The TTC has released the reports investigating the cause of the hydraulic fluid spills from subway work cars during the first half of 2024.

• Work Car Hydraulic Leak Incidents Update

This report contains six sections:

See also:

• Hydraulic Oil Spills on the Subway
• TTC Streetcar Overhead Maintenance Audit
• The Scarborough RT Derailment Technical Reports
• The Unhappy State of SRT Track
• Revisionist SRT History at the TTC
• Line 3 SRT Replacement Service and Derailment Investigation
• Ten Questions About the SRT Derailment

Introduction

The primary report among these is from Hatch, a consulting engineering firm with rail industry expertise. Their task, as they state clearly, was to determine the underlying technical reasons for each incident, but not to delve into TTC operational practices.

There are many cases cited of inadequate vehicle inspection and maintenance, lack of procedures and standards, undertrained staff, and poor record-keeping to document the history of affected vehicles. These are not isolated incidents, but ongoing problems.

The Management Action Plan consolidates all of the recommendations from Hatch and APTA together with their current status. Many are “complete” and others are “in progress”. What is clear from the extent of the list is that many problems, some quite serious, required action by the TTC. How did the system get into that state in the first place?

The TTC management report looks only at the hydraulic fluid spills, but does not consider the wider context of two previous reviews of maintenance and record keeping: the Streetcar Overhead Section, and the post-mortem report on the SRT derailment. There is a sense that “we have fixed this” through the substantial implementation of consultant recommendations, but without the broader context.

On a more general level, there are two obvious questions:

• How many more sections or processes within the TTC suffer from similar issues, and are problems just waiting to surface?
• Is the lower maintenance standard really confined only to work vehicles, or have staffing and funding limitations affected support for revenue vehicles and infrastructure too?

The management report states:

Both reports [Hatch and APTA] identified common root causes, and while they found that the TTC’s practices are typical of the industry, they recommend implementing a more robust preventative maintenance program of procedures, training, and quality control modeled after what the TTC has in place for revenue service vehicles. [Management report at p. 1]

The comment about TTC practices being “typical of the industry” is telling. If the situation described in the reports really is typical, the transit industry is in perilous condition. Saying “everybody else does it this way” does not explain how work car maintenance is nowhere near what one would expect from a once pre-eminent transit system in North America.

The Hatch report described the situation differently:

The lack of detailed documentation for the design and maintenance of the work car fleets is highlighted as a major issue in this report, especially for the repair of hydraulic hoses. However, Hatch’s experience with other major transit agencies in North America like TTC, suggest that design and maintenance documentation supplied by work car OEMs does not usually contain detailed information on the installation of the hydraulic hoses except when mandated by a procurement specification or used for very specific applications (e.g. rigid hoses, specialty hoses and fittings, and components that are hard to procure and/or have long lead times). [Hatch at p. 39]

That remark refers to the availability of documentation, not to day-to-day maintenance practices.

The APTA report is silent on practices at TTC compared to other systems.

This is a significant discrepancy between the management report and the documents from Hatch and APTA, and one cannot help seeing this as “spin” to put TTC practices in the best possible light.

Summary of Incidents

The table below gives an overview of the incidents reviewed by Hatch.

Some of these incidents were cleaned up before affecting revenue service, or occurred in yards where there would be no effect. This does not minimize the severity of so many failures in such a short time span. Some of the cleanup efforts required multiple passes to complete satisfactorily.

One outcome of this review is the recognition that clean-up of spills requires better handling than in the past, but the basic issue is that the spills should occur less frequently, if at all, in the first place.

Readers who want to see complete details and photographs of these incidents should peruse the Hatch report.

One key point should be knocked on its head: back in May, there were questions about possible sabotage given the spate of events in a two-week interval. The investigation showed that all incidents were due to component failure from lack of maintenance, or of incorrect maintenance. The May 13 incident was a direct result of the routing of a hose through a floor grate where it would chafe and eventually fail. “Sabotage” was a red herring at the time, and remains so today. [There is an extensive review of the metallurgical condition of the hose and the floor grate in the Acuren Group report.]

TTC plans to up its spending on work cars. It is worth noting that a plan to refresh and expand the work car fleet under former CEO Andy Byford was sidelined when Rick Leary took over as, initially, was the plan to renew the Line 2 fleet.

The TTC’s 2024-2033 Capital Budget and Plan includes $34.0 million of approved funding for work car overhauls and $63.4 million toward work car procurements.

TTC staff will include a funding request in its 2025 Operating Budget submission to establish a more robust work car preventative maintenance program.

This statement is a clear admission that the program now in place is inadequate. A related issue is that the backlog of necessary work is directly related to work car availability, and in turn that drives the longevity of slowdown orders on the subway.