Nearly six years and two subway fires later, New York City Transit has no timetable for implementing its own recommendations to install fire safety equipment in its antiquated control rooms, transit officials said yesterday.

Transit officials said plans are in the works to install equipment such as smoke alarms and heat detectors in the remaining 40 rooms of 1930s vintage, like the one gutted by a fire at the Chambers Street station January 23. But they could not say when they would be installed.

“At this current moment I can’t tell you how soon those 40 are going to be done,” a senior vice president at the department of subways, Michael Lombardi, said at a City Council hearing on the fire below Chambers Street. “We’re working on a plan. We are certainly going to expedite this.”

After a 1999 electrical fire at a relay room at the Bergen Street subway station, the transit agency’s office of system safety recommended in a report, based on an internal investigation, that engineers install “power disconnects” that would enable firefighters to shut off electricity when responding to an electrical fire, as well as make use of smoke-detection equipment that could be monitored at a central location, and fire-retardant cables. Equipment in the unattended relay rooms control the signals and switches that allow trains to flow safely along the tracks.

The president of New York City Transit, Lawrence Reuter, said last week that had such devices been installed, the damage to the control room at the Chambers Street station would have been less severe, service disruptions for the 580,000 passengers who ride the A and C trains less protracted, and repair costs – projected to be as much as $60 million – would have been minimized.

The fire at the Chambers Street station, which apparently began in a shopping cart parked alongside the wall in the tunnel north of the platform, quickly destroyed the relay room, because the cables and wires were so old and flammable that they acted as fuses, channeling the blaze into the room.

In the 1960s, the agency began updating the 200 relay rooms throughout the subway system. In 1982, with the first infusion of funds from the capital budget, that program began in earnest. So far, officials said, 158 rooms have been completely refurbished, at a cost of $2.4 billion, with equipment that makes them less susceptible to fire.

Neither Mr. Lombardi nor the subways’ chief of operations planning, Keith Hom, would say at the hearing when the remaining 40 relay rooms would be refurbished. The Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s proposed capital plan for 2005 through 2009 has allocated money to refurbish 12 rooms during that time, Mr. Lombardi said.

Mr. Lombardi, along with Mr. Hom, faced heavy criticism from members of the council’s transportation committee. His response, along with Mr. Hom’s, who said “it’s too early too tell right now” how quickly the last 40 relay rooms would be protected against fire, solicited a sharp rebuke from the chairman of the transportation committee, John Liu, a Democrat of Queens.

“This is exactly the kind of non-accountability that we will no longer tolerate from the MTA and New York City Transit,” Mr. Liu said. “You’re sitting there – you are the top two people in charge of running the subways – and you can’t tell us when the remaining relay rooms are going to be protected against a fire when the report, your own report from six years ago, said that all the 198 stations need to be fortified against fire, among other recommendations. You can’t tell us when the remaining 40 are going to be protected.”

Mr. Hom said answers to that question would be available in the coming months. Mr. Reuter, who apologized last week for misleading the public into believing the fire would disrupt service for as long as five years, did not attend the hearing. His absence drew another rebuke from the council members, who peppered transit officials with questions for nearly 90 minutes. Mr. Reuter later said it would take as long as five years to refurbish completely the Chambers Street relay control room with fire-retardant cables and with wires and breakers that would disconnect electricity in case of a fire.

Transit officials, who have worked around the clock to create a makeshift signal system, restored 80% of peak service to the A and C lines Wednesday. The repair, made by putting in place a temporary signal system, was months ahead of schedule. Full service will return in between three and six months, Mr. Lombardi said.

The fire, however, alerted many to the vulnerability of the system to mishap or sabotage. Yesterday, Mr. Lombardi said the Chambers Street relay room was one of “the least critical” in the system, since it controls only two subway lines along 4,000 feet of relatively straight track. He said more critical relay rooms, which contain switches that control numerous lines and tracks, are in Queens and mid-Manhattan.

In March 2003, the MTA said it would spend $591 million to safeguard the subway system against possible terrorist attacks. Council members said they had little faith in the transit agency’s ability to safeguard against terror when its own recommendations to protect against fire were not followed. They will ask at future hearings for a more thorough accounting of how that money has been spent.