[:D] I’ve just received two H0 Walthers Budd 52 seat passenger cars (phases 2 and 3)[:D]
[For use on theoretical west-of-Chicago 1980s].
Now I have a bunch of questions…
One end has the access doors to/from the platform… the diaphragm between cars is open… okay, it’s open when cars are coupled… what about when the car is the last or first in the consist? Is there a built in door or would it have a “plug” fitted? I can’t believe that it would just be left wide open in regular service.
There’s quite a lot of space between the ends and the seating area… what went on in this space please/ Floorplan please? Was this washrooms and/or luggage?
With doors at one end only and all that otherwise occupied space it looks to me like detraining and entraining passengers must have been a slow process. what sort of time was/is allowed for station stops please?
All the seats face one way (what we call “airline” seating). Do they make up the trains so that the seats face forward and/or do they wye the trains at each journey’s end so that everyone gets to point the way they are going… or do you ride facing one way and backwards the other… or do you get pot-luck?
Should the cars have external numbers? (If so… where would I get them please).
I notice that there are brass screws in the car floors above the trucks… are these for installing lighting? If not… what are they for please?
I have two 40 something seat cars that I am planning to run with these (probably behind F40PHs… unless I can magic up a GE beastie)… what other cars would make sense in the consist please. I’m assuming that it is a sort-of long haul commute. Would the consist change on different days or at different timres of day?
Should the windows be clear or shaded/tinted?
Has anyone ridden either of these cars?
Eagerly looking forward to the usual great answers
As far as securing the doors, there are “end gates” that fold up into the ends of the car. The correct Budd gate is available from Train Station Products. I believe that many railroads operated the vestibules forward (I know for a fact the Santa Fe did but am not sure about Amtrak practices). It is an easy detail to add. The correct gates for Budd cars are the “slatted” ones, not the expandable type.
On some passenger cars seats an be turned. I believe this was a feature on Budd cars (anybody know otherwise?). This is a subject matter where Intermountain screwed up with the RTR Santa Fe hi level cars.
The cars did have external numbers and should be available from Microscale, although I thought that Walthers included a decal sheet with the numbers.
As far as the screws, if they are the ones I think they are, they hold the floor, interior, and everything together (I though they are black, but still could be brass). The lighting works using screws from the trucks that make contact with a strip of metal that runs to the roof of the car. That allows for the drop in lighting kits that Walthers makes for these cars.
Tinting would be determined by a few factors, such as what railroad Amtrak recieved the car from, and if there had ever been any replacements. They could be anything from brown, green, or light blue.
1 There is a ‘scissors’ gate that swings across the open vestibule end.
2 There usually are rest rooms & luggage racks near the vestibule end.
3 N/A practive for most ‘streamline’ passenger cars have only one vestibule end. When I worked for the CB&Q in the late 60’s, we had 2 minute stops at smaller on-line towns. Larger cities many times had 15-20 minutes.
4 Most of the coach seats are ‘reversable’ they unlock and can be swung 180 degrees. Older coach seats were of the ‘flop-over’ type.
5 All cars have an external number(reporting marks). Passenger car many times also have a ‘line number’ posted in a window(this is used for seating reservations).
6 These can be used with the Walthers lighting system.
7 Many times the 40 seat cars would be used for ‘long haul’ passesngers(reclining ‘sleeper seats’), and a 52-60 seat cars would run ahead of them for the ‘local’ passesngers.
8 Depends, Amtrak started using Lexan glazing and it has a sort of grey ‘tint’ built-in.
9 I have never ridden a Budd 40 or 52 seat coach, but have ridden on lots of CB&Q dome coaches. Most Amtrak ‘heritage’ equipment that is left is either sleepers or coaches converted to baggage cars. Current Amtrak coaches are either hi-level ‘SuperLiner’ cars, or low level Amfleet cars. The Amfleet I cars have vestibules at both ends and usually have higher seating capacity and run on the corridor routes. The Amfleet II cars have one vestibule and run on long distance trains for the most part.
Heck, there were F40PH’s that never made it to the Ph 3 paint scheme! I am sure there were were a lot of Ph 1 & 2 cars as well. Tfhe Ph 3 paint scheme was introduced in 1979, so a lot of cars would have been in the Ph 1 or 2 paint scheme in 1980.
