ACELA IS IT A BIG MISTAKE

[Anonymous]

Townsend, Have you ever crawled into Liverpool Station in London from say.. Suffolk on the early Inter City Rail?

DC to NYC is one big urban corridor that has also freight traffic to deal with.

I think I will take the 5 hours from London to Edinburgh rather than taking the trouble to drive the roads between the two cities seeing that most everything is near the stations.

[Anonymous]

From my side of the Atlantic, i think Acela is OK and it's a shame the turbo liner program for New York - Albany ran out of cash. In Britain the West Coast Mainline has been upgraded by working down to the foundations and building up again while still running trains. It has been disruptive and very expensive, majorly over budget, but on the same alignement and the extra speed has been won using tilting trains and new more robust catenery. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link is expensive, but on budget and on time. It would have been cheaper to build a new TGV style line than up grade the West Coast Mainline. But in Britain Cities are close together so you have to consider is a new super railway that good a deal if you maby stop every 70 miles. I live in Doncaster on the East Coast Mainline from London to Scotland, an express train that has a limited time table may stop at Peterborough (78 miles from London) Grantham (105 miles from London) Doncaster (156 Miles from London) York (188 miles from London) Newcastle (268 Miles from London) and Edinburgh (393 miles from London). That sort of run may take 5 hours, some trains may just stop at York and Newcastle and take 4 hours, but some trains can stop more frequently. Now with 230 miles or so between NY and DC with two major cities and other sizable places you dont want to miss, is something that goes 125 to 150 mph such a bad deal.

[oltmannd]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Paul Milenkovic

I think the Acela trains were a big mistake, not only for the NEC, but also for just about anybody else trying to promote/establish/justify to voters high speed trains in other parts of the country.

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The less sexy alternative would have been to take AEM-7/Amfleet trains, put in the nice Acela interiors with the tables and power plugs for running your laptop computer on the train, and perhaps upgrading some crossovers, switches, and alignments on the bottleneck low-speed segments of the NEC to boost running times. Would the public not ride these trains? Are people that dumb that they flock to ride the Bombardier Acelas because they are new but won't ride the Amfleet cars? Are the folks in California off base for buying double-decker cars based on proven Superliner (and Santa Fe HiLevel) designs and fitting them with tables an power plugs for people to run their laptop computers?

Well put. I'll comment a bit on what I've snipped from your post.

I would agree that Acela is (was?) a mistake for all the reasons you cite, but I would also say that it is "sucessful" in that it has achieved broad acceptance and has the 150 mph 'Gee Whiz' factor. (Right now it has the 'Gee whiz, broken again' factor). It also is pulling in a heafty fare premium and a good chunk of revenue.

You could say nearly the same good things about the AEM7-hauled Metroliners. If you decide to do AEM7/Amfleet "Acelas", you'd have had 135 mph top speed and something like 3:15 NYP-Boston running time. Was it worth the extra bucks for 15-20 minutes and 15 mph off the top speed? Doubtful! But the 3 hour running time was in the legislation that provide the money for electrification (I think) -so here we are with the tail wagging the dog -- again!

[Paul Milenkovic]

I think the Acela trains were a big mistake, not only for the NEC, but also for just about anybody else trying to promote/establish/justify to voters high speed trains in other parts of the country.

Lets look at the examples of the Metroliner and the Alan Cripe Turbo Train. The idea behind these two trains was a USDOT demonstration of the potential for high-speed passenger service in the NEC. This was in the 1960's and it preceded Amtrak -- it was a kind of government/railroad partnership where the government would foster development of the technology and the railroads would operate the passenger trains along the pre-Amtrak model.

NY-DC was electrified, and your basic passenger train was a GG-1 pulling a string of streamliner cars. MU cars such as the Budd Silverliner were a known technology in commuter service along that line. The original idea was to up-gear the Silverliner to provide a combination of high speeds and high accelerations to provide comfortable trains on fast schedules over the entire distance of the Corridor. USDOT ran some tests where they ran some up-geared Silverliners at 160 MPH.

When the "planning committee" got into the act (combination of government and railroad representatives), they drafted a bunch of specs. The specs were for 160 MPH operation (the Japanese were planning 150 MPH, so we had to one-up them -- this is not my speculation, my source had connections to that planning process) along with enough acceleration to reach those speeds. Oh, this was in a blunt-nosed MU car with an exposed underbody, unlike the Japanese train with a bullet-nosed end and streamlined underbody (in all fairness, the "A" ends of Metroliner MU's has a fiberglass shell that rounded the corners and provided some streamlining over a stock Silverliner commuter car). With these specs in hand, the HP increased which in turn increased the weight which in turn increased the HP until you got an 80 ton MU car with 2500 HP on top of some rough riding trucks that were there on the insistence of the PRR. You ended up with a small production run (50 cars) of a highly customized from existing designs MU car to very high performance specs (the top speed was mainly for show -- no one believed you would operate at 160 MPH), achieved by simply scaling existing technology past the point of diminishing returns, and you ended up with a car-barn queen.

