A Daily News reporter, whose butt felt as if it was riding directly on the rails, asked him what he meant. We were riding on the backup air brakes, he said. The primary brakes - well, you could smell their demise.
The next night, when the same thing happened, the reporter remembered, as if recalling a dream, that sun-splashed October day last year when SEPTA took journalists and rail buffs on the Silverliner V's maiden voyage - a very short excursion from Suburban Station to Cynwyd and back.
The air that day was heavy with new railcar smell emanating from the plush two-passenger blue seats - eliminating the old-school three-passenger seats with their monkey-in-the-middle torture squeeze. The ride was seductively smooth.
So a year later, this reporter, hurtling through the second consecutive night on a burnt-rubber Silverliner II, screamed within his aching head: "Was that 2010 ride on the Silverliner V an opium dream? If Silverliner Vs are real, where the hell are they? And if they're in service, why do I keep catching Sciaticaliners instead?"
There are 43 Silverliner Vs now in service - running as eight three-to-six-car trains on various lines, said Luther Diggs, SEPTA's assistant general manager of operations. An additional 11 cars are being safety-tested. SEPTA said it expects to have 66 Silverliner V's in service by March and six new ones per month after that.
But until all 120 Silverliner V's are out of Hyundai Rotem USA's South Philly plant and on the tracks, the transit agency's 73 Silverliner IIs and IIIs, which have been running since the Beatles were hot young things, will continue to harass heinies all over the Delaware Valley.
"I know, I know," Diggs said empathetically. "The ones with those flat seats? They break my butt, too."
