We allknow tha tAmtrak is ordering more cars for Illinois inter-city service, and we also know that Wisconsin has cancelled the Talgo plans.
Why can’t we just cancel the new shipment of cars and Move the Talgos down to Illinois for transport there, where we’re planning on implementing new equipment on the routes?
Why not move the whole factory? Part of it may be that Wisconsin is more hilly, and the Chicago St. Louis line is relatively curve-free.
The Talgo sets were paid for by the State of Wisconsin. They only way they will “move” to another venue is when they are sold/leased to another operator. They are not free to move about the country.
So why, then, is Amtrak or Illinois offering to purchase the Talgo sets, maybe even getting a “deal” on them by having Wisconsin “eat” some of the cost of the original contract?
The bi-levels are a lower-risk choice as California has had good experience with them in the form of the Surfliners and Amtrak has had good experience with the Superliners I and II.
The Talgos are a “forward looking” choice as they are maybe half the weight per seat (if you leave out the locomotive and non-revenue cab car at the other end), which could mean energy savings, although the energy savings may depend more on the aerodynamics and how well the locomotive blends in with the trailing cars, and the real-world energy use of any of the corridor consists has never been disclosed, and not for lack of trying to find this information.
The Talgos also derive all of their wheel steering from “forced-steer” linkages (The newer radial-truck EMD locomotives also have guided-axles, but they work on the “self-steer” principle where only the axles within one truck are interlinked. The Talgo along with some European radial trucks are “forced-steer”, where steering commands come from the pivoting of the truck relative to the body as well with the radial trucks, in the Talgo case, the train cars themselves are the trucks.) Also, the Talgo gets no steering corrections from the wheel taper as each wheel is independently rotating. Any steering forces in the Talgo have to come from the gravity effect of the wheels seeking the low spot on their flange taper along with the articulation of the train cars around curves steering each wheel set. The 1950’s Train-X along with the 1960’s TurboTrain had guided axles much like the Talgo, but they didn’t go as far as the independently rotation wheels, which completely changes the tracking properties and the stability properties at speed.
One selling point of the Talgo is having the same low floor throughout the consist. The bi-level
As of this morning there is no official offer for the Talgo sets from Amtrak or another state. Even so, the price paid for the two sets was over $40 million. If one can get them, brand new modern passenger rolling stock that meets FRA standards, for 50-70 cents on the dollar then it would be to one’s advantage.
Why would the Talgos be considered Exotic orphans. Are these significantly different from the Talgos that have been running in Cascade service for the last decade+?
Of course, I would assume that Oregon, Washington and BC would get first crack at these for that very reason. They would be confined to a single maintenance location, but that not withstanding, I think it is incorrect to say that the Talgos are an unknown. I’d say that the cascades are as solid a proving ground as the Surfliner, Capitol Corridor and San Joaquins are.
Having said that, one advantage of the California cars is that they mate right up to superliner cars which means that California could grow the fleet with those superliners. I road many a surfliner with those cars. I actually prefered to ride in the superliner car.
The Talgo is most certainly exotic. I know of one other train using guided single-axle trucks – it is used as a commuter train in Denmark. I know of no other train within the past 100 years that lacks a solid axle connection between the wheels and has bearings to allow the wheels to rotate independently. The Talgo keeps its wheels on the tracks using engineering principles employed by no other train.
The WIsconsin Talgo is an orphan. I assume a Talgo train set has couplers at each so you can attach a locomotive in service or a switch engine to shunt it in a coach yard or a maintenance bay, but it does not have any provision for passage between it and any other passenger equipment or even itself. At least the TurboTrain had those clamshell doors that allowed joining a pair of train sets, which was part of the original Alan Cripe concept and was tested in Canada.
It is also an orphan because as part of the Talgo contract there was supposed to be a Talgo-specific maintenance facility – would anyone at Beech Grove know what to do with a Talgo trainset? So yes, if State of Washington wants to make a deal with State of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Talgos could probably be used out west, but they are most thoroughly incompatible with any other Amtrak equipment.
There is also the culture of Amtrak. Amtrak would have nothing to do with the Empire Corridor Turboliners, which are thoroughly conventional passenger cars apart from the turbine “power cars” at each end.
