Horizon Fleet Thread

mtuandrew wrote:F-line and others: of all of those flats, are any currently 125 mph-rated besides the Horizons? Are any easily upgradable to 125? (I'm still sniffing around for A-I supplements until the next-gen cars come, so the A-Is can be cascaded out to LD service.)

MARC IIB's are 125-rated for the Penn Line. But those are Sumitomo-built stainless steel cars from a different non-Comet lineage, there's only 34 left now that the older-gen MARC IIA's have been scrapped, and they've only got 5 years left on their rated post-rebuild life extension before it's fish-or-cut bait. The replacement procurement is slated to happen right after the Kawasaki bi-levels get rotated out for midlife overhaul (2+ year program slated to begin in about a year). Not an option for anyone because they're too few in number and nobody else uses Sumitomo flats.

I'm not sure if NJT maintains any Comets to 125. The MLV's can do 125 to Trenton, but Trenton schedules (especially the expresses) are 100% MLV's these days. NJT stopped intermixing trainsets after the 2nd-gen MLV's arrived; it's all-Comet or all-MLV in regular practice. So if any Comet II's & IV's were ever rated for triple digits the shops have almost certainly downrated them by now to save costs since they so rarely make NEC appearances south of Rahway.


You can run a commuter Comet at 125 if maintained to that rating. But the only intercity rolling stock that uses real Comet trucks are the Cali "not-a-Comet" Comet IB's (i.e. stainless steel Arrow carbodies refitted with generic Comet components)...which don't run on any routes >90 MPH. The Horizons have Amfleet trucks, and all Amfleet trucks are maintained to 125...so the H's gain that speed rating almost as an afterthought. It's quite a different proposition to be scouring the market for 'foreign' imports using different trucks...then put enough elbow grease into refurbbing them to uprate to higher speed. Why would they ever take a handful of Comets w/ Comet trucks and spend the premium to overhaul such a tiny component niche for Corridor duty? Makes no sense. Just assign the imports to some 79 MPH route and tart up something that has pre-existing Amfleet trucks to run on that NEC LD. That means putting some LD lipstick on a Horizon pig and stuffing the commuter refuse on an incumbent Horizon route. A short-term and non- rebuild-worthy proposition at best because someday...someone will deliver a real functioning bi-level and the rent-a-wrecks will be the very first yanked from service. And someday (with hopefully less drama) we'll start getting our Siemens Brightline or whatever next-gen flats and the Am2's will be first in the surplus line...meaning those jury-rigged LD H's are going to be very first sent to the razorblade factory (because who wants to sit half the day on an LD under blindingly bright commuter car lighting).

It doesn't really change the game. It's the equivalent of Amtrak dipping into the rent-a-wreck brokers to pad Chicago hub for however many months/years extra it takes to recover the Nippon-Sharyo fumble, and then bumping some in-house equipment temporarily out of Chicago hub to cover the shortages till the East Coast procurement gets cued up. That's what...a 48-month proposition if they bought some old beaters tomorrow? Not a rebuild scenario. Just put them through a CRASP-like reliability program so they don't embarrass Amtrak with service-fouling mechanical problems, and run them till they drop. Then when they start dropping...have a few extras sitting in storage and run those until they drop. Have enough disposables to cover a theoretical maximum of 5 years, and when ONE--West or East--of the new car orders starts arriving the plug gets pulled on the rent-a-wrecks because one region will be sending its in-house reinforcements to the other. I doubt there's a doomsday scenario where both procurements could get so hopelessly messed up that you need to speak of the rent-a-wrecks in any terms other than "disposable". As infuriating as these delays are, it's still way too short and year-to-year a timeframe to talk of life-extension rebuilds of anyone's old refuse. Or get antsy about there being too few 125 MPH-rated vehicles to shuffle around. Or to overrate the prospects of anyone's single-level refuse when the BLV aftermarket has better legs for usefully plugging holes in 2 out of 3 AMTK regions than the other way around.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:I'm not sure if NJT maintains any Comets to 125. The MLV's can do 125 to Trenton, but Trenton schedules (especially the expresses) are 100% MLV's these days. NJT stopped intermixing trainsets after the 2nd-gen MLV's arrived; it's all-Comet or all-MLV in regular practice.

But the only intercity rolling stock that uses real Comet trucks are the Caltrans "not-a-Comet" Comet IB's (i.e. stainless steel Arrow Is refitted with generic Comet components)...which don't run on any routes >90 MPH. The Horizons have Amfleet trucks, and all Amfleet trucks are maintained to 125...so the H's gain that speed rating almost as an afterthought.

