Regional New England Rail (Amtrak & State DOT & NEC)

Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

F-Line to Dudley said:
Didn't see it mentioned here, but Amtrak's antique Ocean View dome lounge car is doing a residency on the Downeaster now until Sept. 18. Daily schedules that use the dome trainset are listed on the Downeaster's website: http://www.amtrakdowneaster.com/domecar. No reservations required; you can just get up out of your seat and check it out.
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Mini-review (with a couple pics) from Miles:
http://milesonthembta.blogspot.com/2016/08/dome-car-on-downeaster.html
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

Get a bird's-eye-view of this long train, featuring mostly those beautiful shiny new Viewliner II baggage cars slowly passing through Penn Station in New York City!

There's a NER café car on the end. :cool:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL2pmkaGI0U
 
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Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

I called it! No idea how it will actually play out beyond this point, though. Pathetic petty crap on both sides. No, the MBTA shouldn't being paying them shit, but still absurd that they're both doing this tit for tat shit.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

Why do things always have to get ugly between these two?

Millions of people in MA depend on Amtrak service to New York, Washington, DC and beyond. Why does there always have to be a monkey wrench thrown in the mix? :mad:
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

Amtrak ain't cutting shit.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

The EGE said:
And while this slapfest is going on, other departments in Amtrak are getting the actual future of the Northeast Corridor done: the Acela replacements, announced today and in service in 2021.
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EGE -- Who writes their Press Releases?
By adding 40-percent more trainsets than the current Acela Express fleet, we are providing you with more travel options. Upon delivery of the new trainsets, Acela Express service will be offered every half-hour between Washington, D.C. and New York City during peak times, and every hour between New York City and Boston throughout the day. This expanded fleet will give you more departure options during peak travel times.....
In reliability, we anticipate the new trainsets will be at least eight times more reliable than the equipment it replaces,
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That reliability statement fails to transmit any useful information -- for sake of argument the new service is supposed to offer Boston to Penn Station hourly service during the day -- so lets call that 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM or 16 trains/day each way = 32 trains per day + a few for later so make it an even 40 trains every day --if we do that 365 days per year that is 14,600 departures per year -- now 99% reliability for transportation equipment is fairly good = 14454 successful departures and 146 failures

8X more reliable either implies that there are going to only be 18 failures against the hypothetical 146 now

or that if the final reliability is 146 failures then with today's equipment we have 8X = 1168 failures or a 92% current reliability

I'm guessing its the latter although it would be nice if it was the former -- in either case the 8X statement without some reference to current performance conveys no useful information
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

I am thrilled the Alstom order is official. Sure, the 8x can't be both big and meaningful, but still reflects that Alstom trains have been subject to continuous improvement over a huge installed base for ~35 years--by now the trains are made of stuff that either has proven not to break or is hot swappable in a way that does not affect ops--versus Acela's custom parts that could and did fail on an unforseeable MTBF schedule
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

According to the Alstom website the train that Amtrak is buying is a TGV that has been modified to meet the FRA requirements with only the most minimal changes having to be made to the basic design. I am really happy that this is the design Amtrak chose.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

Video showing what the new amtrak trains will look like.

https://youtu.be/WH-3FsmU6KQ


article

"Yesterday, vice president Joe Biden and other government officials announced a $2.5 billion loan to Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, to finance the replacement of Acela trains and perform upgrades to stations along the route, which runs from Boston through New York and Philadelphia before terminating in Washington."


http://qz.com/768405/this-is-what-the-next-generation-of-high-speed-rail-in-america-looks-like/


11-tilting-option-b-coming-out-of-tunnel-1024x576-e1472317573403.jpg



20160826_avelialiberty3_800x450.jpg


10-Close-up-of-train-in-DC.jpg


Cqz99qaWgAAPSpf.jpg



According to a few articles the trains will be faster and can also tilt when they go through corners allowing higher speeds where before they would have to slow down.
 
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Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

stick n move said:
According to a few articles the trains will be faster and can also tilt when they go through corners allowing higher speeds where before they would have to slow down.
Click to expand...

The current Acela is a tilting trainset, that's not a new capability.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

They specifically said it will allow them to go much faster than they currently do so maybe they tilt further, Im not sure.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

of course, you all know.... they can't tilt between NYC and New Haven....

hope that situation can be fixed, and the Metro North Line improved someday.

The regional and Acela Express trains are held hostage.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

millerm277 said:
The current Acela is a tilting trainset, that's not a new capability.
Click to expand...

No, but the Acela's tilt design is a Frankenstein creation by Bombardier derived from its very problematic 1970's LRC trainsets...which are used (long since tilt-disabled) by VIA Rail to this day as generic slow-speed coaches but which Amtrak determined were complete garbage during extended high(ish)-speed NEC trials in '80-82. The tilt design is Rube Goldberg-esque in its needless complexity and morbidly obese component weight, and never stopped being experimental despite Bombardier's best efforts to evolve it.

