Acela & Amtrak NEC (HSR BOS-NYP-WAS and branches only)

[Lrfox]

This might've been what you saw:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/1md6ras/amtrak_acela_news

"Dress rehearsal" runs open to Amtrak employees simulating paying customers.

This is 100% what I saw at PVD. Employees (most in uniform or with Amtrak branded gear at least) occupying seats like paying customers, but conductors were standing at doors like it was a normal in-service train. The signs above the doors read "not in service," however, so it was pretty clear what was happening. I think it was holding at the station for a bit longer than normal because there pretty extensive delays Tuesday afternoon (downed catenary wire just north of PVD station and heat delays further south) so I walked the length of the train to peek in.

Looked like it would be fun to be an Amtrak employee on these dry runs. I'm not sure what rules there are (if any), but they seemed to be enjoying it. The cafe car wasn't operational (lights were on, but all of the surfaces were wrapped in plastic), and there were boxes of KFC all over the place. Looks like they had their pick of sodas and beer too. Not a bad way to break in the new trains.

 

[fatnoah]

PVD this afternoon. Sitting on track one with a lot of crew and no passengers. Presumably training?

There were also power issues along the line that evening, with some trains holding at PVD and RTE (I enjoyed a 6.5 hour BOS->NYP trip), so it's also possible that a training run to BOS got interrupted.

 

[themissinglink]

Eversource buries electric transmission lines that were atop the old WALK Bridge in Norwalk

The energy provider moved two electric transmission lines to underground tunnels beneath the river and city as part of the Norwalk Bridge Replacement Project.

www.fox61.com

NORWALK, Conn. — The billion-dollar effort to replace the WALK Bridge in Norwalk is progressing well, as Eversource recently completed a complex and lengthy step in the process.
The energy provider announced Thursday that it successfully moved two electric transmission lines that previously spanned the top of the old bridge.
[...]
The 240-foot, state-of-the-art multi-span bridge that will replace the WALK Bridge is expected to be completed by 2029, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration.

 

[awood91]

Official launch day is August 28: https://www.amtrak.com/nextgen-acela

 

[HenryAlan]

Official launch day is August 28: https://www.amtrak.com/nextgen-acela

Great news! They are supposed to announce scheduled trains during a noon press conference. I will certainly try to book one of these next time I go down to New York.

 

[Jahvon09]

Well, I'm from Missouri, myself. If it happens, then fine, but we've been through this many times already. It's ridiculous!!!!

 

[North Shore]

Great news! They are supposed to announce scheduled trains during a noon press conference. I will certainly try to book one of these next time I go down to New York.

Do we have any idea of which particular routes/timeslots will feature the new trainsets? I can't find anything as of yet.

 

[themissinglink]

Could the NEC ever support 150/160 MPH speeds between Eddystone, PA, and the Pennsylvania/Delaware state line with some improvements like constant-tension catenary?

 

[awood91]

Do we have any idea of which particular routes/timeslots will feature the new trainsets? I can't find anything as of yet.

Amtrak stated they will let customers know in the coming days before the launch when we can see what itineraries are with the new train sets in their app / website. I'll post here when that goes live to let you know.

 

[riptide]

How to get to Providence in 40 minutes on the T - The Boston Globe

More, faster commuter rail service would help workers and businesses in Boston if Providence, with its lower-cost housing, was more accessible.

www.bostonglobe.com

Didn’t someone raise the idea of using the old Acela trainsets for the Providence Line on this forum before? I seem to recall there were issues. The lack of existing high-level platforms would be one of them, presumably.

 

[JeffDowntown]

How to get to Providence in 40 minutes on the T - The Boston Globe

More, faster commuter rail service would help workers and businesses in Boston if Providence, with its lower-cost housing, was more accessible.

www.bostonglobe.com

Didn’t someone raise the idea of using the old Acela trainsets for the Providence Line on this forum before? I seem to recall there were issues. The lack of existing high-level platforms would be one of them, presumably.

The old train sets have fully depleted their use life, are very expensive to maintain and are basically white elephant trains. No one in their right mind wants to try to run them.

