Not to mention, even if it could handle ordering hundreds of Amfleet coach replacements, where is the funding?
The bilevel coaches and Charger locomotives are basically a state-led effort (CA, IL, MI, MO, potentially WI), with federal/state funding but not really Amtrak.
Amtrak was shrewd with those contracts. The +150 national options on the locomotives are at the back-back-back end of the order, meaning the factory will be hot pumping them out by decision time on the options and the Congresscritters from the states on this order have actively-churning district pork to protect timed pretty nicely with the 2016 election. 3 of the states in this state-sponsored compact--Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri--beneficiaries of the GOP wave who have to weather an unfavorable election map. Forget about who gives a speech on C-SPAN about starving the beast or privatizing Amtrak...when the sausage-making gets hashed out in a closed-doors appropriations meeting, are they really gonna shut these factories down?
Hell no. They will near-silently pick up the options in a Friday afternoon news dump. And Amtrak booby-trapped it that way.
As is, the bi-level order was packed up with so much TIGER grant offsets that California is already tentatively set to drain its complete and total options. It just has to wait to see how the cars perform in testing before making it official. There's some tricky financing gymnastics at work driving that: Caltrans owns the existing California Cars (i.e. the first-generation Superliner corridor bi-levels), will own their fleet of this upcoming third-generation...but it
doesn't own the second-gen Surfliner bi-levels. Amtrak does, and so the Caltrans lease terms are a lot less favorable than outright ownership. They amortize their costs by picking up the complete/total option orders, trading in the Surfliners, and having new-new cars with longer projected lifespan than the 14-year-old Surfliners. And so running up the score on the new units ends up saving themselves money over keeping all old + padding with new.
Upshot of that is Amtrak's going to have 60 more good-condition corridor cars transferring into the national pool all because of Cali's fun with budgeting loopholes. Which in turn would flush out the Midwest if Illinois + Michigan + Missouri do
not pick up their options. Currently the Midwest base order of the new cars is barely enough to 1:1 swap out the shitty Horizon single-levels and alleviate the acute Chicago Hub car shortage...but not give much leeway at all for expansion. This transfer would cover the unreliability of the political winds in those states, and keep Amtrak from having to plug equipment gaps on the corridor routes with the national pool of LD-configured Superliners.
And then...Cali is--haltingly--moving forward with plans for the Coast Daylight and Coachella routes (well, sorta...they've been saying that for 15 years now with the Daylight). So the Surfliners may boomerang back to Caltrans all the same if they can float eventual purchase of those cars on projected new route revenues.
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tpp/offices/oasp/ITSP_Intercity_Rail_Routes.pdf.
One thing I'll give Joe Boardman tons of credit on: he plays the "all politics is local" game exceptionally well. The reorganization of the business divisions into "corridor" vs. "LD" segments on the profit-and-loss statement shows profit and break-even on the right number of state-sponsored routes to neutralize some critics. While the isolation of LD sunk costs makes the Congresscritters fight themselves to a draw on whose pet routes get saved...meaning uneasy truce thus far has ruled over any cuts. They've done a great job playing the states on these equipment contracts, as the Cali financing games prove. These are standardized cars the states can't 'go rouge' over-customizing because they get a better rate rigidly adhering to Amtrak's specs and lower maintenance rates at zero deviation from spec. But the financing and "Job Creatorz!" games also mean 1) the options get drained by default on political expediency, 2) the national equipment pool gets a windfall of badly-needed bodies, 3) they can dispose of some really shit equipment instead of having to hang onto it forever as reserves (e.g. awful Horizon coaches, the oldest/smelliest non- GE Genesis diesels, most of the gutted-out ex-F40 locomotive "cabbage" cars), 4) they don't get shorted on cycled replacements (full overturn of the Genesis diesels). And while Boardman's got to prove his bona fides on this NEC crisis, Gateway, and lack of state-of-repair funding movement...at least some of the Congressional opposition has been halted in place by the fact that so many Congresscritters and the donors/lobbyists who stuff money in their pockets rely on the Regionals and Acela to travel between fundraising events where the money gets stuffed in pockets.
