The president of New York City Transit apologized yesterday for misleading riders when he said Sunday’s subway fire would cripple A and C train service for as long as five years.

Lawrence Reuter said he was initially referring to the time it would take to completely refurbish the underground room that once housed the relays, wires, and switches needed to control the safe flow of trains. Stop-gap repairs will allow full rush-hour service on the A line to be restored within nine months, at which time the C train, which has been canceled, will also return to service.

The prospect of years of delays had enraged riders.

“I must have misspoken or didn’t clarify myself very well, and for that I’m sorry,” Mr. Reuter said yesterday during the monthly board meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that oversees New York City Transit.

At the meeting, the subway fire took center stage. The board’s chairman, Peter Kalikow, appointed a task force to investigate major issues raised by the fire, which revealed that critical but extremely antiquated equipment was highly susceptible to mishap. That probe will be one of several.

Besides the continuing investigations into the cause of the fire by the police and fire departments, the City Council’s transportation committee has scheduled a hearing on the matter for Thursday.

Mr. Kalikow appointed an engineering consultant, Carter & Burgess, a firm the MTA has used for its capital programs, to head the independent task force, which is to investigate how to make the subway system less vulnerable.

“They will not be influenced by what’s happening internally and will be looking at it with a new face,” Mr. Kalikow said. “The more sunlight, the better things are.”

For now, much of the investigation into the cause of the fire remains unknown. Officials first suspected that a homeless man may have started the blaze by lighting a fire in a shopping cart to warm up in a tunnel just off the northern end of the platform.

Mr. Reuter discounted speculation that transit workers, who use similar upright shopping carts, may be to blame. “We don’t know for a fact, but initial reports showed that it was not Transit Authority workers,” Mr. Reuter said.The reports, he said, came from investigators at the scene.

The relay room, which housed a cobbled-together system of wires and circuits made from 1930s-era materials, had no heat-detecting device or system that, unlike newer rooms, would cause electricity flowing through the equipment to shut down. Also, the older wires, unlike newer wiring, were not made with fire-retardant materials designed to make a fire smolder.

It was only when motormen from two subway trains passed through the station, at 1:59 p.m. Sunday, that the debris burning in a shopping cart was spotted. Within 15 minutes, scores of firefighters arrived, but before they could put out the blaze they had to request that the electricity be shut off. By then, the fire had spread to the maze of cables inside the locked room, and the damage – which officials said will cost as much as $60 million to repair – had been done.

There remain 41 other antiquated relay rooms that contain the same kind of highly flammable web of wires and cables that so quickly gutted the room at the Chambers Street subway station.

Since 1982, when the MTA embarked on its capital-improvement program, 158 of the 200 relay rooms in the subway system have been refurbished. Had the fire occurred at a room that contained fire-retardant wires and heat-detection systems that shut off electricity to the wiring, then the damage would have been less severe and the disruption to service less protracted, Mr. Reuter said.

The new room at Chambers Street, which will take between three and five years to be built, will not be constructed using equipment from the 1930s, since that equipment no longer exists. Mr. Reuter said the already refurbished relay rooms may also be upgraded with fire-suppressant systems, such as misting equipment that can tamp fires without flooding the room.

Mr. Kalikow said he plans installation of surveillance equipment in sensitive areas. The MTA chairman also said the weekend fire was covered by insurance, though a spokesman, Tom Kelly, said the MTA expects to get back whatever the current monetary value of the system is – and, given its age, that may be little.

The MTA is insured though a state entity, the First Mutual Transportation Assurance Company, which was created in 1998 and is managed by a firm called Willis Coroon. A spokesman for Willis Coroon, Dan Prince, would not comment on how much the value of the 1930s-era relay room would be.

According to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, each policy differs but the cost of insuring such antiquated equipment for its replacement value might have been prohibitive. Meanwhile, transit officials said they will increase the number of B trains for the Upper West Side.