Amfleet Refresh

So this seems to imply that there won't be any new passenger cars ordered? I believe Amtrak has a design already, but not the money to procure.

Is there any concern about continuing to run these - in terms of structural integrity? They're obviously good cars that have served well for so long, but were built to older standards.

James, even if the A-III's are ordered during the Trump administration, it will be ten years until any are in revenue service. Dealing with a bureaucracy whose favorite sport is "Whose on First" and with contractors such as CAF and Nippon to deal with, the Budd model of "take 'em.or leave 'em" simply belongs to another day.

A rebuilding plan for "the Army you have" had best be in place. Amtrak in the Corridor is a premium transportation product. You cannot offer such with equipment resembling a Fung Wah bus.

Nothing implied. It's an outright fact that there is no order at this time for new single level fleet cars.

Even if there were, as Mr. Norman rightly points out, it would be years before they show up.
So, take your current product and make it better.

The East Coast procurement is nearly 600 cars, with Amfleet II-replacements/LD's expected to be sequenced first, NE Regional/nat'l fleet Amfleet I replacements second, and the statie options last. So if you're a regular Empire or Keystone rider you're not going to see the new NYSDOT & PennDOT cars until 500 Brightline-or-whatever cars into the deliveries. So even if the RFP comes as soon as FY18-19 and is nothing more than a big wet kiss to Siemens to fire the Brightline assembly line up ASAP with nothing more than a handful of PRIAA-spec design deviations from the existing AAF cars...and they start churning them out fast and drama-free...it's still going to take a solid 4-5 years for the 600th car to get accepted into service and the last Amfleet I to be pulled from all-day service into strictly reserves. The test line alone, being dependent on internal staff/power/time slots can only churn so fast through burn-in and acceptance no matter how fast the factory can stuff the yards full of new cars. The pace has to be spread out over years as a practicality even for the off-shelviest of off-shelf product when there's that huge a number of units on-order. Minimum 4-5 years on top of the requisite 2 years of paper-pushing with RFP + bid + design mod/misc. project mgt. overhead...even if they started tomorrow.

The old AmCan livery would've been in pretty dire condition if tasked with persisting a bare minimum of 7 more years...even if the most-obvious bidder got to make their most-obvious bid tomorrow. $16M over 400 cars is chump change for keeping up customer-service appearances when that timetable can't bureaucratically be shortened. Tarting up the interiors to cover that gap era was going to be necessary whether it was proactive like this refresh, or just a bunch of band-aids to keep the seat cushions from disintegrating below your derriere before 2025. This action is non-optional even if a mega-procurement is right around the corner.

And even that timeline gets collectively pushed back if the Midwest/CA coalition accepts 130 Siemens single-level cars in lieu of their bilevels. There will be Amfleets rolling in Amtrak passenger service for two more decades, so better to make them over now.

JamesRR wrote:So this seems to imply that there won't be any new passenger cars ordered? I believe Amtrak has a design already, but not the money to procure.

Actually I took it the other way. It's a quick and inexpensive program that will refresh the existing fleet from now until the expected end of its lifecycle. This is exactly the kind of decision that one would expect in advance of a major multi-year procurement that is expected to take about 5-10 years to complete.

Personally I think its genius.

Gilbert B Norman wrote: ... even if the A-III's are ordered during the [this] administration, it will be [...] years until any are in revenue service.

A rebuilding plan for "the Army you have" had best be in place.

Anderson had conversations before being hired. Next thing you know Moorman is talking about airlines using 20-year-old planes. Keep them fresh inside and passengers never feel like they are on an "old" plane.

So "refresh" the existing coaches.

It's also a great political move. Right now Congress couldn't vote Billions to fund even one, much less two, multi-hundred-car orders for new equipment if it tried. Maybe after the next election, maybe not, but for sure not in the current mess. And "refreshing" sounds very thrifty, so Congress will like that.

Meanwhile, by year end, the big and biggish Stimulus projects come online -- the Cascades 15 minutes faster with two more daily frequencies; the hour cut from Lincoln Service runs St Louis-CHI; good time chopped from the Wolverines Kalamazoo-Dearborn (aka CHI-Detroit-Pontiac); faster times on the Carolinian and Piedmont, with another frequency soon and yet another coming soonish on the Piedmont; better times New Haven-Springfield Shuttles, Regionals, and the Vermonter; less congestion around Albany greatly improving OTP and probably speeding up the timetables as padding is reduced for the Empire South corridor, the Empire West and Maple Leaf (and Lake Shore Ltd) corridor, the Ethan Allen, and the Adirondack.