I am not sure what you mean by a ‘long range’ cummuter’ consist. Amtrak basically does ‘intercity’ passenger trains. Commuter trains were not picked up by Amtrak and are operated by regional transit authorities. The closest Amtrak comes to what you are asaking about are some of the ‘corridor’ trains on the Boston-NYC-Washington route, or maybe some of the ‘Amtrak California’ routes that are sponsored by the State of California. These train use Amfleet I cars or Acela train sets on the East Coast, and usually have some kind of hi-level cars on the West Coast. There is a West Coast corridor between San Diego and LA and another one from the SF bay area to Sacramento.
Phase I paint would probably be very rare by 1980. Phase II was still common in the early 80s.
From what I remember about commuting on the NEC in the mid 90s, the Clockers and Metroliners, were mostly coach only. Some trains carried a cafe car. Only the long distance trains carried baggage or material handleing cars.
The Walthers Budd 52 seat coach is actually a replica of the cars purchased by Seaboard Air Line in the 1940’s primarily for Silver Meteor (New York - St. Petersburg; New York - Miami) service. Walthers has produced this car in its original scheme as well.
Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac R.R. (RF&P) and the Pennsylvania R.R. also purchased this car for use on the SAL trains as the three railroads had a co-op agreement. The SAL cars eventually became Seaboard Coast Line cars, the PRR cars Penn Central and in 1971 all became part of the Amtrak family. Many stayed in Florida service; some were shifted in the great shuffle when Amtrak moved working cars to other parts of the country and retired/scrapped the worn out, too-expensive-to-repair models.
It was common for long distance coaches to have all seats forward. At the end of the line, the train consists were turned on a wye.
The cars rode well; I rode one in the 1960’s on the Seaboard Coast Line.
I bought one of those coaches in Phase II (and a “lounge”, really a parlor) a couple of years ago, and recently I had the chance to buy more cars at good prices, so I now have a slumbercoach, two 10+6 sleepers (that’s 10 roometttes and 6 compartments) and a diner. This is a reasonable facsimile of smaller Amtrak trains of the late 1970s -I still need a baggage of course, I’m using an RPO, which I don’t think ever ran on Amtrak.
Mine are all in Phase I or II, right for my period (I travelled coast to coast, LA to NY via Seattle and the Empire Builder, through Canada to Montreal and down on the Vermonter in 1977).
Some relevant comments from the trip relate to the vestibule. The Empire Builder had four SDP40Fs (two were on their way to EMD to be turned into F40PHs) and we sat at 79 mph for hour after hour. The trailing car was a dome sleeper with a buffet (out of use) under the dome and it had the vestibule trailing. Only sleeping passengers could use the car, so we only had five or six passengers in there. I would sometimes go down to the vestibule and look out over the gate at the track and time the mileposts. I got covered in dust and condensed steam from the heating, so I came to the conclusion that open platform observation cars were not practical. A great experience.
Another point I noticed at Washington Union Station was on some Amfleet cars that the colours had been altered from Phase II to Phase III by the addition of a wider strip of white vinyl over the existing scheme, making the three colours the same width. You could just make out the depression of the original narrow white strip underneath. This could be done fairly easily, and probably accounts for the rapid disappearance of Phase II.
By “Long Distance commute” I mean the sort of thing our 125mph HST’s made possible… towns between an hour and 90 minutes suddenly became dormitory towns for the major cities… mainly London. I guess that I’ll have to get my head round the idea that you probably didn’t do this.
On the issue of coloured/timted glass in the windows… does anyone have a way of doing this please?
Refering back to earlier points about phase 2 or 3 liveries on Amtrak … I have an E8/9 A-B pair on the way. I believe these will be in silver/grey with just the pointless arrow rather than a phase… they’re just going to have had to have “survived” - I really like the P2K E 8/9s… Does anyone know when these locos finally disappeared? Or when the last “pointless arrows” ran?
Dave, Amtrak hung on to some of its E units a while longer after the SDP40fs experienced a rash of derailment problems on certain curves whenever a pair were coupled back to back. But even by then the majority of its E units were being scrapped or traded in by the batches. Fortunately a few winded up in museums, commuter agencies, and historical societies.
Amtrak’s E units started to disappear rapidly in the mid to late 1970s after the F40PH became Amtrak’s primary workhorse.
