Here is a speed log of a few early Penn Central Metroliners shortly after they entered service in 1969. These were recorded by Donald Steffee, famous for his annual list of fastest trains in the world first in the Railroad Magazine and then later Trains and finally Railway Gazette. His reports lasted from the 30s to the 80s! Only Cecil Allen which published Steffee’s Metroliner speed log in Railway Magazine had as long a tenure for tracking train speeds.
In my opinion the Metroliner saved the passenger train in the USA. Prior to the Metroliner there was little to no enthusiasm for passenger trains. Railroads were abandoning pax trains as fast as they could keep up with the discontinuance filings with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Even the ICC itself opined in the Hosmer Report of 1960 that the intercity pax train would by 1970 join the stagecoach in the transportation musuems.
New trains after WW2 did little to generate traffic. New old, didn’t matter, passenger traffic dwindled year by year. By 1960 only new commuter trains were being built.
Yet the PRR/PC persisted and thought there was still demand. In the early 60s they tested a GG1 against the Silverliners to see if they could do 100mph on a 3 hour 5 stop schedule DC to NY versus the 80 mph 4 hour trains then in service. Both could do it although the MUs were a bit better due to better acceleration. With government assistance, some would say prodding, the Metroliner was born.
Common perception was that the Metroliners were a failure. Technically yes. Realiability and durability were not very good. But commercially they were a huge success. For the first time in decades new trains increased traffic. And by a lot! 46% in just the first year. A new type of traveler was once again joining the rails. The business traveler. As well as the wealthy. For them time is money and the Metroliner saved them time. They were also highly profitable. See my earlier thread. Pre Amtrak profitability by train
So here is a cheer to the Metroliner, The train that I think saved the passenger train for Americans.
The Metroliners were in large part the fruit of the 1965 Johnson transportation initiative, much like commercialization of the Sikorsky/UA TurboTrain. If it were not for scads of Government assistance I doubt any higher speeds than ~100mph would have come from PRR alone… let alone from Penn Central.
The Metroliner ceased to be an effective 150mph train when they gave up the low-mass Pioneer truck design for the GSC90s. Perhaps the change was truly necessary to allow operation before the southern part of the Corridor was grade-separated and high-speed track improved, but even a few months of peak speeds in the 130s did enough track-wrecking to put hard limits on in-service speeds.
And then we had the effects of flat-pack electronic technology and its maintenance in an environment marked by substantial arcing and difficulties with high-speed wire contact – there were some pretty spectacular spark shows to be seen in the Seventies.
Note how even the Acela trains have not returned to MU-style individual-car motoring.
Actually the federal assistance was only about $9 million while the PRR/PC invested about $50 mills. I have an article detailing it. I’ll post when I can.
Hi Woke, here it is from Train Nov 1967 issue. If you have that issue it’s an excellent indepth article on what the PRR had to do. The parts about the right of way were particularly interesting since the cars are pretty well known but the permanent way works seems to have been generally ignored in the history of the project.
Was that Pennypacker’s article? Ah, where have the years gone?
I had not appreciated that the PRR covered so much of the cost of all those grade-crossing removals that you come across on the high-speed portion from South Brunswick to Trenton. Most of those (in the mid-Seventies) were on two-lane roads which suddenly veer to one side, go up enormous ramps to a heavy bridge and down the other side, and then rejoin to continue as before – the little section to what evidently used to be a grade crossing now in the ‘shadows’.
And for the SPV2000, which would have been spectacular except for a few design details, and as successful cab cars in a surprising number of services, some, like the Energizer Bunny, still going…
“…all those grade-crossing removals that you come across on the high-speed portion from South Brunswick to Trenton. Most of those (in the mid-Seventies) …”
The last grade xing there was overpassed about 1963. All the others east of Trenton closed … before 1940?
What a wonderful article! Merci beau coup! Thanks very much!
Another tid bit I learned in researching the Metros. Conrail did not want the NEC. It’s because Amtrak was only required to pay the freight RRs their avoidable costs for operating the trains. In short that meant Conrail could not allocate any overhead.
Now RRs have a lot of overhead and with Conrail having much less freight trains on the NEC than Amtrak they knew they’d be on the losing end of the stick. So they “sticked” it to Amtrak.
War stories are fun. Here’s mine. I had two aunts named ironically both Kathryn on my dad and mother’s side. One live in DC the other in NY.
So my brother and I decided while we were in college to do a trip and visit both Kathryn’s in one spring break.
We flew to DC for the Kathryn on my mom’s side and then took a regular train to NY to visit the other Kathryn. Back then airfares required a round trip to be cheap so we again trained it back DC. This time we splurged for a Metroliner. This was about 1980 so still the EMU.
Being a rail fan we wandered to the back vestibule to time the miles. After a bit the conductor comes back asking what we were doing. Not really accusatory just probably thought we were sneaking smokes.
I replied we were timing the miles. He asked well how fast do you think we were going? My timing skills were rudimentary and I think I said about 120 or so. He said probably not quite but he’d ask the engineer.
When he came back he said the engineer wouldn’t tell him! Before I could protest he further said “he’d rather tell you! Have you boys ever ridden in the cab of a Metroliner before?”
So off we went to the head end and we chatted with Frank the engineer all the rest of the way from about Baltimore to DC. Back in the days when it wasn’t verboten. We didn’t hit 120 he said but the speed limit was 110 and we did see 111 on the straights. Sold me on high speed rail right then and there!
We rode the Metroliner to Washington very early in 1969 (somewhere I have a picture taken with my new Polaroid Swinger camera gotten for Christmas shortly before!) and got in trouble because I stayed up front looking through the window through the tunnel and across the Meadows – I had to remain in my seat until Philadelphia and so missed most of the fun of meets and other traffic crossing underneath. But it was fun watching the ties blur under the front end, and I got the engineer to pick up the PA and tell the passengers ‘were going a hundred’. Yes, that was FAST to me as a reader of the Steffee surveys in Trains in the Sixties. I was surprised to see a grade crossing, with an actual station wagon waiting, near the south end in Maryland…
I later discovered a clever dodge at 30th Street when visiting a girlfriend in Gladwyne a few years later. There were armed police guards on the stairs down to the track a Metroliner used, at train time, and they were implacable about seeing your valid ticket. But at the far south end of the platforms there was a little walkway and you could sneak across, walk back up the platform of interest, and board the Metroliner without any further ado. Now of course I was going to stand up front all the way back to New York, so the lack of a reserved seat was no problem, and the conductors never had a problem with letting me ride as a ‘standee’ for regular fare.
Many was the time we’d have strange electrical gremlins. I remember one memorable occasion with panels in a vestibule opened up, jumpers everywhere, and looking out the door to see the pans going up and down…
Incidentally, I sometimes rode ‘locals’ going to college, and the contemporary Silverliners had controls right in the vestibule, including a little wooden slat you could raise like an ironing board and a nifty round speedometer dial. It was perfectly normal for the train to exceed 100mph between stops, which seemed extraordinary for a commuter train. (I subsequently had even more fun coming in from Landover to Washington in the Penn Line, it turned out being pushed by a HHP-8, where we got RIGHT up to 114mph after stop after stop, with the overspeed alarm frequently going off for a moment. Even more fun was that the engineer would actually be out of his seat leaning out the opposite versibule door for a few seconds as the train started accelerating…
I always wondered why they went with an all new design when the Silverliners were pretty capable. I guess they needed to outdo the Shinkansen’s 130mph. Which of course the Metros never achieved in service.
Got to admit though the Metroliners were cooler looking than the Silverliners.