 

[wicked]

How to get to Providence in 40 minutes on the T - The Boston Globe

More, faster commuter rail service would help workers and businesses in Boston if Providence, with its lower-cost housing, was more accessible.

www.bostonglobe.com

Didn’t someone raise the idea of using the old Acela trainsets for the Providence Line on this forum before? I seem to recall there were issues. The lack of existing high-level platforms would be one of them, presumably.

I thought this was floated by the Baker administration/Poftak at one point, or maybe that was the leasing of one or two other Amtrak locos.

 

[The EGE]

There were apparently preliminary discussions about leasing ACS-64 Sprinter locomotives:

Take the E-train? MBTA mulling electric locomotives - The Boston Globe

The T would test the electric vehicles on the Providence commuter rail line, where Amtrak already runs electric trains.

www.bostonglobe.com

I suspect we'll see this pop up again in a few years when the new Airo trainsets begin displacing the Sprinters from Northeast Regionals, Keystones, etc. SEPTA already has some of their own, so they're proven in commuter service.

As JeffDowntown said, zero chance the Acelas get reused for commuter service.

 

[clam]

How to get to Providence in 40 minutes on the T - The Boston Globe

More, faster commuter rail service would help workers and businesses in Boston if Providence, with its lower-cost housing, was more accessible.

www.bostonglobe.com

Didn’t someone raise the idea of using the old Acela trainsets for the Providence Line on this forum before? I seem to recall there were issues. The lack of existing high-level platforms would be one of them, presumably.

Since Acela’s are designed for 1st class/business travelers, why are we even talking about using them for the middle class masses on the commuter rail?

Cannot think of a more businessy clientele and routing than a Track 61 shuttle hitting Back Bay-South Station-Convention Center.

 

[Nexis4jersey]

Could the NEC ever support 150/160 MPH speeds between Eddystone, PA, and the Pennsylvania/Delaware state line with some improvements like constant-tension catenary?

Yes , and extended down to the Wilmington City Limits.. I think the Bridges around Chester might need replacing.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

There were apparently preliminary discussions about leasing ACS-64 Sprinter locomotives:

Take the E-train? MBTA mulling electric locomotives - The Boston Globe

The T would test the electric vehicles on the Providence commuter rail line, where Amtrak already runs electric trains.

www.bostonglobe.com

I suspect we'll see this pop up again in a few years when the new Airo trainsets begin displacing the Sprinters from Northeast Regionals, Keystones, etc. SEPTA already has some of their own, so they're proven in commuter service.

As JeffDowntown said, zero chance the Acelas get reused for commuter service.

The prior discussions were for only a few Sprinters, because that's all Amtrak could spare at the time. A few wouldn't have made any difference to Providence Line schedules because there'd still be 79 MPH-capped slow accelerating T diesels taking random rotations on any given slot, meaning the whole day's Providence schedules still had to keep being factored on diesel acceleration even when you had the more capable equipment onhand. Same reason why you won't see the T leasing any of SEPTA's very lightly-run Sprinters as half of that fleet sits idle on a daily basis from malingering post-COVID schedule reductions, and SEPTA's looming doomsday-budget service axe figuring to shelve the whole of their push-pull fleet for foreseeable future. It's simply not worth even a cheap lease price unless you can get enough units to guarantee coverage and cushion for every non-Wickford Providence turn on the schedule with zero diesel protect units. Thus far nobody's had enough lease units to guarantee an actual speed-refactored all-day schedule making the quick money worth spending.

That becomes possible once the Airos are fully delivered and Amtrak's Sprinters use is sharply reduced to long distance trains only. Then again...the Airos will be fully delivered by the time we have the BEMU procurement for the Fairmount Line, so we really don't have any excuse for not planning a supplemental Providence/Stoughton BEMU order instead of holding out for slightly worse electric push-pulls. Unfortunately the ultra-funky procurement logistics for that BEMU pilot--Keolis, not T, lease and Keolis, not T, maintenance shed only big enough for a half-dozen Fairmount-only trainsets--handicaps them from proceeding with getting any Providence/Stoughton supplementals into the pipeline. They'd need the Readville Vehicle Maintenance Facility to be fully-funded instead for construction starts instead of malingering without CIP funding sources to do it in time. So unfortunately an Amtrak loco short lease may need to go on the table solely because of tardiness with any in-house capacity to expand the BEMU ranks beyond Fairmount, which is not exactly great value and is not exactly going to thrill electric advocates who are going to seize on the BEMU-rollout constipation as a "this is why we can't have nice things".

