With Amtrak announcing tests of the ONE View liner baggage car several questions come up.
Why did news wire say tests of cars and not say car ?
Why is Amtrak not putting more cars into the test program ? Anyone?
There is certainly more than one ACS-64 being tested every day.
It is normal editorial grammar to test one car as a representative of all cars in that class. Whatever the performance of the one car is what all others of its manufacture and specs will be. This one baggage car is the only one which has been delivered thus is the chosen one.
Which begs the question why haven’t more cara been delivered for testing ? Putting all eggs in one basket ?
Viewliners are ugly with those angular sides. Whatever happened to streamlining as part of marketing?
Times have changed. Streamlining on a train doesn’t have the same aura as it did 80 years ago when the “Pioneer Zephyr” and UP M-10000 hit the rails. Besides, I would hardly consider the Viewliners to be ugly.
Because it makes sense to start with testing one? Real world testing frequently leads to modifications. The more cars you have built by the time you do the testing, the greater the difficulty (and cost) in making those modifications across all the other cars in the series. Far easier to implement modifications on cars that are on the production line or haven’t even been started yet.
Building one or two prototypes is the way airplanes have been developed for many years. What is learned from extended testing is incorporated into the production run.
Based on my experience dealing with EMD and GE new locomotive purchases, sometimes it takes a while to get the “sample” car to pass muster against the specs in the contract. There often are lots of details that don’t get done quite right and can delay getting the first one out the door.
Sometimes, it’s the purchaser being overly picky. Sometimes it’s the manufacturer mis-reading the spec or cutting corners. Sometimes it’s just sloppy manufacturing.
This kind of thing is bad enough when you’re a repeat buyer, but the first order after many years is going to be particularly troublesome.
Yes – tell Boeing that only 2 prototype 787s necessary and look how long the delays. Boeing built many more of 777. 767. 757, 747, 737, 727s test aircraft and refurbished most to deliver at a discount to an airline. One B-707 prototype flew for Boeing for 10+ years But do not have exact figures. Do know Lockheed built 6 - L1011s all which were able to do different sections of testing. There are various tests for aircraft all which cannot be done at one time.
Amtrak has had as many as 6 ACS-64s in test status but the figure is down to 3.as best as has been determined.
Is the answer as simple as there is one car ready and so it’s out being tested and everyone wants to await the initial testing results before rolling more cars off the line? In the railroad world, 1-5 prototypes have been common for many years, so I’m not sure there’s anything unusual going on here.
In recent years some manufacturers have produced whole series of trains apparently without any prototypes, leading to some spectacular flops (IC4 in Denmark for example). So I am personally happy Amtrak and CAF are taking it slow and testing properly.
I guess we gotta look at the contract between buy and seller to see what it says. Hand me that piece of paper over there and let’s see what it says.
I believe the same thing happened 45-50 years ago with both the UA Turbotrain and the Budd Metroliners. Especially in the case of the Metroliners, they were just simply rushed into production so in both cases the result was some very trouble-plagued trains.
I think you are referring or also referring to the Budd SPV’s which turned out to be a dismal failure with no redeeming qualities (couldn’t be shoved off onto a branch line someplace or run as a shuttle of some kind without getting into trouble of some kind!).
There are some of us old enough to know from contemporary Trains Magazine reporting that the original Metroliners were “car barn queens.” Trains even reprinted a column from humorist Art Buchwald, likening the troubles of the Metroliner train to the perils of the manned space program, accompanied by a cartoon graphic of a Metroliner being prepared for a space mission, complete with a transformer bristling with insulated posts as the launch pad…
The story is that with a patch here, an override there, the maintenance staff got them working reliably. Then someone had the bright idea of “renovating” or “rebuilding” them. They were rebuilt to blue-print spec, which means all of the patches and fixes were no longer applied. At that point, Amtrak gave up on them, running Metroliner service with the AIM-7’s and the original Amfleet cars. The original Metroliners were then relegated to being cab cars for push-pull Diesel trains, and I am told the San Diegans was one assignment. Someone recently had a picture here of a Metroliner cab-car on a Keystone Service train.
I am also skeptical of the characterization of certain railroad equipment as “failures” let along “dismal failures . . . with no redeeming characteristics.” I spoke with someone who regarded the Budd RDC as a “failure” when a fairly large number of those rail cars were put into service. They were put into service as a replacement for a small passenger steam locomotive and a couple cars used in branch line service, and branch lines let alone mainline passenger service were already in serious decline when they came on the scene.
It is probably unfair to hang the label of “failure” on the Pennsy T1 duplex drive steam locomotive. Yes, they advanced the state-of-the-art of steam locomotives and had some difficulties for taking that trouble, but they were introduced when the decision at high corporate level
A point missed. The pictures of the roll out of the Viewliner-2s showed 3 -4 baggage cars. What happened to them that they could not enter testing ?
I’d bet much of the testing involves instrumentation and/or some folk to watch and monitor things. One is gets you the answers you need at least cost.
You generally don’t need to do much testing at all on the subsequent cars. Just put them in service.
Sometimes an innocent press release can start all kinds of speculation. This announcement may mean at least one route will have enough new Viewliner-2 baggage cars to run them every day on one or more trains ? ?
Another unconfirmed rumor has View-2s Bag-Dorm, Sleeper, & Diner coming to Albany tomorrow or the next couple days. Anyone with more info ?
Sleeper 62500 PORTAGE RIVER
Bag-Dorm 69000
Diner 68000 ALBANY
Cars and train being assembled in Elmira, NY as of 8:30AM EST Tue 7/8. Don’t know what all is in the consist. Will go to Binghamton then Albany this morning…more late.
Should be leaving Elmira for Binghamton before 11AM EST. Don’t know consist yet…will be looking for it…