The US Standard Light Rail Vehicle (SLRV) was a light rail vehicle (LRV) built by Boeing Vertol in the 1970s. The Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) promoted it as a standardized vehicle for U.S. cities. Part of a series of defense conversion projects in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the SLRV was seen as both a replacement for older PCC streetcars in many cities and as a catalyst for cities to construct new light rail systems. The US SLRV was marketed as and is popularly known as the Boeing LRV or SLRV, and should not be confused with their prior lunar roving vehicles for NASA.
The SLRV was purchased by the public transportation operators of Boston and San Francisco; in service by 1976, the US SLRV proved to be unreliable and scrapping started as early as 1987, but the SLRV were not completely replaced in both systems until 2007. Although the SLRV itself was not successful due to poor reliability, it did set the general size and configuration for succeeding LRVs in the United States.
History
Origin
The original concept of the SLRV 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; the last PCC had been manufactured in 1952. In 1968, the MBTA in Boston, one operator of PCC streetcars, created a mockup for one end of a proposed "Type 6" streetcar out of wood; the Type 6 program was discontinued after MBTA decided the cost to produce it was too high. Meanwhile, Muni in San Francisco, released a request for proposals in 1971 to purchase 78 new cars, designed by the rail transit engineering firm Louis T. Klauder and Associates (LTK), to replace their aging PCC fleet. The new cars, which Muni called subway-streetcars, were touted as "specially designed for San Francisco, adaptable to both subway and surface conditions and seating more passengers than the present [PCC] streetcars." Muni received two bids in November 1971, with a low bid price of per car from Boeing. Both bids were rejected as being excessively costly because potential builders were forced to recoup development costs over a relatively small number of vehicles.
Düwag had built a prototype as a demonstrator for the Hanover Stadtbahn in 1970 (Hanover car 601 [DE]); in June 1971 MBTA ordered two more prototype "Hanover" cars, to be partially paid using a grant from UMTA. However, under the Nixon administration's "New Economic Policy" introduced that fall, UMTA was not allowed to fund the grant. That policy, codified as "Buy America" in Title IV of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1978, stated that UMTA could not fund any grants exceeding $500,000 for transit vehicles that were produced outside the United States unless an exception was approved by the Secretary of Transportation. Instead, Boston (MBTA) was directed to join with San Francisco (Muni) and Philadelphia (SEPTA) to design a new streetcar that could meet the needs of all three cities.
In response to the failure to procure the Type 6, Duewag, and LTK/Muni streetcars, UMTA organized the BSF (Boston and San Francisco) Committee to design a standardized light rail car to reduce per-unit costs, using the same concept under which the earlier PCC streetcars were designed. The Standard Light Rail Vehicle (SLRV) specification was developed by UMTA based on the 1971 LTK design for Muni in conjunction with potential operators (who were all currently operating PCCs) in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia (SEPTA), Cleveland (Shaker Heights), Pittsburgh (Port Authority), New Jersey, El Paso (City Lines), and Toronto (TTC) as well as industry consultants at Parsons Brinckerhoff and Louis T. Klauder and Associates. At the same time, a flood of defense conversion projects came to fruition as the result of government encouragement to help keep defense suppliers busy as the Vietnam War was coming to an end.