Indian engineer and Amtrak have a bad day

This just in: The Deccan Herald in India reports that a passenger train bound for Bahareich on the North-Eastern Railway left 500 passengers stranded in seven of its eight coaches because the engineer was blissfully unaware the train had separated behind the first coach while standing in the station at Gullabeer.

The hapless passengers at first believed there was a technical problem. “We thought the train might have come to a halt because of some . . . lack of signal,” one passenger told the newspaper. The engineer (they’re called drivers in India) realized he had a one-car train only after coming to a halt at Bahareich, three miles down the pike, and finally turning around. The newspaper reports that passengers reached Bahareich after a four-hour delay.

Surely things are not that bad on Amtrak, you must be thinking. The answer is yes indeed they are that bad, if you wanted to ride the Palmetto from Savannah, Ga., and points north to New York City. Reports I've seen lately reveal that air conditioning units on Amfleet cars, many of them going on four decades of age, are failing serially. If you suspect nobody is doing preventative maintenance on these cars, you may be correct. In Amtrak's defense, seldom is its equipment tested against the heat and humidity in the manner it was in early July along the Atlantic coast.

On July 8 the New York-Savannah, Ga., Palmetto was all but KOd by cooling failures. Southbound 89 that day left Fayetteville, N.C., with three hot coaches. Compressors were restarted at Florence, S.C., but because two of these cars were repeat offenders they were shopped at Savannah and put on the rear of the next day’s train 90 as deadheads.

To accommodate heavy ridership, Amtrak ordered up three busses for Washington, from Charleston, S.C., Florence, and Fayetteville. But before 90 could leave Savannah July 9 a third car was shopped for a bad AC compressor. By my count, the train was now down to two usable coaches and a snack car. A fourth bus scooped up people waiting for 90 in Kingstree, S.C.

The busses were to connect in Washington with Northeast Corridor train 182, but the busses were late and 182 left without 85 passengers. So passengers with carry-on luggage were to go on the next train, 192, and those with checked baggage on train 66, the overnight run to Boston. However, the usher at Washington Union Station got confused and told train 192 to leave without the Palmetto passengers. They all were crammed onto train 66 (once called the Night Owl) and got to New York in the middle of the night.

Now let’s talk locomotives. Of 89 assigned to the Northeast Corridor, 23 (or 26 percent) are out of service. That includes 40 percent of the 15 HHP-8 electrics and 26 percent of the AEM-7s. The 11 P42 diesels and 17 P32 dual-mode engines are hanging in there quite nicely. So will someone please explain why the diesels, with so many moving parts, run like Singer sewing machines and the electrics, with so few moving parts, hardly run at all? — Fred W. Frailey