mtuandrew wrote:... Amtrak has had decades of broadly dissimilar rolling stock and would love for it to all come from the same factory & drawing board again. One brand of car (and a few V-I and V-II stragglers) means Amtrak can have one maintenance base and use one set of parts.....It's worth noting that the legacy carriers accomplished this despite having three builders. They did this by specifying things like trucks, brakes, draft gear, and HVAC equipment. For example, all Santa Fe passenger cars had "steam ejector" air conditioning, meaning the steam gen had to run all year. This seems a bit crazy, but it was probably something that worked best in the primitive years of AC and they ran with it. As more car orders came and went at ATSF, they all had this system. By 1950, why bother changing? This was't really a problem until 1971 when each railroad's reasonably homogeneous fleet was mixed into Amtrak, producing a seizure-inducing flashing light of permutations in the fleet. There are stories of the ex-PRR carmen having an awful time at 14th street trying to get ATSF air conditioning to run.
The problem was then exacerbated by Amtrak's procurement model. The procurement model included lots of experimental stuff that didn't pan out, with a poor support mechanism for those experimental cars. The procurement model also included foreign equipment such as AEM7, which is hard to support across the ocean. The procurement model also included much longer intervals between car orders and lower overall volumes, leading to big time attrition in the supplier base and more one-off components.
Over all, this has lead to serious problems in supporting any rolling stock. It boggles the mind that, despite federal money going to most Amtrak and commuter rolling stock purchases, they haven't settled on one truck design, one HEP design, one window size, one disc/tread brake setup, etc... for any federally-funded rolling stock operating below 100mph. Amtrak has at least three truck designs under their cars - GSC, Waggon, Pioneer... This wasn't mandatory, and in fact the Metroliner EMU had a GSC truck but somehow the Amfleet has a Pioneer truck. Then Pullman comes along, after using GSC for decades, and puts Waggon trucks under the Superliners... Makes no sense.
The new Acela: It's not Aveliable.