was also nearly purchased by SEPTA in Philadelphia and GCRTA in Cleveland, however those companies later struck down their deals and went their own ways.

[edit] Problems

From their entry into service, the USSLRV was prone to numerous problems ranging from derailments on tight curves to shorting of electrical systems to passengers having the LRV's "plug doors" closing on them. These problems were coupled with a very low mean distance between failure and additional, smaller, mechanical problems and defects. In Boston, this led to the LRV fleet ranging wildly in size for the first several years as well as a PCC rebuild program at the MBTA's expense, while in San Francisco it led to the Muni Metro tunnel (where only two of the LRV's three doors could work on its high level platforms) not reaching its full potential until 1982. During this time, the MBTA sued Boeing-Vertol (and won) for the cost of repairs and, ironically, sold 50 cars which were not accepted or destroyed from their order to Muni with the last cars entering service, in both cities, in 1983.

[edit] Replacements and retirement

The problems of the USSLRV led their purchasers quickly looking for replacements and supplements to their fleet. In Boston, MBTA retired the worst of the LRVs starting in 1987 after being the maiden customer of Kinki Sharyo, manufacturer of their Type 7 in the US while San Francisco began retiring their LRVs in 1995 after the first of their replacements (the LRV2) arrived from Italian manufacturer Breda. In an ironic twist, Boston also turned to Breda for the ultimate LRV replacement, the Type 8, but has faced similar problems in a situation eerily similar to that a generation earlier with Boeing. Both cities did sizeable rebuilds of the fleet, ranging from new circulation systems and electrical equipment to enhancements ranging from (in San Francisco) automatic announcements to (in Boston) a different style of doors.

At the end of 2001, Muni retired the last of their USSLRVs after the LRV2s had proven their reliability on the Muni Metro system. The MBTA was originally expected to have retired their USSLRVs around the same time, however the problems with the Type 8s have pushed this back and a limited number still run with a retirement date sometime by the end of 2006.

Two of the Muni cars have been saved in museums, one at Willamette Shore Trolley and the other at Western Railway Museum.