Being incompatible with other equipment is irrelevent since they are a complete train.
My point is that the Wisconsin Talgos are not the first on Amtrak’s system and are not unique, since Cascades have been running them for over a decade.
They certainly are less flexible, but that’s not the same.
Since Talgos do not meet the FRA crash worthiness will there be the need for a waiver for CHI - MKE route and would they not be able to operate any other route out of CHI ? Amtrak does have a Talgo waiver Vancouver - Eugene.
I have heard that whereas the Cascades Talgos do not meet the most recent and upgraded FRA crush force standards, and operate under a waiver requiring a locomotive at one end of the consist and an equally heavy non-powered cab car at the other end (they actually wrote that into the waiver), the Wisconsin Talgos meet all applicable FRA standards, accounting in part for the 40 million dollar price for the two train sets. I saw a picture that they have a Talgo duck-billed cab car at the end of the consist away from the locomotive in contrast with the Cascades Talgos that use a heavy F40PH with the prime mover removed and concrete weight substituted so they set right on their springs.
As to the arguments and rejoinders about the Talgos being exotic orphans, exotic nature and being orphans is all in the point of view. It is indeed arguable that Talgos are no big deal and why-doesn’t-Amtrak-buy-them-from-Wisconsin. I am not speaking to my personal opinion about the Talgo but the mind set at Amtrak.
Talgos are plainly in maintenance and couple-to-other-cars sense not interoperable with Amtrak’s fleet. Amtrak for better or for worse seems to have a low tolerance for equipment that is not fully interoperable. They scrapped the Turboliners and won’t operate the refurbished-at-considerable-expense New York Empire Corridor Turboliners – those were less “different” than Talgo, but those two required a special and separate maintenance facility, which is what Amtrak seems to want to get away from.
The need for a separate maintenance facility and Amtrak not wanting to provide one in Chicago is indeed a holdup with the Wisconsin Talgos because as far as I can tell, Wisconsin is contractually bound to pay for the two Talgos, two that were intended as an upgrade for the Chi-Mil Hiawatha service and the purchase of which pre-dated the 810 million dollars that the Wisconsin Governor sent back. The hangup is that a legislative committee doesn’t want to
To me this is one of the great missed opportunities. When candidate Walker was opposing the Madison line someone should have suggested, “hey, let’s take the 810 million dollars and buy about forty new Talgos.” Wisconsin would have gotten the jobs, and the entire midwest could have new passenger train sets. Mr. Doyle, Walker and La Hood could have all claimed victory. Sad but it was not to be.
I believe the $800 mil. or so was for the specific purposes in the original proposal, not just whatever Walker wanted. I believe he proposed using the money for other purposes and that proposal was rejected by LaHood.
With the rejection of the 810 million by Wisconsin, and wasn’t there also a rejection by Ohio and Florida of their awards, it initiated a new round of bids by states and awards by US-DOT?
I believe that Wisconsin under its new political administration put in a proposal to spend a smaller amount of money on the upgrades to the Milwaukee line but leaving out Madison, and that proposal was rejected in favor of other proposals in other states. I don’t know if that was a personal decision by Secretary LaHood; I would think it was part of a process under the terms of the ARRA legislation where the US-DOT is supposed to come up with a plan to spend the Stimulus money. But it is true that the rejection of the 810 million followed by the failed proposal to do something only about the current Hiawatha service has lead to the Talgo being left high and dry.
There was also talk during the campaign of using the 810 million for highways, but that probably would have required action by Congress rather than Secretary LaHood agreeing to it, and with Congress gridlocked by the same political wave that brought about the changes in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, the probability of that change was and is low.
Kinda, sorta. The new Talgo sets, the Series 8’s, meet the FRA “Tier 1 Alternate Compliance” crash specs via “Crash Energy Management” or CRM. FRA is still feeling its way through all this so, even though the specs are met, the new equipment still requires a waiver. Tier 1 is defined as operating at “speeds up to 125 mph and running with intermixed traffic.” FRA has made it clear that they will grant the waiver if the CRM specs are met; it’s just they way they want to regulate this for the time being.