Paul Milenkovic One more thing. In my view, Budd simply made the best railroad passenger cars -- whether the Amtrak Heritage fleet, the Amfleet, or the Silverliner MU cars. Weren't they an automotive supplier?
One more thing. In my view, Budd simply made the best railroad passenger cars -- whether the Amtrak Heritage fleet, the Amfleet, or the Silverliner MU cars. Weren't they an automotive supplier?
...and the first thing Budd built by shot welding was an airplane. It's sitting outside the Franklin Inst. in Phila.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Apart from the passenger-only line, the low axle loads and absence of nose-hung traction motors to pound up the track, that superior technology is no trade secret, its just that the management of Beech Grove don't seem to want that style of truck in their shop for some reason I cannot fathom.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
If you had ever ridden an German ICE-3 or its Siemens equivalent in China, at high speeds and smooth as silk comfort and quiet, you would know what superior technology is.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Yes, if you could get a railroad passenger car for 1.2M, that would be a deal.
The Aerotrain coach, at half the price (and again half the length of car and half as many seats) would be about 300K -- doesn't that make it competitive with current motorcoach prices?
The thing about the Aerotrain is that it is frequently discussed with derision, "Oh, those were nothing but bus bodies put on steel wheels by GM, and what did they know about trains?" For starters, they became the dominant locomotive builder through their EMD subsidiary, applying automotive concepts of internal combustion power, standardization, and volume production.
I have reasoned before that the Aerotrain was a naive design before "hunting" and "critical speeds" were scientifically understood -- you could not just replace the axles of a bus with railroad wheels and expect that to work. On the other hand the remark, "It was just a bus" (I guess a bad thing somehow) "turned into a train" perhaps reveals something about trains.
The steel wheel on the steel rail is perhaps a much more demanding shock and vibration environment than a rubber-on-concrete vehicle. This is usually phrased as "those wannabes from the automotive world who just want to build trains have a thing or two to learn."
But maybe, railroad passenger cars, in contrast with freight cars where you permit the lading to be subject to the shocks, have to be heavier and much more rugged than buses -- to isolate the passengers from the shocks transmitted up from the steel wheels, the lateral motion of those steel wheels as their cone taper steers them to follow the tracks, the buff and draft requirements as rail passenger cars are formed into trains, coupling shocks, and so on. The United Aircraft Turbo Train was perhaps a train designed by Henry6's "layed-off aerospace engineers" who presumably didn't know the first thing about how to build a proper train, and Jason Shron in TurboTrain: A Journey tells of how one hard coupling from a switch engine wrecked the suspension struts in an entire 7-unit trainset in Canada.
We keep coming back to this. Whenever someone wants to innovate, essentially to reduce costs, in the rail passenger business, there is the inevitable, "you don't know the first thing about railroading if you think you can take your fancy aerospace/automotive experience and start building lightweight train cars." This comes up around here -- it has come up time in again in guest commentary in Trains Magazine -- especially in back issues in the late 1950's through early 1970's when people were still thinking about lighweight trains.
The comment is made along the lines that what we have for passenger operations, the separately coupled locomotive, the 85' steel or stainless steel passenger car on 2-axle swing-hanger pedestal trucks, that system is "tried and true", works, is rugged, reliable, and comfortable, and don't think you are so smart to improve on it. That system is also pretty expensive, to purchase and also to keep in operation for some reason, and every other industry is constantly looking for ways to be more economical to get ahead.
Inflation 1956 to 2009 is about x7.8, so an 80 seat coach at $2000/seat = $1.2M
June 13, 1956: Publicity run of The Keystone, the "tubular" lightweight, low-center-of gravity
train built by The Budd Company; consists of seven coaches and
a head-end-power/kitchen car; tubular cars cost $2,000 per seat, vs.
$3,000 for Congressional type car and $1,000 for "Aerotrain".
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