SPVs

Good God . . . did somebody on this forum really use the term over-engineered to describe the SPV? Having been a rail commuter in the territory where and when they were used when in regular service, I can speak all too knowledgably of the total lack of engineering care that was expended on the design of this most horribly abysmal of machines.
In fact, about the only practical use these rolling pieces of junk could be put to was as examples for engineering students on how to do everything wrong.
Of course I suppose one could legitimately make a case that this disctinction has now been passed on to the Acela trains.

I made the comment after working on them for 6 years at both Harmon shop(MTA cars) and Danbury(CDOT cars).
The car was equiped with to many unneccesary gadgets that looked cool but did not do the job, it was over engineered and not fit for Railroad enviroment were a car gets very little servicing.
The two FL9 trains in Danbury took 4 hours to service, while the two coupled SPV's took up the other 4 hours.
Budd did a good engineering job other than the open wire trays under car and the total dependency of car on APU unit. the cars had to be babied every night.
I did get to operate the cars for 3 years after I switched to Engineer, and again the cars ran fineas long asf you did not try to race them, stopping was a different story after the Jacobs brake was disabled that really sucked.

as far as ACELA comments those belong on Amtrak board.

Ah, now I understand your meaning of "over-engineered!!"

My own worst memory was of what we engineers (of the non-railroad variety) usually call "mean time between failures."
To me as a passenger this translated into the number of unplanned bus trips I had to take to Danbury when an SPV broke down. Believe me, it was a big number!!!

I have no doubt that wire basket you referred to on the underside of the car allowed components to be easily damaged and was responsible for a lot of those failures. To borrow a concept created in Dante's Divine Comedy, there must be a special tier of hell reserved for the mechanical engineer who would've designed such a thing!

the Manufacturer of the engine cooling system also designed a closed coolant system like on a car but the spare coolant was only 5 gallon.
as soon as low light came on the engine shut down.
The system was to be pumped up with a barrel pump till light went out.
right ?? In railroad enviroment that ment put the waterhose on fill and blow 65 Lbs of city water into system till hoses blew off.
cause if your low on coolant the car is in yard were no barrels of coolant could be stored.