Superliner Equipment Status

Officer (Captain?) West Point, of the 108 cars noted by Col. Perkowski, the answer is NONE. They have been stricken from the roster.

Now if there are an ADDITIONAL 100 or so cars, I guess that is an "it depends". Some just might only need the periodic brake system maintenance (COTS) and other similar repairs that are awaiting parts and/or staff to repair them.

But with these fleets now so old, there may no longer be commercial sources available. That means Amtrak would need to fabricate those parts, and the "old heads" with the expertise to do so have simply "checked out", and there are no "heads out on the street" available to replace them.

ExCon90 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:44 pm That would mean running two trains, but not for the price of one. You'd need to be fairly confident that ridership would grow to fill any additional capacity and that the host railroad would graciously accede to allotting track space for a second section.

It takes 2-3 hours to completely unload that train, and the Sanford station is already too short to platform the train as it is (they split it in two and platform it at two tracks to avoid blocking the crossing their passengers need to use to leave). I'm pretty certain that running a second section would require building new station complexes to handle that.

I was thinking more about conventional LD trains, where increased frequency should result in increased ridership, using existing stations and perhaps achieving better equipment utilization -- always subject to other drawbacks previously discussed. The AT is admittedly in a class by itself.

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 7:04 am What is the issue here? Getting wheelchairs up/down? Or getting them from car to car once they're at the upper level?

Getting people into the train doesn't necessarily have to be a design constraint because there's existing alternatives to a car-mounted lift (e.g. the crank-o-matics or a fixed ramp with gangplank). If you can traverse between cars, having a high-level boarding position and traps provides a no-tech solution...

Allowing the mobility impaired the ability to use all of the train's services is something the current trains fail at. It's not just lifts up/down but also vestibule and aisle access forward and aft.

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 7:04 am Getting them from lower to upper, or even to high-block, just means taking a lift up the stairs. If that means designing the car around the stairs, so be it.

Lifts break down in proportion to use, and having to use them regularly while the train is in motion generates far more opportunities for a mechanical failure plus wear & tear than a lift that's only used when the train is stationary.

The opportunity for a service failure also goes down if you don't need them to move around. Imagine being a paying customer on a cruise ship and being limited your stateroom and the hallway for the bulk of your cruise... You can't get to the dining room. You can't go out on deck. You can't drop into lounge for a drink or to see a show.

That's essentially the wheelchair bound experience on a Superliner... Why perpetuate that nonsense?

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 7:04 am Getting them from car to car due to track wobble is a track issue, not a car design issue, and is out of scope.

Nah, you can't just "out of scope" your way out of movement between cars. Wobble is a safety issue for anyone moving between cars. It's not nearly as unsafe on a single level car.

eolesen wrote:Wobble is a safety issue for anyone moving between cars. It's not nearly as unsafe on a single level car.

Very true. Superliners have that ship-like roll if the track is at all bad. The upper floor must be three or four times as far from the coupler (the axis that two cars rotate around relative to each other) as in a single-level car, with three or four times as much possible side-to-side movement.

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 10:09 pm

eolesen wrote:Wobble is a safety issue for anyone moving between cars. It's not nearly as unsafe on a single level car.

Very true. Superliners have that ship-like roll if the track is at all bad. The upper floor must be three or four times as far from the coupler (the axis that two cars rotate around relative to each other) as in a single-level car, with three or four times as much possible side-to-side movement.

But as said, such wobble is caused by bad track, and is thus a track issue. Nothing much you can do to help that on a bi-level and a upper-floor crossing (connected solid corridor guard or wider entrance/exit), and a low-block crossing would require redesigning everything including coupling and bogies/trucks.

eolesen wrote: Getting people into the train doesn't necessarily have to be a design constraint because there's existing alternatives to a car-mounted lift (e.g. the crank-o-matics or a fixed ramp with gangplank). If you can traverse between cars, having a high-level boarding position and traps provides a no-tech solution...

Allowing the mobility impaired the ability to use all of the train's services is something the current trains fail at. It's not just lifts up/down but also vestibule and aisle access forward and aft.
...
Lifts break down in proportion to use, and having to use them regularly while the train is in motion generates far more opportunities for a mechanical failure plus wear & tear than a lift that's only used when the train is stationary.

The opportunity for a service failure also goes down if you don't need them to move around. Imagine being a paying customer on a cruise ship and being limited your stateroom and the hallway for the bulk of your cruise... You can't get to the dining room. You can't go out on deck. You can't drop into lounge for a drink or to see a show.

That's essentially the wheelchair bound experience on a Superliner... Why perpetuate that nonsense?

Lets stop using the Superliner as a base of our arguments here if we're talking replacements. We know it's "bare minimum effort" for wheelchairs, and damn hard for otherwise mobility impaired.

A proper bi-level design would force wheelchair and mobility-impaired to be placed on the upper level (design enforces policy/operations). Any internal lifts would be used for wheelchairs to get to the upper-level and can be locked down, mitigating any use-in-motion issues.

There is one question, though: How much of a difference between high-block and upper-level are we talking about here? We got "crank-o-matics" for high-block, yes. How much further do we have to go?

west point wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 4:57 pm Then of course we have the El Capatin cars including the Pacific Parlour cars.

The ATSF Hi Levels were part of the 1971 buy. While they were HEP converted and ran with Superliners, they never were a part of that fleet. Save the Kachina Lounges, they were retired by 2003. The BNSF Topeka shops could restore them for service, but Amtrak would pay a pretty penny to repurchase and shop them.

