What Should A SilverLiner VI Look Like?

MelroseMatt wrote:As much like the Swiss ICE as possible. Puts our Acela to shame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB-CFF-FFS_RABDe_500

You want a commuter car to look like this?

And as for the comparison to the Acela, this ICN is slower, at 125 mph top speed.

How about this from Australia, just need some mods for low level boarding. Also add blue paint to where the green is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transperth_Sets.JPG

dreese_us wrote:How about this from Australia, just need some mods for low level boarding. Also add blue paint to where the green is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transperth_Sets.JPG

It's about one foot too narrow for the US and can't reach the edge of the high platforms (9 feet 6 inches on a 3½-foot gauge track is pretty wide though). It's also 2½ feet shorter above rail, so headroom would be lacking. The crews would certainly like those full-width cabs, but they'd have to be up to AAR crash specs at the very least. Also, the top speed is 80 mph rather than 90 mph. And something tells me that passengers won't like these seats, especially for outlying stations.

The METRA Bi-Level MU's are kinda neat. Maybe a SL VI should be a BL with 2-2 seating.

South Jersey Budd wrote:The METRA Bi-Level MU's are kinda neat. Maybe a SL VI should be a BL with 2-2 seating.

They won't clear. They have two full levels above the trucks. The MLs in the northeast(*) have two levels only between the trucks, and one level over the trucks.

*--counting Virginia as not northeast, since they do operate gallery cars (the name for those Metra bi-levels).

OK then lets go to Baltimore, steal one, slap a pantograph on it and see if the side walls are still on it at Temple.

Still think the METRA are kinda neat. I just stood and looked at them for a while the first time I saw one.

South Jersey Budd wrote:OK then lets go to Baltimore, steal one, slap a pantograph on it and see if the side walls are still on it at Temple.

Still think the METRA are kinda neat. I just stood and looked at them for a while the first time I saw one.

They're also about 1½ feet taller than the tallest multilevel car that can fit through the tunnels unde the Hudson River to New York City. They look like they might have fit into Reading Terminal, but not the CCCT.

Chicago-type bilevels into RT and CCCC? That's a might-have-been.

I saw an old 1970s SEPTA Capital Program. In it was an item for purchase of a few gallery cars. The item lasted apparently for a few years, and then it disappeared. Finally, I got an answer from the late John Henry Strock. It was to be an add-on order to some Burlington stainless steel gallery cars that would have been built by Budd.

One notable thing about the Burlington cars as opposed to the others was (and is) that they are only 15'-8" high, about 3 inches less than the others. They could go anywhere on the RDG, and at that time the CCCC was not on the front burner. Presumably the CCCC would have been designed with them in mind. John said they could be made to fit into Suburban Station. but that someone looked at the effective clearance on the vertical curve west of that station and calculated that it constituted the fatal flaw for system-wide operation.

delvyrails wrote:One notable thing about the Burlington cars as opposed to the others was (and is) that they are only 15'-8" high, about 3 inches less than the others. They could go anywhere on the RDG, and at that time the CCCC was not on the front burner.

Isn't there a low clearance up on the Ninth Street Branch around Indiana Ave?

Matthew Mitchell wrote:Isn't there a low clearance up on the Ninth Street Branch around Indiana Ave?

IIRC, Track 4 at 17th and Indiana has a max equipment height of 15' 4".

well you guys might agree on this one
i hope the vi's BETTER NOT BE BUILT BY HYUNDAI ROTEM

It's likely that the 15'-8" high cars could operate through the 17th and Indiana area back in the 1970s, else the bilevel cars never would have been considered for RDG service.

In those days, the catenary was attached directly and quite closely to the overhead bridge spans of that day. Now, those and other overhead bridges have been replaced; and separate bridge frames have been added to support the catenary on each side of the new bridges. The catenary may well be inches lower than it was in the 70s. In addition, the 16th Street Junction track area has been totally rebuilt as part of Railworks; and there is no guarantee that the rails are at the same level as in the 1970s.

What 1s important now is that specifications for the NJT Multilevel cars show them to have a height two inches lower than the specs show for the Silverliner Vs. This means that a powered or unpowered trilevel car design developed from the ML cars would be a reasonable basis for a Silverliner VI.

The passengers' demand for quality and spaciousness vs. the economics of car design are what have driven the now-nearly-universal North American use of two- and three-deck commuter-rail cars. The key question is whether that demand for quality will be met here, too, or continue mostly to be ignored.

I thought a big reason for multilevel equipment, at least in the northeast, VRE MARC NJT LIRR and MBTA, was to increase train capacity without having to lengthen station platforms.

I looked at some pictures of NJT ALP- 44's coupled to BL's and they don't much taller than the dynamic brake grids. I vote for the BL SL VI.

On SEPTA's railroad, many of the rush hour trains already exceed the length of the station platforms at which they stop. Not all doors can be opened; so the stops are longer. In typical cases, the Willow Grove platform is only four cars long; inbound North Hills, just three. Five-, six-, and seven-car trains are operated on several lines.

A five-car Silverliner V train is about equivalent to a four-car multi-deck train in seating capacity. The latter cars can make more efficent use of existing platforms. Because of more floor space at the doors, they tend to load and unload faster, too.

For the new commuter rail systems in the West, most station platforms used didn't exist before the services started. That fact suggests that economic and service considerations other than platform lengths are what have led to the widespread use of these cars instead of single-level cars.