Together the Stimulus upgrades will add a million or so riders to Amtrak's total. Growing ridership and revenue is a strong argument to make to Congress for investing in more and better trains.

By the time we get a new Congress in January 2019, Amtrak should have enuff Viewliner IIs to make an impact on the net results of the Eastern trains. (And another "refresh", for the Viewliner Is, will need funding.)

Within the term of the Congress taking office in January 2021, Amtrak should be receiving Avelias to replace the Acelas, giving the NEC's premier service a 40% capacity increase and more than a "refresh". And with any luck, the Midwest will be getting new cars from Siemens, freeing up 80 or 90 Horizon cars to assign to warmer corridors.

So maybe Amtrak can get funding authorized to replace the single-level fleet in four or five years. Until then, refresh.

Gilbert B Norman wrote:... the Budd model of "take 'em.or leave 'em" simply belongs to another day.

Worth noting Mr. Norman that "take 'em or leave 'em" appears to be pretty close to what is going on with Siemens' single level offering.

I think Amtrak likes the product a lot and they are prepared to sign on the dotted line at the earliest available opportunity.

Does Siemens have the ability to ramp-up production, open a second line, or build different products on the same line? (Amfleet-3 "brightliners" and low-floor single-levels simultaneously)

Siemens are building locomotives (electric or diesel), Brightline cars, and light rail trains at the same factory simultaneously, so I'm pretty sure that could build Amfleet replacements as well. How fast they can do so is the more appropriate question than if they can do so.

Except for those of us that know within a few years of how old each type of Amtrak rolling stock is, the public judges everything from appearances. If it looks nice and new, it must be new. Remember, Amtrak is selling their services, so things must appear reasonably new to appease the customers.

In the past 8-10 years, while talking with fellow passengers, the conversation sometimes comes to how nice the cars are. From Superliner I's to Viewliners to Amfleet I's and II's, most passengers I've spoken to believe the cars they are riding in are less than 5 years old, give or take. Most of them are incredulous when I tell them the Superliner I sleeper we're in is about 35 years old or 40-something for the Amfleet I's. In short, doing a 'refresh' on the cars works wonders with passenger satisfaction and approval.

BandA wrote:Does Siemens have the ability to ramp-up production, open a second line, or build different products on the same line? (Amfleet-3 "brightliners" and low-floor single-levels simultaneously)

Probably. But that's not as important as Amtrak's bandwidth for testing them once they're delivered. You can only juggle so many test trains at one time while yard space is tight with an influx of new stuff coexisting with old in-service stuff. For that reason it's better to have the manufacturer stick to a steady set pace of X deliveries per month they can reliably stick to--no less AND no more--rather than have big, irregular bursts in the deliveries. Hurry-up tactics end up becoming counterproductive if they require more resources to be muscled on the next handoff (i.e. to AMTK for testing) to tame a budding glut. That carefully crafted Fleet Plan v3.1 steps out the procurements in a constant churn for a reason rather than trying to do too much in any one year. There are real consequences to the continuity of that Fleet Plan for CAF blowing its V2 delivery deadlines by what's now projected to be 3 whole years, and for Nippon Sharyo blowing...well, everything.