John_Perkowski wrote: ↑Fri Jul 15, 2022 1:52 pm 479 Superliners were bought in the two orders. 371 remain on the books. How many are at Beech Grove awaiting lawsuits or in repair for return to service, I don’t know. More later, time for me to get ready for work.

I think that 371 number may be a bit suspect. Some of the Superliners have been moved into the California fleet, so that might cause a discrepancy.

[updated 8pm]
The FY22-27 funding request appendixes have some really great detail available...
https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/proj ... Y22-27.pdf

It lists 390 active and 62 inactive Superliners, for a total of 452 cars still around.

62 inactives is around 16% of the fleet in either a repair backlog or a state that's damaged beyond repair but not yet scrapped. For the government dependent? Probably not bad.

What's somewhat impressive is that on a life cycle basis, only 5.5% of the Superliners purchased are off the roster, presumably scrapped beyond repair or sold in the 2019 auction.

Also interesting is that 47 of the S-1's are still under lease. That might explain a few that are in storage or not yet scrapped. The owning banks might not want them scrapped (think Phillip Morris with the Hippos).

NTSB’s investigation is ongoing. Future investigative activity will focus on highway railroad grade crossing design specifications, railcar design, survival factors, and passenger railcar crashworthiness.

The above is captioned from the NTSB Preliminary regarding Mendon. I would fully expect the Final on Clarendon Hills will address same, as the revenue passenger fatality was apparently ejected through an oversized evacuation window of a METRA Gallery car.

Best accept if the Sightseers are withdrawn systemwide; and that Amtrak, or a sponsoring Local agency, no longer will order ay bi-level equipment for any service.

Gilbert B Norman wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 9:22 am The above is captioned from the NTSB Preliminary regarding Mendon. I would fully expect the Final on Clarendon Hills will address same, as the revenue passenger fatality was apparently ejected through an oversized evacuation window of a METRA Gallery car.

Best accept if the Sightseers are withdrawn systemwide; and that Amtrak, or a sponsoring Local agency, no longer will order ay bi-level equipment for any service.

Lets add some more context here, as the Sightseers are not the same as Metra's Gallery cars. From Railway Age's reporting of the Mendon accident (emphasis mine):

The (NTSB) is looking at crashworthiness, however. “Lives were lost on the train so we’re looking at survive-ability,” she said. “We’re looking at seating configurations; some of the seats move and rotate. … We’ve made recommendations on this in the DuPont, Washington, accident that we investigated involving an Amtrak train, where the seats weren’t locked and the seats swiveled—that has an impact on survive-ability. We’re also looking at lighting, handles, windows, doors. On the windows, we’re going to look at ejection or popping of the windows. We can say there were no passenger ejections in this accident, but when a window is ejected, and the train is on its side, and sliding on its side, ballast, gravel is coming into the train, into that train car, and that has an impact. So we’ve had recommendations on windows popping out or popping in for decades, so that’s something we’re going to look at as part of this investigation. Now I’m really happy that FRA had Volpe out here, which does a lot of its research and engineering also on passenger windows, so they were looking at that too as we were going through the railcars, which was really helpful. Again, our goal is to make sure that people can walk away if there is an accident.”

The question here is if those Sightliners follow NTSB's recommendations on the windows, something NTSB would have to confirm. Metra's Gallery cars, as you said, had an escape door that popped open and ejected passengers. You can be sure they didn't follow the recommendations.

I think we can agree, there's going to be a radical redesign of bi-level long-distance cars. I really doubt we'll see the end of them.

There's no "escape door" on the Metra gallery cars. The windows are almost identical in form and function to the Sightseers.

What presumably happened was either the window popped its seal when the ejected passenger's body struck it, **or** flexing of the carbody after impact caused the seal to fail and the passenger's body was able to continue thru the opening instead of being restrained inside the car.

49 CFR 238 requires that a set number of sideways facing windows have seals that are removeable in an emergency. That's not just a NTSB recommendation. An unobstructed opening with minimum dimensions of 21 inches horizontally by 28 inches vertically is required by law.

The problem is there's now a series of accidents where those seals may have resulted in the windows failing to protect occupants.

I'll speculate that the seats, at least in the METRA 80XX Control Cars, will be removed around the evacuation panes. The smaller evacuation panes on the ex-BN 7XX cars, who knows.

It's really a non-issue if such comes to pass; METRA has lost half their business - and it's never coming back.

Meanwhile, back at Mendon, I still think "the Amtrak way" will simply be to withdraw the 330XX Sightseers from revenue service; problem solved!!!

But hard as it may be, let us wait to see what the Board has to say in final about both incidents.

Are you suggesting that if one of the windows popped out in a sleeper or coach and led to injury or death (I haven't seen any notes on where the other two passengers who died were or what caused other injuries) that all sleeper or coach services should be ceased?

If there's a pattern of injuries or fatalities, the NTSB has an obligation to pull that thread to see if there's a bigger issue or future risk.

This is how the new crush standards came about. You can only predict so much in a lab environment or on paper, but after you have a few real-world examples to look at, changes sometimes have to happen.

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Or, Amtrak could do more of the kind of convertible (non-room) seating that we're seeing on premium sleeper bus services.

Sometimes that's a coffin-shaped bed
(as we saw on California's LA-SF Cabin)

Sometimes that's a two-seats-convert bed (now serving WAS-NAS)
https://news.yahoo.com/traveled-luxury- ... 00172.html