Not sure, but are the ALP46s rated at 100 mph? Might also be some Arrows going down to Trenton as well, but they are rated at 80.

Are the Horizons Pioneer III equipped (Amfleet trucks)? - being opposed to the standard Comet trucks (St. Louis-GSI Series 70)

F-line: the Horizons ride on General Steel Casting 70 outside-equalizer trucks, not Pioneer trucks a la the Amfleets. (I think the Arrows all have variants of the Pioneer truck too - the "true Comet truck" you mentioned - but I don't know for certain.) The S-IIs and all Viewliners use the same GSC-70. All Pullman-Standard and Bombardier Comets (not sure about the Alstom V) also use GSC-70 trucks, but an inside-bearing version. They function identically to those under Amtrak rolling stock, except the bearings are less accessible.

I'm not really asking about the trucks anyway, but about the crash rating, the brakes, the bearings, and any other miscellaneous details.

The Horizon cars have the same trucks as the Viewliner 1 and 2, Superliner 2, and a couple other things.

Their biggest issue is the ease that the damn things freeze solid. Thankfully there are enough spare superliners in the winter that they can be brought in to replace frozen Horizons.

"" IF "" a level 3 overhauls of the Horizons is ever done then one would think that the freezing up of the Horizons would be solved ?

east point wrote:"" IF "" a level 3 overhauls of the Horizons is ever done then one would think that the freezing up of the Horizons would be solved ?

Viewliners and Amfleets freeze up as well. What the Horizons needs most is a rotational turn to the Deep South every now and then.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:I'm not sure if NJT maintains any Comets to 125. The MLV's can do 125 to Trenton, but Trenton schedules (especially the expresses) are 100% MLV's these days. NJT stopped intermixing trainsets after the 2nd-gen MLV's arrived; it's all-Comet or all-MLV in regular practice. So if any Comet II's & IV's were ever rated for triple digits the shops have almost certainly downrated them by now to save costs since they so rarely make NEC appearances south of Rahway.

Nothing on Transit (and thus, any commuter class Comet derivative) is over 100. Everything is good to 100 with the exceptions of the Arrows and the 4100-4112 Geeps, both good for 80. Trenton trains, although mostly ML at this point, still run both Comets and Arrows as well. ML's and Comet's have never been mixed in revenue, even before the second gen ML's arrived. Although the intent during the design phase was to mix ML's with Comets, this was proved unfeasible as soon as the cars arrived on the property.

electricron wrote:

east point wrote:"" IF "" a level 3 overhauls of the Horizons is ever done then one would think that the freezing up of the Horizons would be solved ?

Viewliners and Amfleets freeze up as well. What the Horizons needs most is a rotational turn to the Deep South every now and then.

I would have thought with 900kw of HEP available on these shorter corridor trains , they could use electric heat in the right places to prevent them freezing.

electricron wrote:

east point wrote:"" IF "" a level 3 overhauls of the Horizons is ever done then one would think that the freezing up of the Horizons would be solved ?

Viewliners and Amfleets freeze up as well. What the Horizons needs most is a rotational turn to the Deep South every now and then.

Horizons freeze up worse then those too. They freeze up bad. Side effect of their cheap construction.

Doesn't help that Chicago has trouble keeping them on ground power during layover too.

The shell is an aluminum shell in these cars. Metal is getting so dingy that Beech Grove has resorted spraying the whole car platinum mist.

Alcochaser wrote: Horizons freeze up worse then those too. They freeze up bad. Side effect of their cheap construction. Doesn't help that Chicago has trouble keeping them on ground power during layover too.

If the Horizons are so poor in cold weather, how do AMT's Comet II-based aluminum coaches fare, given Montreal having harsher winters and lower temperatures than Chicago?

Because those weren't ordered cheap like the H's were. The MBTA's second-source MBB coaches developed pretty bad floor rot issues in their latter years that did not afflict their identical- age & mileage Bombardier order or the 10-years-older Pullman order. Lumpy floors from use of cheaper materials, making the frame rehab costs in a hypothetical rebuild much steeper on those units than the two batches of Bombers 1 year older and 2 years younger. That wasn't a design flaw; it was an explicit decision to go cheap to stack the roster with as many above-and-beyond units as possible. The Bombers were a normal replacement procurement intended for a full-on 30-year + overhaul life sequence. But at the time the last of the T's legacy coaches (gutted RDC's & whatnot) were failing so quickly that a bang-bang decision was made to double-up the procurement for a complete purge...then pad the reserves. So they stretched a small pot of extra money to the limit by going extra low-cost with a second-source vendor.