Amtrak's kept good uptime on the Acela trainsets after correcting the problems during the initial rollout, but it takes a Genghis Khan's army of shop labor to pull off that magic trick invisible to the riding public. Amtrak maint staff regards the Acelas as total nightmare fuel for how difficult and resource-intensive it is to manage the unorthodox design kludges in those trainsets on a daily basis. They'll seriously cut their maint costs in half with this TGV-derived design, which executes its tilt and other bread-and-butter HSR features with fully orthodox component sanity.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

They look damn good too. These will be coming online around the same time as the red/orange/green train sets, so were going to have vastly upgraded stock in a few years. Hopefully with consistent upgrades to the tracks, switches, third rails, etc we will have a vastly improved overall rail transit system pretty soon. Very good news. Then I would imagine once these things are taken care of we can then start talking about necessary extensions like orange further south, blue further north, red-blue...etc.

Amtrak will have, once these come on line, train sets capable of 200+ miles per hour. I think a serious look needs to be taken at exclusive rights of way, separated grade crossings, straightening out areas with a lot of curves and high angles. This is an extremely important set of rails that connect the most important pieces of the US. We need to stop playing around and finally make this into a true HSR. Texas, cali, all thats cool...but this is where it NEEDS to happen.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

East Junction in Attleboro to Sharon + Shannock to East Greenwich, RI are already pre-qualified for the 150 MPH to 165 MPH speed increase (which the current Acela is rated for), same as that stretch in New Jersey. Not sure why they haven't enacted the increase...possibly a delayed-reaction schedule padding concession to all the NEC construction in CT in NJ.

165 is pretty freakin' fast. The only HSR systems in the world that get within a hair of 200 MPH (click header to sort chart) are Japan and France (320 kmH = 198 MPH). Fastest 'standard' grouping is 300 kmH/186 MPH, and the NEC leapfrogs six countries into the Top 12 when 165 MPH goes online. Obviously schedule coverage at near-max speed is the only real-world measure that matters and isn't going to show on an absolute max speed ranking of countries. That is the part the NEC has the most work to do. But there's nothing second-world at all about 165 MPH covering decisive majority of the route miles in MA and RI, and most of NJ when the infrastructure renewal backlog gets tamed. MA in particular is sitting the most-pretty of any state with unbroken max speed from near- state line (past state line if the East Junction bypass gets pursued) to near- Route 128.

It's more the acuteness of some very tough short-distance speed bumps south of NYC and the total wipeout that is the State of Connecticut which hold everything back. Not cumulative route miles on the current ROW realistically pushable to 165 MPH if SGR renewal funding gets another 10-15 years to do its thing. It's a misnomer that Attleboro is some sort of "technically correct is the best kind of correct!" HSR participation prize; 40% or more of the existing route miles are realistically pushable to 165 without going off the property lines. The reason it'll always be some degree of 'mongrel' HSR is because the most meaningful clogs on the schedule are so disproportionately stacked to CT and those maxumum-difficulty individual speed bumps. Some of them solvable at kajillion-dollar megainvestments like a non-insane CT bypass, some of them like station approaches in the megalopolis's densest CBD's being "features not bugs" you must accommodate with a performance-balancing act because the Philly 30th, Wilmington, and Baltimore Penn slow zones happen to be the exact destinations passengers most need to go. The strategy has always been to run up the score in the Jersey swamps and inland RI/MA so the downtown destinations of greatest need aren't punished by their speeds, and that's a strategy any first-world transpo planner on his/her OCD meds from Japan to France would adopt without hesitation. It just can't be overstated what an enormously vexing buzzkill Connecticut is, or how all-world complex the surgery--and politics--is going to be for the major pinpoint fixes in heavily built-up areas like Metuchen Curve and North Philly.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

stick n move said:
Video showing what the new amtrak trains will look like.

https://youtu.be/WH-3FsmU6KQ


article

"Yesterday, vice president Joe Biden and other government officials announced a $2.5 billion loan to Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, to finance the replacement of Acela trains and perform upgrades to stations along the route, which runs from Boston through New York and Philadelphia before terminating in Washington."


http://qz.com/768405/this-is-what-the-next-generation-of-high-speed-rail-in-america-looks-like/


11-tilting-option-b-coming-out-of-tunnel-1024x576-e1472317573403.jpg



20160826_avelialiberty3_800x450.jpg


10-Close-up-of-train-in-DC.jpg


Cqz99qaWgAAPSpf.jpg



According to a few articles the trains will be faster and can also tilt when they go through corners allowing higher speeds where before they would have to slow down.
Click to expand...


WOW!

These look very ultra-modern, streamlined, sleek & sexy! Love the color scheme, also.

But I'm concerned about the tilting of the trains. Looks like it tilts a lot more than the present trains in use. Gotta ask yourself; Will trays & drinks fall of the tray tables in first class or business?

But overall, they look very nice. Anyone know how soon they'll be made? :cool:
 
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