by Tadman
mtuandrew wrote: ↑Fri Dec 13, 2019 12:40 pmI used those very specific examples. The SDP40f was a BS failure in between thousands of successful passenger and freight six axles. Something stinks there and it isn't EMD, who has a very good track record, it's probably the buyer, which has a very bad track record.Tadman wrote: ↑Fri Dec 13, 2019 9:48 am Looking at Amtrak, they run the business just like 1971 and even 1951. The best changes have not been internally innovated, but externally. The F40. The Superliner. The Amfleet. Those came from GM, ATSF, and Budd, sometimes in the ashes of a failed government spec. Now we have Amtrak and Via buying mass amounts of Siemens rolling stock, after Brightline started it all.Funny you use those three examples, because two of them are also exemplar failures of private industry (PRR with the Metroliner, GM-EMD with the SDP40F) that were funded and then bailed out by the Federal government. Also, Budd only came up with the Superliner concept - Amtrak hired P-S to essentially reverse-engineer and produce a new one....
fail like private industry sometimes does (cough IPH cough.)
That buyer and track record includes the Metroliner EMU, which was a disaster from start to finish. It came from Budd, who wrote the book on stainless railcars, and made thousands of good AC and DC EMU cars from 1950 on. The Amfleet was a success and it's accepted wisdom that Budd told Amtrak that Budd would not build another magic experiment fleet, but would use those bodyshells. For further proof, the original Silverliner fleet was 15 years older and lasted 20 years later than the Metroliner, and Chicago and New York are just now retiring Budd subway cars. The M2 was a Budd-GE joint project like the Metroliner, from the same era, and was just recently retired. We're talking differences of 30-40 years here!
These projects were government failures that were fixed by private industry. If the builder was really at fault, would Amtrak have come back for 300+ F40's and 400+ Amfleet? Not likely, and the Bombardier case shows us that.
The new Acela: It's not Aveliable.