Hoosier State Discussion (both Amtrak and Iowa Pacific)

Corridor: definitely not. Potential corridor: maybe, if INDOT gets its act together.

Keep in mind Iowa Pacific owns many railroads and runs weekly trips over Amtrak already as well as tourist operations around the country. These maintenance standards are not anything new or mysterious, so I have a hard time believing IP is not capable of complying or even doesn't comply. Either someone at Amtrak or FRA has a burr up their butt.

ryanch wrote:

gaspeamtrak wrote: I think the last two rockets that were to supply the International Space Station "Blew up shortly after lift-off" and were built by a "private company" "NASA" was working with.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, please. But who says going private is the best alternative, sometimes it is not... Come on up here and drive on our "Privately run 407 highway and see what the toll fees are! They are some of the most expensive in the "world" Sorry about getting off subject. Enough said already...

Ding, ding! We have a winner. Someone who reads the news closely and thinks about it rather than just letting the reflected light flow through an ideological prism.

Someone who reads closely and thinks about it might also realize there is a bit of difference between a clean sheet space program and a railroad program operated by an existing and operating railroad company with proven equipment including the 40-series locomotive, the standard by which any locomotive has been judged since 1968. If we can't get a small service with a few geeps and passengers cars running, it's not the operator's fault. He's already got plenty of trains running and has shown plenty of competence in doing so.

ryanch wrote: An honest poster might now track down an image that reads "NOT good enough for government work", and mash it up with an IP logo. This private company can't seem to do anything right at this point.

Other than operate multiple railroads and a string of private cars every week on the City.

ryanch wrote:There is also this beauty:
>INDOT also still has to develop contract language the ensures accountability and consequences for compliance with Amtrak and federal safety standards, an issue that raised by the Federal Railroad Administration in March.

So the two parties clearly at fault as shown by this article - INDOT and IP. So who do some of our most prolific posters blame? Amtrak. Hard to know what to say.
.

It's called eliminating variables. IP runs plenty of trains on their own. You don't hear about problems there, so I find it hard to believe they have this little tiny problem operation in a sea of compliance on their other nine railroads and nine passenger operations.

I also blame the FRA. They seem to screw up anything they put an oar into these days.

I have to ask, Ryanch: Why do you stick up for the government so much? Do you work for the post office? It's pretty clear by now that they'd mess up a one car funeral between the Hoosier State and the PTC debacle.

Tadman wrote:
I also blame the FRA. They seem to screw up anything they put an oar into these days.

I have to ask, Ryanch: Why do you stick up for the government so much? Do you work for the post office? It's pretty clear by now that they'd mess up a one car funeral between the Hoosier State and the PTC debacle.

I think it's fair to say we all have our blinkers. I for one regret that we're missing the spectacle of Indiana and Iowa Pacific negotiating with CSX, UP, the Belt, and CN for the re-routed Hoosier State that Tadman proposed a little while ago (in lieu of dealing with Amtrak).

Tadman wrote:Keep in mind Iowa Pacific owns many railroads and runs weekly trips over Amtrak already as well as tourist operations around the country. These maintenance standards are not anything new or mysterious, so I have a hard time believing IP is not capable of complying or even doesn't comply. Either someone at Amtrak or FRA has a burr up their butt.

As has been noted in this thread, there is a difference between an occasional tourist run and a regularly scheduled passenger train. Considering that Mr Ellis and his company had no written standards to meet for a regularly scheduled train at the beginning of this process, they have managed to overcome most of the hurdles. The train HAS now passed all reported inspections and is in place and ready to run. (There were discrepancies with the unwritten rules found that were not revealed by previous approved operations. They have been resolved.)

"Either someone at Amtrak or FRA has a burr up their butt." is a good guess ... all parties responsible for the operation of this train are already railroads responsible to the FRA - and I thought an agreement had already been reached to drop the requirement that the State become a railroad just because they are paying for the service. The state is not a railroad today and they are managing to pay for Hoosier State trains run by Amtrak. It will not be much different when IP equipment is used ... except instead of having the State pay Amtrak $2.7 million per year they will pay IP ... who will pay Amtrak for their crews and services.

I can't help but think that there is at least a whispering campaign against IP. Since that campaign seems to be benefiting Amtrak they seem to be as good of a source as any to blame for the delay. Meanwhile Amtrak continues to collect money for their "service". Not a lot of motivation to play ball and let another provider prove that someone else can provide nicer equipment and better on train services.

If you were INDOT, would you rent a train from Amtrak or a better train from some other known vendor for less money? Especially when it's coming out of your own pocket? In either case they have no equity in the equipment.

The red flag statement was that there were repeated inspections and the same item wasn't fixed between inspections. Also that incorrect parts were installed, that should have been fixed without an FRA/Amtrak inspection.

But then the train is only going about 45mph on average.

If they start service, will Amtrak nitpick, causing trains to go OOS for trivial reasons? Will IP keep up with maintenance on these older units?

I keep hearing on this website that Amtrak has high charges for equipment & services. Here in MA the MBTA refuses to consider running electric locomotives because Amtrak charges too much for the electricity, according to posters on this website.

