Metro-North maintenance crews — responsible for making sure crucial switches and signals are operating properly — get little or no supervision, do not document their work, and are sometimes not even given assignments, according to a report from the MTA’s Inspector General.
The report gives a harsh assessment of the performance of the railroad’s communications division, which maintains the fiber optic network that connect Metro-North’s control center at Grand Central to the switches and signaling system on the Harlem, Hudson, and New Haven lines.
The report from Inspector General Barry Kluger’s office said that on some days, crews aren’t any given specific orders and are just told to drive around inspecting equipment at random without documenting where they went or what they did.
“Some days I do not have eight hours to assign,” one supervisor told investigators, so he tells crews to drive alongside the tracks and look around.
When orders are given out by higher-ups, they aren’t being documented — leaving no record of who was assigned to do what.
“The maintenance crews themselves are not required to routinely log their activities or document their work,” the report says.
Crews are supposed to inspect and test key communication nodes every month — but one crew blew off the required job for nearly a year, the
report added.
It turns out many of these issues were brought to the railroad’s attention back in 2001 — but they were never properly addressed.
That audit found a lack of record-keeping for equipment failures and repair work, and that Metro-North was not keeping track of the work done by crews during their shifts.
“It’s a crying shame that this has been going on since 2001,” said Prashant Joseph, 34, who takes the Harlem Line to Grand Central. “It’s 2015 now. These problems still exist.”
Even though the deputy director of railroad’s communication division, who has been in his position since the 1990’s, was aware of the problems, management failed to implement even basic improvements — like workers logging their assignments, according to the report.
“That these serious deficiencies have persisted or emerged without correction is troubling,” writes Kluger in a letter to him.
MTA spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said the agency is working to fix the issues raised in the report.
She said the railroad is creating a computer-based system of record-keeping to better track the tasks assigned and completed by those who maintain all aspects of it’s infrastructure, from power to signals to stations.
The Inspector General released a similar report last fall about Metro-North machinists. A probe caught machinists wasting away shifts shopping at stores like Home Depot, hanging out at fast food joints like Arby’s, and commuting on company time.
“This office takes these issues very seriously as witnessed by the series of reports that we have put out,” said Kluger. “From our perspective, the new management clearly recognizes the seriousness of the issue.”