NICTD Getting Highliners?

The bathroom thing got me too, when I was a carman I asked why there's water fills on both sides of the cars when we always only used the north side. Then they told me about the wye-ing.

are the brakes air controlled between cars?

should it come to coupling up one set can freewheel.

like a trailer.

really, its not a good idea they wont be compatible.

They'll (likely) be compatible with the new Highliners. Even though the South Shore doesn't cycle through equipment as fast as Metra does and the current single-level fleet will likely be retained for some time, they'd be stupid to base a new order off of a propulsion system that was state of the art in the early 1980s.

yeh, at the moment I am thinking in terms of just having to move cars in case of problems that they would be coupleable.

obviously today technically theres new ways to do MUing.

The new cars can be scheduled for peak high traffic times and adding trains helps.

byte wrote:they'd be stupid to base a new order off of a propulsion system that was state of the art in the early 1980s.

Well, the 100 series employs modern AC propulsion and is still compatible with the earlier cars. The issue isn't so much that the new Metra cars have radically different control systems, but rather that they were simply not designed with backward compatibility in mind, and it's cheaper to build more of the same than to engineer something different for the NICTD versions.

Don't all rebuilt MU's get the AC drive package? I'm pretty sure they all make that whine characteristic to inverters.

I should have stated that more clearly. You're correct, all NICTD's rebuilt cars now have AC propulsion. Only the 100's were designed and built with it, though, and they were compatible with the DC cars.