When the snow flies and the ice forms, Metro-North Railroad will have a bigger arsenal of new equipment to fight back than it had for last winter's storms.
Its foul-weather weaponry now includes three recently purchased Rolls Royce jet engines that they'll use to blow snow away.
The turbine engines produce exhaust at 600 degrees Fahrenheit to not just melt snow but vaporize it. But replacing older turbine engines is just one part of the railroad's armory, which also includes five cold-air snow blowers — up from three last year — and 150 new heaters to melt snow and ice around switches and interlocking tracks to allow them to operate smoothly.
Still, all winters are unpredictable, and the railroad, which carries 125,000 people on an average weekday, was not making promises it might not be able to keep.
"It was a record-breaking winter last year," railroad spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said. "We hope it's not so bad this year. Have we done things to hopefully respond better? Yes, we have. Will they work better? We hope so."
The New Haven Line is particularly vulnerable, relying mostly on a fleet of aging trains, some several decades old. The new M-8 trains rolling out on the New Haven Line also are built to better weather snow and ice storms.
Jim Cameron, chairman of the Connecticut Metro-North/Shore Line East Rail Commuter Council, said he's seen the railroad continually work on its handling of winter storms.
"I think that's true year over year," he said. "As they've learned more from the previous winter — and the last one was pretty bad — they have done new things."
The railroad gets ready for storms by taking many steps, such as changing the third-rail shoes on trains to ones that have holes in them to prevent the buildup of ice and snow that can block the shoe's contact with the rail.
Still, the wallop of the unusually harsh winter tested the system. It forced the railroad to stop running completely on Dec. 27, 2010. After a January storm immobilized many older New Haven Line cars, service on that line was scaled back for about a month.
"Last year, truthfully, it was very challenging," passenger Joanne Smithwrick said recently, waiting at New Rochelle to commute to her job as a vice president of human resources. "I'm assuming they did the best they could."
Told about some of the railroad's current emergency plans, she said, "Good. That's what they should be doing."
Others are still leery about whether the railroad will be able to handle it.
"Seeing is believing," said David Cohen, 56, an attorney also waiting at the New Rochelle station to take a train to Manhattan. He was hoping for the best this winter.
"I'm just praying that there's no snow," he said.
The railroad and the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which shares responsibility for the line, have agreed to be prepared to scale back New Haven Line service again if needed.
"We had the worst winter in our history, with more than 80 inches of snow on the New Haven Line," Anders said. "We are all going to be even more prudent and cautious in our approach this year because the fleet is a year older. ... We don't want people to not have service. We're not going to shut down unnecessarily. But we have to be mindful of the antique fleet."
Cameron said the approach was wise.
"If they know that there's going to be blizzard conditions, with that kind of snow, they're preemptively going to curtail service rather than send out those cars and have them break down in the middle of nowhere, stranding passengers," he said.
Much of the new equipment was not on hand or ready to help clear snow in October, when a surprise storm dumped wet, heavy snow on the region, Anders said.
With the beefed-up arsenal, the railroad has heavy-duty snow-clearing equipment at eight of its 10 yards.
The jet-engine snow blowers blast hot air with 2,500 pounds of thrust to get under ice and snow that is crusted or wet and heavy. Built in England in the 1960s, they are more powerful and more efficient than the engines the railroad had been using, 1950s-era J57s that were used in B-52 bombers. The newly purchased engines burn about 100 gallons of kerosene per hour, roughly half the fuel used by the engines they're replacing, Anders said.
Cold-air snow blowers are better for light, fluffy snow. They are mounted on vehicles fitted with both rubber tires and steel wheels to run on train track or roads.
So far, six trains of M-8 rail cars are carrying passengers, Anders said. The 48 cars that make up those trains, with spares, comprise about 12 percent of the New Haven Line fleet.
The M-8s, for instance, use traction engines that are enclosed, unlike older cars, which used exposed motors that could ingest blowing snow, shorting them out.
Heating and air conditioning are provided by removable units, so when the systems break, they can be removed for repair without taking the entire car out of service.
Also, each car has two of the units, each capable of cooling or heating the car if the other breaks down.
Whatever happens this year, by next winter, the M-8s will make things run more smoothly, Cameron said.
"The biggest issue has been the age of the old cars and their bad design," Cameron said. "This, I hope, is the last winter where we have to kind of worry about those things."
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