Poor "Pennsylvania"

jfrey40535 wrote:Nostalsia is great, but commuters don't really appreciate it. When I'm headed to work at 7am and have a 1 hour train ride from CC to WIL, I don't really care about where the cars used to run, I just want an extra hour of sleep, and when I'm on a SLII, I know I'm not getting it.

That is an inherent problem with electric rail cars. The best of them have been so well built, and so durable, that they are kept in service long after their attractiveness as transportation has ended. This was the problem with the MP-54's as early as the 1950's. These cars were incredibly durable, but by the 50's had become horrible from the perspective of the average commuting rider. When some of them were transferred to Baltimore in the 1970's to operate on what has become MARC's Penn Line, the outcry was almost instantaneous. Though I haven't ridden them, I suspect that the Silverliner II's now have the same problem.

But its not like the rest of the car is that bad. Its air conditioned, the heat works. Sometimes the lack of a P/A is a good thing, like when you sit all the way at the other end of the car so you don't have to hear the conductor shout.

All these things need are some comfortable seats to make them attractive for commuters. Although I suspect SEPTA would like to get rid of them since all the door must be manually opened. Why not redo the interiors on these guys like they did to the SLIV's?

As a commuter who has been in the Silverliner II's a few times, I never did like the thinly-padded benches in those cars. I definitely prefer the newer cars with newer seating. The Bombardier coaches are very nice.

There's also a whole bunch of features that you get with a completely new car, such as AC traction with electronic control, and a greater number of doors, with automatic operation, for faster loading. At a certain point, the cost of engineering and retrofitting fixes to the old cars is not worth it compared to a new car.

Lucius Kwok wrote: There's also a whole bunch of features that you get with a completely new car, such as AC traction with electronic control, and a greater number of doors, with automatic operation, for faster loading. At a certain point, the cost of engineering and retrofitting fixes to the old cars is not worth it compared to a new car.

This is very true, however, history, particularly in Philadelphia, tells us that traction companies and railroads often will run a car until it can't be run any longer. Philadelphia's private streetcar operators ( PRT & PTC) were known for running cars long after they had outlived their public acceptance. ( It was once said that once Philadelphia was finished with a car, it was not good for anything but the scrap heap.) This was true of the Nearside cars, some of which were run for almost 50 years before they were scrapped. Even the P&W's Brill Bullets, with their 60 plus years service life, had, by the time they were withdrawn from service, far exceeded the period during which they were attractive to anyone but railfans. They were un air-conditioned and very rough riding---all of which, in addition to the sound of their traction motors at high speeds, made them a railfan's dream, but a commuter's nightmare.--- And I say this even though they are, by far, my favorite electric rail vehicles.

In the early 80's I took a trolley-museum vacation in New England. While I was riding a post-WW2 car at Branford, one of the employees asked me what I thought of being on such "old" equipment.

Then I told him I rode the Bullets every day....

I like SLIIs also for the fast running that someone mentioned earlier. It does seem like they have more get-up-n-go than some of the SLIV's. I don't ride the RRD more than 2x a month, though, so I might have a different opinion if it were a daily event. I do think that the suspension is better on the older cars - something I noticed on the Cape May Seashore Lines' RDC also - maybe designed to be more forgiving on deferred-maintenance track? Going thru Newtown Junction at speed can be a real bouncy thrill in a SLIV but I don't seem to notice it as much in the SLII's.