The old train sets have fully depleted their use life, are very expensive to maintain and are basically white elephant trains. No one in their right mind wants to try to run them.

Not only that, a 6-car Acela I set only seats as much total--304 passengers--as 1 T bi-level coupled to 1 T single-level...like, laughably inadequate for the Providence Line's loading at any hour of the day or even on weekends. Providence runs no-foolin' bi-level 8-packs (~1440 passengers) at rush. You'd have to buy pretty much the whole Acela fleet and run 3-4x the current schedules--impossible on the 2-track NEC--to provide equivalent rush-hour capacity to our crowd-swallowers. And, as I've said several times before, Massachusetts has LOW motivation for running BOS-PVD super-expresses when so many of the Providence Line's in-state intermediate stops are Top 10'ers in systemwide Purple Line station ridership. As much as RIDOT (passively, and without subsidy) wants those, the T makes money running crowd-swallower locals in a way that it wouldn't running lower-capacity premium-class expresses.


FWIW...I'd love to know what this Globe reporter's RR.net handle was...and when exactly he got banned. That piece reads exactly like so many locked "Acela re-use" threads drenched in foam from guys like him...then drenched in equal parts bile from the Amtrak employees who actually have to run and maintain those maintenance-nightmare A1's. Like...man...it's been proposed. Screamingly. Exhaustingly. Many times before. It ain't happening in any universe. Right now the most pertinent insider speculation about the A1's future is whether the dropping-like-flies fleet is actually gonna last long enough to have a proper sendoff fantrip vs. just getting unceremoniously yanked one day en masse never to return due to unfixable mechanical issues a la the Horizon coaches. It's that dire right now.

 

[wicked]

Ridiculous speculation is all RR.net is anymore. Waiting for the RR.net moderator who claimed all NB/FR trains would be splitting at East Taunton to pop up here any day now. He nearly got me suspended there because I, repeatedly, called him out on how preposterous that idea was. And he regularly deleted my posts. But he works for the railroad and knows best, apparently.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Ridiculous speculation is all RR.net is anymore. Waiting for the RR.net moderator who claimed all NB/FR trains would be splitting at East Taunton to pop up here any day now. He nearly got me suspended there because I, repeatedly, called him out on how preposterous that idea was. And he regularly deleted my posts. But he works for the railroad and knows best, apparently.

Maybe if/when electrification with EMUs happens, but there's still a serious time penalty to that. Ultimately a question for the future though.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Ridiculous speculation is all RR.net is anymore. Waiting for the RR.net moderator who claimed all NB/FR trains would be splitting at East Taunton to pop up here any day now. He nearly got me suspended there because I, repeatedly, called him out on how preposterous that idea was. And he regularly deleted my posts. But he works for the railroad and knows best, apparently.

That guy doesn't work for the railroad. He has (had?) some affiliation with the Boston Street Railway Association, so has marginal expertise in the rivet count of a Type 5 trolley. For commuter rail?...well, something something opinions something something like assholes. His "war on the quote button" (because we're all apparently reading the site on dot-matrix screen 1990's flip phones or something) has pretty much single-handedly destroyed the MBTA subforum over there as a discussion destination for anything but vehicle-tracker threads because you can no longer make heads or tails out of the discussion flow with all the nested quotes removed (and replaced by intentionally rude mod warnings to stop using the quote button). Most of the really insightful posters have long since thrown up their hands in frustration and left, and there's only a couple Keolis employees (one of them already regularly cross-posting here) who even bother with insider dish anymore. aB has long since surpassed it as a go-to for anything MBTA-geek.

