DutchRailnut wrote:
don't confuse the purchase price for paying for refurbishments.
The $1 per car was basicly a transfer price to unload cars payed for with federal dollars to another agency.
The $10 000 is what VRE spend to make the cars fit for duty.
So now Metra has to pay that to get cars back if they want them.
Indeed, people tend to focus too much on sticker price and not enough on total cost of ownership. (If people could do math, then inkjets would be relegated to photo printing, while laser printers clean up in the home market as well as the office.)
Actually, Metra is getting even better of a deal than that. VRE spent about $300,000 each to refurbish the cars, not merely $10,000. (Still only 10-20% of what it would have cost to purchase new cars).
From
http://www.vre.org/about/minutes/minutes-june2000.htm (emphasis mine):
Total project costs for the overhaul of twenty gallery cars is $6.08 million (including contingency funds). This project is fully funded using both federal grants and $1.28 million from the sale of 18 Budd rail cars (14 cars to California and 4 cars to Vermont).
So basically, Metra is getting $290,000 worth of free improvements to the cars, minus 8 years of minor wear-and-tear in sunny Virginia (as compared to icy Chicago). Pretty decent deal considering they needed the cars in a crunch, and couldn't wait for the legislature to dump tens of millions of dollars on them.