Published: Tuesday, February 27, 2007
By Nancy Remsen
Free Press Staff Writer
MONTPELIER – The House Transportation Committee has endorsed a Douglas administration plan to buy five small train cars to operate on the northern portion of the Vermonter route between St. Albans and New Haven, Conn.
The administration has been asking lawmakers since last summer for permission to join Amtrak in a project to test the feasibility of using smaller train cars on some routes to save money.
The resolution passed by the House Transportation Committee would allow the state to draw up contracts with Amtrak and Colorado Rail Co. for three motorized passenger units and two trailer units that only carry passengers.
The cars would not be “smaller”; they would be 85 feet long by 10 feet 6 inches wide, just like other railcars.
The routes in question used to run RDCs, so this is more of “forward to the past” business. (Anyone think that Amtrak was a little too hasty in giving up their RDCs? especially the Roger Williams ones?)
Yes and no on being hasty on giving up the RDCs. They were gettting up there in age and were getting more and more expensive to maintain. On the other hand, Amtrak had no replacement, and VIAs keept a lot of their fleet going.
People like one-seat rides. See Ed Blossoms 1951 story on Lehigh Valley Transit and the Liberty Bell. To think that more people would prefer to change trains at New Haven to a diesel car than riding through from Washington or New York all the way in an Amfleet coach…
I think they are nuts!
Of course, they could tie the diesel car on the back of the through Regional Express to Boston, but isn’t that running up unnecessary car miles on an expensive peace of euipment? But that is only way they are going to get more business or even keep the business they now have!
I wish that Colorado Railcars could be first used on a more viable route. Could affect their sales potential?
I’m a train fan, but a couple dozen Bentley’s or Maybach’s could be bought at a fraction of the cost, and probably provide service profitably on the route. www.bentleymotors.com/www.maybachusa.com
Let me see if I understand this logic. On a route with marginal passenger traffic, the solution is to purchase brand new equipment in order to save money. On one side we have a problem and the other side is a pile of cash…let’s keep throwing cash at it until the problem is solved. Brilliant. I still prefer my green power horsecar as a solution…horses also produce alot of fertilizer at a better price.
All righty then: Problem one. Would a small, self propelled car shunt signals properly on the road and at grade crossings? If not, then they would have to operate under very restrictive rules for movements of equipment other than locomotive powered equipment, commonly referred to as track cars. The NORAC book limits track cars to 25 MPH in most circumstances, which would make the equipment in question too slow to be practical to run in the more often than not busy corridors where Amtrak operates. Second: I haven’t mentioned the competitive dis-advantage of such a slow service outside congested urban areas. Third: operating small light equipment over large numbers of grade crossings would be very difficult at best. Having helped out a friend flagging crossings on a local job, I can attest to the fact that people will just as soon run you over as obey your request to stop for a minute or less, to permit a train or railcar to cross a road in front of them.[soapbox]
I think when the parent post was talking “smaller cars”, they were talking about DMU’s instead of some kind of Galloping Goose-style speeder.
The Colorado Railcars DMU is somewhere in the 80-90 ton range according to the specs on their Web site – a 4-axle locomotive may be in the 120-130 ton range – so the DMU is no ultra lightweight piece of equipment.
As to lightweight equipment and triggering signals, there were such problems with the early Talgos, but in addition to light weight, the Talgos have independently rotating wheels, and I imagine modern Talgos have some kind of electrical jumper to trip signals.
The deal with the DMU is in part the RDC experience and in part the MU vs locomotive debate. When the Japanese Bullet train came out, it was widely held that adhesion dropped dramatically at high speeds and that low axle loads were a prime consideration in high-speed trains, which would favor MU over locomotive. It was thought that a locomotive for such trains would need at least half the train weight just in the locomotive. Since then there have been advances in wheel slip control and very high horsepower electric locomotives (the AEM-7’s and their European cousins), and the French TGV as well as the Acela and others have gone to locomotives or at least “power cars” while perhaps the Japanese have stayed with MU cars.
The MU question is whether MU cars, even MU cars with locomotive noses like the Roger Williams RDC and the CR DMU are safe in a grade crossing collision. You would think that if you put the front end of a Genesis locomotive on the F-end of a DMU you would get the same protection, but then we have such extremes as the Pacific Cascades Talgo along with the Amtrak Diesel corridor trains where they put a 120 ton locomotive at one end and a ballasted-to-120-ton “dummy” locomotive (the cabbage car) at the other end of 220 tons of Comet (Horizon) cars. Over half the weight of the consist is in these
Paul, the classic interurban, rapid transit, and commuter railroad lines had it right, and the solution has been forgotten by modern management. All these operations, the original IRT in New York, even the North Shore, South Shore, Lackawana, and New Haven, used a combination of motor and trailer cars. On many lines, this was done with most equipment configured as “married pairs”, one motor and one trailer, with operating cabs at the outer ends only. With modern compact motors capable of high horsepower, good wheel slip technology, etc, there isn’t any reason why ALL Long Island and Metro North and Metra Electric and SEPTA mu cars have to be power cars. It is really one waste of money in both first purchase and in maintenance. A 50% ratio would do just about as well in performance, without the problems of going all the way to a locomotive, trailer, end cab-car configuration.
I am writing knowledgeably about straight electric passenger equipment. Whether this applies also to diesel-mechanical cars, well Colorado Rail does say their car can haul or push two of their trailers, so their opinion seem to confirm mine.
The change to all motor equipment was really initiated with the C&LE Red Devil lightweight speeders of about 1929 and the further development into the Indiana High Speeds of 1931. The first were capable of only single-car operation, not trains, but the latter ran in trains up to four cars. But in a four-car train, the motors of the last car were cut out and the fourth car ran as a trailer. The older equipment on the Indiana Railroad did have trailer operation (and of course the frieght operations did), and for a while sleeping car trailers (one per train) were used between Indianapolis and Lousiville.