The Amtrak subforum is its own kind of shitshow, albeit much livelier. You've got about 5 or 6 extremely prolific posters (a couple of them mods or assistant admins) with an extreme fiscal conservative bias spamming every thread into the ground with the same "aMsUcK nO sElF-sUfFiShEnT...EVERYTHING BAD!" talking points and harkening back to the everything-for-profit days of 55+ years ago when the passenger rail network was...bankrupt eight ways to Sunday? You're routinely beaten over the head with "There's no need for an Acela at all! You can run first-class service on Amfleets and (they never shouda been retired!) Toaster locomotives for another 50 years because it's literally a crime to retire anything OLD! Every form of transit should be PROFITABLE with the minimum-most taxpayer investment or it's not worth doing at all, and Amtrak should be writing the Class I carriers checks for MARKET-RATE trackage rights! BUT I'M STILL A FOAMER AND I RODE A TRAIN IN VIENNA ONCE AND HAVE AIRLINE FREQUENT FLYER MILES; I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT WITH TRANSPO MARKETS AND SO ON AND THEREFORE. . .!!!" You can watch other posters (and other mods) go slowly but irrevocably mad in real time swimming amid all that sewage. But there's still a few ace employee insiders dishing out info you can't get anywhere else, including guys who are qualified on both the A1's and A2's and can speak immaculately to the living nightmare it is trying to operate the former, and the exercise in extreme patience it is shaking out the latter.

Still a site that can't be beat for New England freight and excursion RR insight, though the mod for all those particular subforums is one of the few sane and level-headed ones who doesn't actively stifle good discussion despite the...uh..."challenging" crowd.

 

[FK4]

That guy doesn't work for the railroad. He has (had?) some affiliation with the Boston Street Railway Association, so has marginal expertise in the rivet count of a Type 5 trolley. For commuter rail?...well, something something opinions something something like assholes. His "war on the quote button" (because we're all apparently reading the site on dot-matrix screen 1990's flip phones or something) has pretty much single-handedly destroyed the MBTA subforum over there as a discussion destination for anything but vehicle-tracker threads because you can no longer make heads or tails out of the discussion flow with all the nested quotes removed (and replaced by intentionally rude mod warnings to stop using the quote button). Most of the really insightful posters have long since thrown up their hands in frustration and left, and there's only a couple Keolis employees (one of them already regularly cross-posting here) who even bother with insider dish anymore. aB has long since surpassed it as a go-to for anything MBTA-geek.

The Amtrak subforum is its own kind of shitshow, albeit much livelier. You've got about 5 or 6 extremely prolific posters (a couple of them mods or assistant admins) with an extreme fiscal conservative bias spamming every thread into the ground with the same "aMsUcK nO sElF-sUfFiShEnT...EVERYTHING BAD!" talking points and harkening back to the everything-for-profit days of 55+ years ago when the passenger rail network was...bankrupt eight ways to Sunday? You're routinely beaten over the head with "There's no need for an Acela at all! You can run first-class service on Amfleets and (they never shouda been retired!) Toaster locomotives for another 50 years because it's literally a crime to retire anything OLD! Every form of transit should be PROFITABLE with the minimum-most taxpayer investment or it's not worth doing at all, and Amtrak should be writing the Class I carriers checks for MARKET-RATE trackage rights! BUT I'M STILL A FOAMER AND I RODE A TRAIN IN VIENNA ONCE AND HAVE AIRLINE FREQUENT FLYER MILES; I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT WITH TRANSPO MARKETS AND SO ON AND THEREFORE. . .!!!" You can watch other posters (and other mods) go slowly but irrevocably mad in real time swimming amid all that sewage. But there's still a few ace employee insiders dishing out info you can't get anywhere else, including guys who are qualified on both the A1's and A2's and can speak immaculately to the living nightmare it is trying to operate the former, and the exercise in extreme patience it is shaking out the latter.

Still a site that can't be beat for New England freight and excursion RR insight, though the mod for all those particular subforums is one of the few sane and level-headed ones who doesn't actively stifle good discussion despite the...uh..."challenging" crowd.

Never used that site but aware of it for many years, sad to hear this, and honestly surprising, since I just assumed any site devoted to railroad stuff would not devolve into poorly moderated nonsense. But nice to know I’m not missing as much as I thought I might be getting my info from aB