According to Railway Age’s news feed IDOT is selecting the Siemens/Cummins team for the 35 joint procurement locomotives. The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) has issued a Notice of Intent to Award to Siemens Rail Systems USA for approximately 35 high-performance diesel-electric locomotives for several Midwestern and West Coast states using funds from the U.S. Department of Transportation. IDOT is leading the multi-state locomotive procurement on behalf of the Departments of Transportation from Illinois, California, Michigan, Washington, and Missouri. The Notice of Intent to Award means a potential vendor has been identified. A contract still needs to be awarded before the purchase can proceed. The new locomotives will achieve a maximum speed of 125 mph and meet Federal Environmental Protection Agency Tier 4 emissions standards. They will be equipped with the Cummins QSK95 diesel engines, which Siemens is using for its U.S.-market diesel-electric locomotives, “resulting in one of the most energy-efficient, lightweight, smart, diesel-electric locomotives available today in North America,” Siemens said. Siemens and Cummins announced their partnership on Dec. 3, 2013. In 2012, IDOT was involved in a multi-state procurement of 130 next-generation bilevel railcars for high-performance service, an effort led by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). That effort resulted in the selection of Sumitomo/Nippon-Sharyo, which is building the railcars at its plant in Rochelle, Ill. The procurement includes 88 cars to be deployed on Midwest regional corridors. The Rochelle plant opened in 2012 and has created more than 250 jobs in Illinois. Amtrak debuted the first 110-mph HrSR (higher-speed rail) service segment outside of the Northeast Corridor on the Chicago to Detroit Corridor in early 2012. Today, the corridor features an 80-mile segment of track where trains are running up to 110 mph. By 2015, nearly 80% of the corridor will see sustained speeds of 110 mph, with new high performance
Wonder how the folks at EMD-Caterpiller and GE are taking this.
GE did not submit a bid, so I doubt that they expected to be selected. The final offerors were EMD, Siemens, and MotivePower. There is an IDOT webpage with many documents from the RFP for the Next Gen diesel locomotives. In the evaluation report, Siemens bid $225 million for the base contract, while EMD and MotivePower bid $260 million. In the scoring of the bids, Siemens won on points in each category.
The contract is not just for 35 locomotives because the RFP asked for options for up to 225 additional locomotives, including up to 175 in “LD” configuration. So the Siemens locomotives, if Amtrak can get the funding in a few years, are likely to replace all the P-40 and P-42s in the Amtrak fleet in the next 8-10 years. The Siemens bid is reportedly based on the Vectron DE diesel which will have a lot of commonality with the ACS-64 electric locomotive.
$7+ M a piece! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
Oltmannd,
If you want custom items, you are going to pay custom prices. Besides, ATK beyond the NEC is just another welfare project. They need to spread the joy.
Mac
Is it possible for you to constrain your political obsessions?
No more than it is for you.
Mac
I suspect that part of it is the whole bidding process. The consultant writes the spec from the “Christmas wish list” given to them by the DOT. The consultant and DOT finalize the spec and heave it out to the public for bidding. The manufacturers bid on the exact stuff in the spec. It can include all sorts of stuff like training, spare parts, documentation, adaptability for all sorts of train control, and who-knows-what.
Then there are all the constraints in Federal law when you use Federal money. Content, testing, design…
Beat on high for 3 minutes, bake a 350F for 20 minutes…$7M brownies!
Everybody in the process is pretty much in bed with everyone else: The Transit-Consultant-Supplier Complex, it might be called if DDE were still around.
I can’t believe that if an AC freight locomotive is $2.5M, that you couldn’t build a decent passenger unit for $3.5M. A GE Genesis with some trucks fitted with frame mounted, quill drive motors would do it. (Just look at how long and how many miles those P42s have on’em!)
The real telling moment will be when (if?) FEC orders 125 mph locomotives.
Trains newswire reports : Siemens $7,047,181, EMD $8,125,937, MotivePower $8,153,429 per locomotive. Multiplied by 35 gives Siemens $246,651,335. The $225 million bid must be for 32 locomotives, since Washington DOT has anoption for 3 more. Multiplied by 260 possible locomotives gives Siemens $1,832,267,060 or more , since the cost of the long distance locomotives with bigger tanks has not been determined. Why didn’t GE bid?
Well, hey! At least it is not the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightening II.
GE did bid via MPI.
GE may have decided not to bid because they have as many orders as they can handle.
What inquiring minds want to know is, what about reliability?
Electric locomotives are pretty much a specialty of the European builders, and the AEM-7’s have been particularly successful. Diesel locomotives maybe not so much. I get the impression that the Diesels in Europe are for light duty use because their really hard “pulls” are all electrified?
The Krauss-Maffei Diesel hydraulics didn’t work out very well at all on the “our side of the Pond.” Maybe they were “one-of” designs adapted to U.S. freight requirements, and if there was a demand they would have stuck with it to improve the design? Maybe K-M just didn’t have European experience with such heavy duty use because they use straight electrics for that application? Maybe the economics of European railroads ( government ownership) were such that they tolerated much higher levels of preventive maintenance (and maybe providing employment for their workers in the transportation sector was a policy goal as we might do for the aerospace sector?).
Anyway, of the plethora of U.S. first-gen Diesels, only EMD achieved high reliability (also over time), and maybe ALCo, if your shop people “understood them” (no, ALCo had a Diesel engine model that probably sank their effort), and GE achieved reliability only over a long time, using their deep corporate resources, and putting their techs into railroad shops as “locomotive whisperers.”
But look at the problems when EMD partnered with a foreign source on their 4-stroke H models, and how they back-tracked to the 710 design?
Maybe passenger locos are not as problematic as freight units operated in Run 8 for hours at a time whereas passenger units pull light trains, they accelerate their trains at high power and then throttle back? Commuter engines may be “light duty” as the bulk of their heavy pulling is only 4 hours a day in the AM and PM rush hour, but Amt
The scary part of ‘specialized’ locomotive is the continuing availability of replacement parts and skills necessary to maintain them. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Well, the latest diesels being built for Europe are:
GE Powerhauls,
EMD JT42CWR (Class 66)s,
Vossloh Euro-uses EMD 710 prime mover
Voith Maxima-diesel hydraulic, not many built.
Siemens Eurorunner, Vectron diesels.
Bombardier TRAXX diesels.
The last 2 use MTU diesels.
Three out of the 6 use American equipment.
Interesting that this new generation of American Passenger locomotives, with the exception of the HSP46, utilize a high-speed prime mover: MTU, Cat, Cummins. What’s a meduim-speed, medium-size engine mechanic to do?
Go to work for the MBTA who are taking delivery of new MBTA/Wabtec locomotives with GEVO prime movers and GE electrical systems.
Um, the new MBTA diesels are the HSP46s…[:)]
Speaking of them, why didn’t MPI bid with a modified HSP46?
A lot depends on the specs included in the bid package. It is quite possible that MPI couldn’t come up with a qualifying bid based on the HSP46.
The GE locomotive has freight type nose hung traction motors that are nominally limited to 110 mph because of the damage to the rail caused by the unsprung weight. To go above 110 mph you have to go to the quill drive tm’s that are common in Europe. My guess is that EMD’s bid will use quill drive tm’s sourced from Vossloh which I think are a Siemens design anyway.