New FRA Regs Clear European Style Trains on US Rails in 2015

jt42cwr wrote:

Adirondacker wrote:

jt42cwr wrote:I hope the regs stay as they are. Who wants a load more boring soul-less multiple unit trains all over North America, Europe is already plagued by them. Looks like I might have to go even further afield in search of real trains.

people who want to go places and care about how fast they get there not how the train looks?

"Normals" might do. I'm not a "normal", I'm a railfan so I do care about those sort of things. I have visited the US several times solely to travel on loco-hauled trains, but if everything was to be replaced by EMU's and DMU's I wouldn't imagine I would return. They have ruined the UK and most of Europe's train services from a railfan perspective as they offer very little compared to a varied fleet of locomotives and rolling stock.

Um um the rail system doesn't exist so you can take pictures.

Our freight trains would still be locomotive-hauled, and those are much more plenty then our passenger trains any way. Not to mention I can't see Amtrak using DMUs on it's long distance trains.

GE45tonner wrote:Our freight trains would still be locomotive-hauled, and those are much more plenty then our passenger trains any way. Not to mention I can't see Amtrak using DMUs on it's long distance trains.

Good point.

Not to mention the 70 brand new electric locomotives Amtrak is getting for the NEC. I think it is safe to say locomotive hauled trains are here to stay for a while yet.

I'll take seeing DMU/EMU combination outside my window any day of the week as preferable to the waste of (mostly empty) 10MPH track I see now. If trains cost less than half the current cost because we'll be able to use off-the-shelf designs instead of all these custom-made jobs, then maybe we'll see, speaking from a local perspective, expansion of commuter rail to serve the couple hundred thousand people in southern NH.

djlong wrote:I'll take seeing DMU/EMU combination outside my window any day of the week as preferable to the waste of (mostly empty) 10MPH track I see now. If trains cost less than half the current cost because we'll be able to use off-the-shelf designs instead of all these custom-made jobs, then maybe we'll see, speaking from a local perspective, expansion of commuter rail to serve the couple hundred thousand people in southern NH.

Outside of Japan the MTA's M7/M7a is one of the biggest fleets in the world. I'm gonna assume that many of the people in New Hampshire would be using the trains to get to Boston. Almost all the off-the-shelf stuff is too narrow for North Station. Something that New Hampshire could use would work just as well in Massachusetts. Or Rhode Island. Or Connecticut, Or New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Ontario, Quebec.