I have somewhat more sympathy for the Alan Cripe Turbo Train. The idea was to use a lightweight train with tilting and which didn't require the electric catenary to achieve good running times on the non-electrified curvy line between NY and Boston. The train was a lot of outside-the-box thinking, and if it had teething problems, one could assign that the being a pioneer and developing tomorrow's train. It made extensive use of aircraft-style aluminum construction to get a lightweight train that met the (1960s era) FRA strength requirements. It used turbine engines to get a lot of HP while maintaining light weight. It used guided single axles, for both light weight and good high-speed tracking, and it had a pendulum suspension allowing it to bank into curves without the need for a complex hydraulic system (like Acela). The original concept was developed by Alan Cripe by the C&O back in the 1950s, but I believe the original concept was for lightweight Diesels in the fashion of the RDC.

I guess turbines are a dumb idea for railroads unless you want to waste a lot of fuel -- a passenger train needs a lot of HP to get up to speed, but unless it is horribly unstreamlined, it should cruise at a much reduced power setting -- not a good use of turbines which get good fuel economy at sea level only when operated near max power. Maybe they should have pulled the turbines out of the Turbo Trains and simply ran them behind F9's -- Canada ran Turbos behind F9's when they had turbine failures, and they got good running that way because the Turbo is so light weight. A Diesel loco pulling a lightweight pendulum tilting train -- that is what you have with the Pacific Cascades Talgo, and I haven't heard too many complaints from passengers or the folks operating that train. In my opinion, Alan Cripe has a better design for a pendulum-banked guided axle train than the Talgo people from an engineering perspective, but I guess the Talgo people have a product they want to sell you while the people who made the TurboTrain are no longer in that business.

OK, on to Acela. The "proven technology" for the NEC in this age is an AEM-7 pulling Amfleet cars -- kind of like taking the motors out of some Metroliner cars and putting a modernized GG-1 in front. The idea was that this tech wasn't sexy enough or something and that we needed something like the French TGV (just like back in the 1960's the Japanese Bullet Train was the benchmark). So, you stick a high-powered electric locomotive at each end and you add tilting, but because of the FRA standards and political considerations about having the trains assembled the U.S., you end up with this highly-customized, low production run, overweight, up-powered thing that you can point to as the next new thing but turns out to be an expensive car-barn queen.

The less sexy alternative would have been to take AEM-7/Amfleet trains, put in the nice Acela interiors with the tables and power plugs for running your laptop computer on the train, and perhaps upgrading some crossovers, switches, and alignments on the bottleneck low-speed segments of the NEC to boost running times. Would the public not ride these trains? Are people that dumb that they flock to ride the Bombardier Acelas because they are new but won't ride the Amfleet cars? Are the folks in California off base for buying double-decker cars based on proven Superliner (and Santa Fe HiLevel) designs and fitting them with tables an power plugs for people to run their laptop computers?

The Japanese Bullet Trains along the the French TGVs are highly-engineered systems based on research and tests going back to the 1950's -- the systems encompass the track, signals, electric power distribution, and the trains. Yes, they are expensive, but they are well thought out. Only now, on their 3rd or 4th generation Bullet Train design are they adding tilting, and only a small amount of tilt -- it will allow them to negotiate their very broad-radius curves without any speed reduction, and they did the analysis that the savings in running time and energy use were worth the expenditure.

I get the feeling that the Acela trains were a matter of adding a fancy "second generation Metroliner" without any consideration to the overall system, which may require a more detailed analysis of the speed restriction bottlenecks on the NEC and the tradeoffs between investing in train HP or in trackwork. But the brake problems are just the point end of the iceberg as to what is wrong with them.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by MP57313

Huh? Depreciation expenses do not generate more funds for capital acquisitions.
[/quote

Well, depends on how well the managers run the business. I have worked for corporations that capture the depreciation charges from each business unit just as if they were a utility bill, like electricity. Those funds are placed in banks, money markets, etc. and become an internal capital fund. I have also worked for companies that do not repleni***he capital funds and must constantly turn to outside lenders for funding, of course at the current interest rates. The later system allows for higher cash flows through the business, which looks good to investors in the short term, but causes lower growth in the long run.

Honestly I cannot see how in any sense the Acela can be considered a mistake. For such a large change in technology for both Amtrak and Bombardier there has been few teething problems. If you think that I am off the mark look back at the Metroliners, or United Aircraft Turbotrains. When they were new they were horrible, but after a few years of experience and modifications they became reliable workhorses. (yes I know the Metroliners were still expensive to maintain)

The Acela has been accepted by the general public as a viable alternative to aircraft travel. The public is willing to pay a premium for this real (or perceived) benefit. Argue all you want about speed, the builder, Amtrak, teething problems and the like. But the bottom line is that if the general public accepts the technology then it is successful. And the Acela is successful.

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