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New Acela service!

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Posted by Overmod on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 4:29 PM

charlie hebdo
Are you saying everything is serviced in Sunnyside?  Even so, trains must be lightly serviced in Boston (and in DC) now before turning around for return trip.  

Sorry; I thought you meant 'servicing' as in mechanical maintenance and repair.

I've used the term 'turn' for what you do with an arrived train to spruce it up before more passengers board, a term borrowed from the 'hospitality industry'.  And it would be relatively easy to base such a crew, together with its specialized equipment (even extending to vacuum-assisted high-pressure steam-cleaning equipment) on a mobile basis and have them ready in any of the locations you mentioned.  Sunnyside is a bit special because it's (to my knowledge) a bit difficult to access from the road system, but I don't think this poses a particularly difficult logistic problem.

Heavier service to some of the train's systems could probably be handled with non-Amtrak 'outsource' with some union permissions -- I'm thinking specialty equipment, like the high-speed broadband or the combined microwave/convection ovens, not things dear to the heart and pocketbook of existing service provision unions.

I do think the question of where the Avelia Liberties will receive heavy maintenance involves more than the logical point (Bear, DE) but I'm also pretty certain that all of that would have been rolled into the extended 'service arrangement' that is surely part of the contract as signed.

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