Things are already getting hectic for Beech Grove with the V2's being so late. The CAF contract was supposed to be pretty much over by the time the main thrust of the Charger deliveries started coming in, and they were hoping for the extra sleepers to be in-service so they could kick off the Viewliner I rebuild program and have that churning along before the Midwest bi-levels started coming in. Now both new and rebuild Viewliner programs are in direct conflict with each other because the diner delays shot the schedule for the supplemental V2 sleepers to hell, and they're now encroaching on the meat of the Charger deliveries that reach a crescendo with Siemens' January target for delivering all 63 currently-ordered units (meaning, a chock-full test train schedule on every corner of the system this Winter+Spring to keep up on acceptances). Inopportune time to have the Beech Grove technician staff divided-and-conquered by still having to play catch-up on way too many V2 diners, sleepers, and bag-dorm acceptances. There's no timetable at all for the Midwest coaches now that N-S crapped the bed and they're back at the drawing board evaluating new vehicles...and whether any of the candidate vehicles can meet the PRIAA accessibility regs (a requirement for salvaging the awarded PRIAA funding). That schedule is now so thoroughly hosed that if you throw a dart at the board--fast delivery of substitute stock, or new vendor attempting a bi-level design do-over, or anything between--it's going to get stuck in the middle of some other gummed-up test line: deliveries on up to 38 more statie Charger options and 150 national Chargers, the V1 rebuilds, possible revisiting and exercising of some/many/all of the 70 unexercised V2 options since the extra LD cars may be needed as a hedge against not being able to replace the ancient Superliner I's for many more years because of the fallout from that bi-level design disaster. And should the East Coast procurement go out, even though that won't be Beech Grove's bag to maintain those flats in-service the sheer size of that ~600 car order means all hands across-system will have to be on-deck pitching in with the testing no matter what else BG is preoccupied with for other regions.



To some degree light livery refreshes like this Am1 update are the only things they can meaningfully do when the very major procurements are blown this far out-of-whack by a couple vendors upsetting the whole Fleet Plan apple cart. It's wholly cosmetic and livery-specific so it can be done quick with minimal downtime and doesn't take any tech staff or test train slots to re-qualify the cars for service post-update, like updating the guts of the cars would've required. The V1 sleeper rebuilds, because they're a full 25-year midlife carbody & systems overhaul in addition to the planned customer-facing livery updates on the amenities, are a much thornier item to slot because they have to be scheduled for a couple months downtime for doing the heavy rebuild and then get the requisite shakedown testing hours on their new systems before re-acceptance into service. Can't sack sleeper availability by yanking in-service units until the V2 supplementals are all in-service to cover the temporary losses, and having to wait for the V2 sleepers to even start the program means that the V1's hit a nasty test line traffic jam (Chargers, Midwest coaches, something else) any which year they're scheduled, and could themselves start vulturing resources from some other future delivery (East Coast coaches, Midwest coaches if given a 5-year redesign extension on the bi-level design + funding, another stopgop Superliner rebuild while the bi design gets sorted, etc.). Pick your poison, because hitting one's delivery pace with consistency matters.

bratkinson wrote:Except for those of us that know within a few years of how old each type of Amtrak rolling stock is, the public judges everything from appearances. If it looks nice and new, it must be new. Remember, Amtrak is selling their services, so things must appear reasonably new to appease the customers.

In the past 8-10 years, while talking with fellow passengers, the conversation sometimes comes to how nice the cars are. From Superliner I's to Viewliners to Amfleet I's and II's, most passengers I've spoken to believe the cars they are riding in are less than 5 years old, give or take. Most of them are incredulous when I tell them the Superliner I sleeper we're in is about 35 years old or 40-something for the Amfleet I's. In short, doing a 'refresh' on the cars works wonders with passenger satisfaction and approval.

Even with this, I think more and more folks are going to start asking, "Why can't we get a train to MY city" or "more trains to X". Forget the need for replacement (which is real), the need for expansion is there too!

And that's a good thing.

I completely agree. I think Lynchburg and Roanoke has caught the attention of a lot of officials and planners in the South who previously felt that Amtrak service was totally unattainable. The Amfleet Refresh program will only make the "withouts" ever more envious.

Woody wrote:Anderson had conversations before being hired. Next thing you know Moorman is talking about airlines using 20-year-old planes. Keep them fresh inside and passengers never feel like they are on an "old" plane.

Woody does have a point here. With Anderson at the controls, Delta chose to redo their short-intermediate range fleet with used variants of the 50 y/o DC-9 (MD-80, B-717 whatever).

The trade off was the gas pump v. capital costs; Delta chose the former. While Amtrak is at the mercy of Col. Perkowski's 218+51+1, Delta was not and made a private sector business decision.

I can't think of when I last flew Delta; they do not hub at O'Hare (haven't the vaguest where their gates are) and my flying this year will only be four round trips. I can only assume that their cabins don't look like something out of "Flight of the Phoenix", that the Attendants are not confronted "coffee makers that don't", and that the Officers are not flying with NAVAIDS from Lindy's day ("sorry folks about that turbulence").