It worked for them. The MBB's were extremely reliable in-service. They just don't have the same overbuilt frames that the name-brand BBD units did, so when they hit end-of-life they developed carbody ailments that the BBD's and Pullmans never did. But that was all part of the plan: those other batches were the ones that had baked-in options for pursuing the maximum life extension, the MBB's didn't. The T's bean-counters figured out all that depreciation math 30 years ago, and (correctly) concluded that their fleet costs would amortize better if they pulled the trigger sooner/cheaper rather than saving up a couple years extra for a third BBD batch and watching their Budds collapse in a heap of rust before the replacements arrived.


Same exact time-and-place conditions in same exact era that forced Amtrak to bite on a cheaper compromise. They needed bodies and needed them now, and didn't have enough years to save up for an Amfleet 3 or Viewliner coach before the stretched-thin fleet took an outright hit from failing Heritage coaches. So they aimed at the same commuter frames that had hot assembly lines going in '88 to get 'em fast, and they angled for cheaper packaging that would max out the unit scale in exchange for a compromise of amortizing at 30-and-out (with any life extensions beyond that being gravy)...rather than 25 + Rebuild 1 (with any Rebuild 2 being gravy) of "standard" overbuilt commuter Bombers. The only differences between the H's and the MBTA's MBB's is that Amtrak wasn't able to tap its option orders, so the fleet scale has always been awkwardly small. And the component selection left them with nagging glitches like the doors from Day 1, whereas the MBB's were pretty much flawless and didn't show any maladies until end-of-life (in exactly the places their cheaper construction was expected to show).

It's not that Amtrak couldn't have standard-ordered Comet packaging as overbuilt as an Amfleet or classic commuter Bomb set where Rebuild 1, Rebuild 2... are rubber-stamp formalities. It's that they couldn't get what they desperately needed now ordering at that price point, so they had to base the order on different amortization math: more units @ lower cost from less overbuilds, lower upper-bound life extension prospects (i.e. more intensive rebuild required to roll back wear) from less overbuilds, and accepting the up-front reliability/MTBF risks of stripping out those component overbuilds. Can't say ~28 years later that it didn't work out for them nearly as well as it did for the MBTA with its MBB's. They have high fleet uptime, and they're running routes they never would've been able to run if they'd been stuck milking the shot Heritage coaches through the Clinton era out of pure desperation. But it does mean you have to put up with tradeoffs like them being pretty dodgy in regions that are clammy-cold + wet/slushy like the East Coast winters vs. bone-cold + dry/snowy like Midwest winters.

I wonder if the stainless steel rebuilt Comet IBs in California will be around as long as the Horizons. Aside from their 100 mph speed rating, they seem like a better Amfleet supplement than the Horizons are!

Matt Johnson wrote:I wonder if the stainless steel rebuilt Comet IBs in California will be around as long as the Horizons. Aside from their 100 mph speed rating, they seem like a better Amfleet supplement than the Horizons are!

Don't get too carried away. They've already been around for 49 years (albeit mothballed for half a decade between between retirement as EMU's and conversion to coaches). The Cali rebuild was a cheapie for 10 years @ light duty. Those frames have enormous mileage on them, and even the most immaculately taken care of railcars start showing metal fatigue at that advanced an age...as we're seeing now with the Heritage fleet. There's only 14 of the IB's left out of an original batch of 30 coach converts. Those were the best-of-the-rest condition IB bodies that survived...not the average-condition IB body. Half of them were scrapped because they were ground to dust like 40+ year old cars are wont to be.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:

Matt Johnson wrote:I wonder if the stainless steel rebuilt Comet IBs in California will be around as long as the Horizons.

Don't get too carried away. They've already been around for 49 years (albeit mothballed for half a decade between between retirement as EMU's and conversion to coaches). The Cali rebuild was a cheapie for 10 years @ light duty. Those frames have enormous mileage on them, and even the most immaculately taken care of railcars start showing metal fatigue at that advanced an age...as we're seeing now with the Heritage fleet. There's only 14 of the IB's left out of an original batch of 30 coach converts. Those were the best-of-the-rest condition IB bodies that survived...not the average-condition IB body. Half of them were scrapped because they were ground to dust like 40+ year old cars are wont to be.

The rest of the Comarrows were sent to AAR/TTC Pueblo, none have been scrapped to date. However keep in mind the Arrow I (Comarrow conversions) [and Silverliner IIIs] are stainless monocoque, the stainless steel sheetmetal is load carrying and serves as an integral part of the truss-type carbody along with the roof and center sill (all stainless). Built in '68, converted to push-pull 1987-88, overhauled at Beech Grove 2013-14. These are the only St. Louis stainless cars with build quality on Budd caliber, I suspect they might even last as long as the VIA Budd Heritage fleet.