Metro Transit rolling stock
[2] Bombardier constructed a full-scale, half-car mock-up of the Minneapolis version of its Flexity Swift design[3] and this was placed on temporary display on a section of completed track on 5th Street, starting on October 30, 2002,[1] to enable Metro Transit to give the city's residents a hands-on preview of the low-floor design several months before completion of the first actual rail cars.
The articulated vehicles use a 70% low-floor design, are 94 ft (29 m) long and can carry 66 seated passengers and 180 standees.
In January 2007, the Metropolitan Council announced that three additional vehicles would be purchased, for a total of 27 LRVs on the line.
Most are intended for the Green Line (initially the Central Corridor route from Minneapolis to Saint Paul) which opened in 2014 and is to be expanded from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie along the Southwest Corridor, though the initial vehicles were used on the Blue Line as part of that route's three-car expansion project.
Options for additional vehicles were exercised about a year later as contingency funding from the Central Corridor project opened up.
[13] The first vehicle, numbered 201, arrived in September 2012 and underwent some initial testing before being officially unveiled at an event at Target Field on October 10.
[14] The first car of this small order arrived in September 2017[15] and the last later in the fall of 2017, bringing the total number of type II LRVs to 64.
Rear-facing cameras connected to video screens in the operator cab replaced rear-view mirrors in the newer design.
[23] Since the completion of three-car station extensions in winter 2010, Metro Transit operates one-, two- and three- car trains on the Blue Line, depending on the time of day and ridership needs.
Many stations on the line were initially built to be capable of serving only one- or two-car trains, as a cost-saving measure; all of the shorter platforms were designed and built with future extension in mind, and currently all stations are capable of serving three-car trains.
The Blue Line's Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF) is located between the Cedar-Riverside and Franklin Avenue stations.
The Green Line's Operations and Maintenance Facility is located on the site of the former Diamond Products building in Saint Paul's Lowertown neighborhood, just east of the Union Depot station.
The Northstar commuter rail line's first five locomotives are the MP36PH-3C, manufactured by MotivePower in Boise, Idaho at a total cost of $13,823,000.