Being equipped with dual 567 prime movers, the low horespower output (for 1970s standards), and with millions of miles racked up, those graceful E units were very expensive for Amtrak to maintain. Locomotive breakdowns were a common occurence on the LD trains. There’s a photo on this link circa-1977. Scroll down to it: www.railpixs.com/amt2/amt2.html
I do remember seeing one E8 on the Silver Meteor coupled to an SDP40f as late as 1979 in the pointless arrow scheme. Didn’t see anymore after that. Ironically the SDPs were gone within 2 years as well.
In 1980 I took photos of an Amtrak E8 in the Phase II striped scheme. It was sitting in the yard in Sanford, FL apparently awaiting its appointment either with the blow torch or sale to a customer.
I rode in plenty of these, sorry I can’t remember too much about them, BUT, this does bring up a question, it seems these cars were only used in certain areas of the U.S. and Canada, that would mean many, many people never got to see these actual cars, is this true?? or were they common everywhere?? I just assumed because I saw them, so did eveyone else(not true) any answers out there???
It’s taken the introduction of the Acela to make that a reality in the northeast corridor. The Rohr Turboliner did shorten the trips between Albany, NY and NYC, the average speed was about 90mph with stretches of 120mph, but our previous Governor (NY) got into a dissagreement over funding for their rehabbing and so they sit rusting away in Schenectady, NY.
No GE beasties in the early '80s; Amtrak was pretty much an EMD operation then.
The Heritage coaches (Amtrak refers to anything inherited from a predecessor railroad and converted to take electrical head-end power as a “Heritage” car) were still in use in the early 1980s. Amtrak wasn’t really into the shorter-distance corridor services at the time, and the Superliner I fleet was complete by 1981. Amtrak was using the Heritage coaches and sleepers principally for long-distance train service into and out of New York City, because the tunnel clearances into Penn Station don’t accomodate Superliners. For Chicago traffic at the time, that meant they were used mostly on the Lake Shore Limited and the Broadway Limited. They were used a lot as a sort of “reserve fleet” at holiday times - adding one or two to an all-Amfleet train during the holiday season to accomodate the extra passengers, until the Chase wreck put an end to that practice, at least on the NEC. They did sometimes wind up on the western long distance trains out of Chicago (Empire Builder, California Zephyr, Southwest Chief and some of the now-discontinued services that escape me), but those tended to be premium services, and Amtrak really tried to get Superliners on them as fast as possible.
BTW, on speeds - 125mp passenger service doesn’t exist in the US outside of the Northeast Corridor. The FRA restricts trains operating without cab signals to a maximum speed of 79 mph, and where there are cab signals, the track has to meet the appropriate standards to run at higher speeds. The Philadelphia-Harrisburg service is now running at 110mph, and there may be a few spots where Amtrak runs 90mph service, but I can’t remember any; the bulk of service outside the NEC is currently at 79 mph or less.
***The two North Carolina funded Amtraks - the Piedmont and the Carolinian - were more or less meant to give people a car-free way to get from the north middle of the state toward the south middle or vice-versa. The Carolina Piedmont (I mean the terrain, the middle region E-W) has so many interlinked towns and small cities that sociologists coined the term “conurbation” long before people worried about megalopolis. (Think of Leeds-Sheffield-Manchester-Nottingham in your own country.) If N.C. sponsors only two trains, as it does, the schedules for the Piedmont and Carolinian are about as good a compromise as can be regarding people’s work schedules. Also the Crescent - both ways - spends most of its journey after midnight.
In California the Pacific Surfliner trains are very popular, but I would guess that very few people are on the train for the entire route of San Diego - Santa Barbara, relatively speaking. Even Californians will adapt their work schedules to train schedules if possible, at least if commuting by car is simply too wretched or expensive to undertake every day.
Then there are a few lucky happenings, like the way Amtrak’s Crescent works so well for people from Charlottesville, VA, to hike up to D.C. for the day. Breakfast train and dinner train!
As to whether we are due for long-commute HST trains, say Chicago to Rockford, I rather doubt it. I suspect there will not be a political mandate for short- to medium-length HST’s meant for commuters until other routes are given basic passenger service, and corridor-type routes have been upgraded, if not to HST, then at least to the kind of stuff run in Canada in the Ontario - Quebec corridors. The need just se
BTW, one former Amtrak E unit was at the B&O museum awhile back. IIRC, it still had its “pointless arrow” (in the early 1990s!) and was pretty much stripped out. It’s no longer there–I think it was sold on to a private owner.