Amtrak boxcars

I saw a bunch of Amtrak boxcars in the AMTK 71000 series today. I was surprised to see Amtrak boxcars. About half were filthy. I am guessing they had been in storage somewhere and where heading to delivery to a new owner. They were sitting in a UP yard, on a line that does not normally have Amtrak trains.

Half of these cars (100 of them) were sold to CarMath a couple of years ago; I see them all the time (CMHX, same numbers). I’ll keep an eye out for these, should they come around.

I’m guessing that you’re seeing Amtrak Materials Handling Cars. Another word for boxcar.

Amtrak entered the express business in the nineties, and from all accounts did quite well.

When they exited the business, the cars became surplus and were stored.

Wrong!

I’ll second that “Wrong!”.

I was working for Thrall Car Manufacturing when we built some of these cars for Amtrak. We were the low bidder and we were charging around $370,000 for each boxcar.

No one could pay $370,000 for a boxcar and expect to make money with the thing. The ownership costs will eat you alive at $370,000/car. These things required electrical systems. No other boxcar has an electrical system. We had to subcontract the electrical work because nobody in house could do electrical work - freight railcars don’t have electrical systems. Special braking systems were required. Thrall put 'em in and charged for doing so. It went on and on up to $370,000/car.

I won’t name the guy who sold this stupid idea to Amtrak, but I know who he is. If I ever get my business going I want to hire him as a salesman. If he could sell the idea that Amtrak could make money hauling freight in $370,000 boxcars, he can sell anything.

While traveling through Santa Maria,CA in June of this year I saw enough of the Amtk boxcars that you couldn’t count them all while driving. They were being stored on the Santa Maria Railroad.

I never knew Amtrak had any boxcars. Never saw any and this is news to me

Greyhounds:-

Years ago I saw plenty of boxcars being hauled on the rear end of Amtrak nos. 3 & 4 (Southwestern Chief) and 5 & 6 (California Zephyr). These cars were exactly that: boxcars. They had no electrical connections, no signal line, and the only markers they carried were an E.O.T. device mounted on the trailing knuckle. Design-wise they didn’t look that much different than any other ordinary boxcar owned by any Class 1 carrier.

Now I’ve also seen a few mechanical refrigerator cars (reefers) painted in the Amtrak color scheme and carrying Amtrak reporting marks. I seem to r

The Thrall MHCs, I believe, carried four-digit numbers (1400 and 1500 series, IIRC). The cars Eric saw (and I alluded to) were purpose-built box cars for express service, and were numbered in series 71000-71199. They had a larger cubic capacity than the MHC cars and were not nearly that expensive (nor did they cause the operational problems).

These cars (at least the CMHX-relettered cars I’ve seen) were in various incarnations of a paint scheme compatible with Amtrak passenger equipment. Amtrak also had some box cars that they bought secondhand (they had SP ancestry; they’d been painted for “Golden West Service” when Amtrak bought them). These were repainted dark green, and lettered “Amtrak Railway Express” (or something close to that).

The CMHX cars that I see regularly are now in service handling bagged flour. Don’t know where they originate (I’m guessing somewhere in Kansas), but we send them east on NS or CSX.

The extremely short answer to the mystery of the boxcars is that through the 1990’s Amtrak was aggresively trying to develop LCL/Parcel business using both the “Material Handling Cars” and Roadrailers. Amtrak wound up butting heads with the Class 1 Freight carriers whose track it operates on who considered the service(with justification, IMHO) unfair competition.

Still I have some good pictures of the Lakeshore Limited on the Boston & Albany(CONRAIL/CSX Boston line) with boxcars outneumbering passenger cars…

For refers you are thinking of the 74xxxxx series refer boxcars Amtrak purchased and then leased to Expresstrak to move produce from the west coast to the east. I know of a program from Washington state called Washington Fruit Express that ran for awhile before getting caught up in Amtrak’s troubles. Now UP has taken over this kind of service. With trains from Wallula WA to NY.

I remember the normal box cars Amtrak had as well. These were staged at their yard tracks by Safeco field and then brought up and connected on the end of Empire Builder out of Seattle. After they died Amtrak tried Roadrailers. Same story, assemble the group in their yard area and then shove it up to the end of the Empire Builder. Suppose they had to break these off at Spokane so they could put the Portland section of the train in their space and then connect to the end of that car set.