  Electric railways are fast, clean, and safe, but complex to operate and
maintain. Electric traction infrastructure includes signal power and feeder
lines that remain live during isolations and complicate maintenance processes.
Stakeholders involved in power outage planning include contractors, linemen,
groundmen, power directors, dispatchers, conductor-flag, and support personnel.
Weekly planning processes for track time requires many contingencies due to
large number of moving parts and factors not known in advance, like personnel
availability. Electrical and mechanical environments faced by crews working in
adjacent areas may be entirely different and require a "bespoke" circuit
configuration to de-energize catenary, which must be planned meticulously.
Although recent automation improved real-time "plate order" communications
between power directors and dispatchers, each outage still requires many manual
switching operations. Net impact of this isolation process reduces available
construction work windows nightly from a nominal 7 hours to 2 hrs 39 mins. We
recommend joint design of electrical and civil infrastructure, cross-training
between disciplines, limiting maximum number of concurrent outages, formal
study of maintenance outage capacity, and further automation in power
switching.