While all the "Nitpicking" has reached new heights,this all is becoming a "CYA" type of "Nitpicking",
checking all parties involved.
The slightest "mishap" will bring on many "ambulance chasers" or "better call Saul" types of legal beagles
to plug the court system with lawsuits.

Mackensen wrote:If you're trying to increase ridership then dropping easy, bookable connections to the rest of the national rail system seems counterproductive.

On the other hand, if trains are being held because of late incoming connections (a substantial issue for CHI routes to east and west), that alienates the CHI-Indiana customer whose journey isn't exactly rocket fast when on time.

Interesting that the "indemnity card" has not been played in the media. The Lafayette paper that seems to have at least one reporter willing to dig for stories and from which several articles have been quoted here, has not reported on such matters.

While indemnity matters are not generally discussed in the open, it would appear that if there are unresolved issues, it sure seems late in the game to address them. During my time in the industry, self-indemnification, or "no fault", prevailed between Amtrak and the roads. I'm not certain if whatever rules applies between Amtrak and a private car operator would apply here as Amtrak is collecting the fares. Further, it has never been clear to.me if IPH would hold a contract with the State and Amtrak is a subcontractor or vice versa.

On these points "enquiring mind wants to know".

Tadman wrote:I have to ask, Ryanch: Why do you stick up for the government so much? Do you work for the post office? It's pretty clear by now that they'd mess up a one car funeral between the Hoosier State and the PTC debacle.

I don't. Only a failure to carefully read what I write would make you think that. This isn't a setting where one must be "pro-government" or "anti-government".

I stick up for fact-based analysis. In the void of facts here, I object to people who know nothing assigning blame as if they knew something. You'll note that I favorited electricron's post where he said we don't know enough to blame one side or the other. I only dissent from posts that attack, in harsh language, on the basis of virtually nothing.

What I strongly object to is knee-jerk, ideologically driven 'it it's good enough for government work' BS.

For those who've never dealt with a delivery from Abt ("I know we told you we'd be there between 2:00 and 4:30 this afternoon, but it's 10:45 this morning and we're on your doorstep - can't you be here now.") and never tried to accept credit cards for their business using Intuit's merchant services (14 calls to the customer service line and 5 weeks of missed credit processing because a) they failed to assign the copy of QuickBooks to the right account; then b) made a typo in my email address; then c) couldn't correct that typo without faxed copies of my ID and my business registration, and then d) didn't realize that they'd set up the account for the wrong version of QuickBooks Point of Sale, which is their own program; and then e), f), g) and h) which aren't worth going into, all while failing to call me back as each succeeding customer service rep told me they would ...)

These are just examples from my personal life in the last 3 months.

For anyone who never actually deals with an American corporation, "good enough for government work" may be a ha-ha line. For the rest of us, we know that corporations screw up as much as the government does, though it tends to be in different ways - in one case, on the side of caution or the side of fairness; in the other on the side of risk, inequity and cost-cutting; that each is pretty insulated from accountability for mistakes related to individuals, because the choice is too often A or B (whether Dem or GOP or oligopolist company 1 v. oligopolist company 2.)

So for all of us who actually deal with American corporations, we aren't knee-jerk anti-government. And we can tell when someone is. When someone makes judgments based on their prejudices rather than knowledge of the facts of an individual case, we tend to dispute what they say.

ryanch wrote:For those who've never dealt with a delivery from Abt ....

Mr.Ryan, I would presume you are addressing a customer service matter with Abt Electronics & Appliances, a one outlet retailer, but still quite large, located in Glenview, IL.

Even though I have never done business with them, and there certainly many a closer appliance/electronics retailer, I certainly see their delivery trucks "an awful lot" around town.

Have there been any sightings of the Iowa Pacific equipment that might give a clue as to if IP thinks the takeover is soon, or being put off to the indefinite future?

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=521915" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; you also forget their lives before NJT.. In this picture, #4135 is the second unit.

ACeInTheHole wrote:http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=521915 you also forget their lives before NJT.. In this picture, #4135 is the second unit.

Weird to think of the Penn Central having some new, modern, clean equipment. They look much better in chocolate brown than black.

For Hoosier State Line, The Clock Is Running Even If New Trains Aren't
By Stan Jastrzebski • Jul 8, 2015
http://wbaa.org/post/hoosier-state-line ... ains-arent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“Of course we’re eager to get going, so we were disappointed," says Iowa Pacific President Ed Ellis, who says he thinks his company could start running the trains within a matter of days after a contract is signed. But he insists it’s not Iowa Pacific holding that process up.

“We believe that ours is pretty much fully negotiated," Ellis says. "We haven’t signed it yet, because we don’t want to sign it until INDOT signs with Amtrak. But we believe that once theirs is signed, the steps involved in signing ours are really short.

“We’re not holding this up," says Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari, who adds there are “issues” left to resolve, but he repeatedly refused to elaborate.

“We’re not going to negotiate this on public radio,” he says.