blue streak 1 Since Talgos do not meet the FRA crash worthiness will there be the need for a waiver for CHI - MKE route and would they not be able to operate any other route out of CHI ? Amtrak does have a Talgo waiver Vancouver - Eugene.
Since Talgos do not meet the FRA crash worthiness will there be the need for a waiver for CHI - MKE route and would they not be able to operate any other route out of CHI ? Amtrak does have a Talgo waiver Vancouver - Eugene.
Editor Emeritus, This Week at Amtrak
With the rejection of the 810 million by Wisconsin, and wasn't there also a rejection by Ohio and Florida of their awards, it initiated a new round of bids by states and awards by US-DOT?
I believe that Wisconsin under its new political administration put in a proposal to spend a smaller amount of money on the upgrades to the Milwaukee line but leaving out Madison, and that proposal was rejected in favor of other proposals in other states. I don't know if that was a personal decision by Secretary LaHood; I would think it was part of a process under the terms of the ARRA legislation where the US-DOT is supposed to come up with a plan to spend the Stimulus money. But it is true that the rejection of the 810 million followed by the failed proposal to do something only about the current Hiawatha service has lead to the Talgo being left high and dry.
There was also talk during the campaign of using the 810 million for highways, but that probably would have required action by Congress rather than Secretary LaHood agreeing to it, and with Congress gridlocked by the same political wave that brought about the changes in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, the probability of that change was and is low.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
I believe the $800 mil. or so was for the specific purposes in the original proposal, not just whatever Walker wanted. I believe he proposed using the money for other purposes and that proposal was rejected by LaHood.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
To me this is one of the great missed opportunities. When candidate Walker was opposing the Madison line someone should have suggested, "hey, let's take the 810 million dollars and buy about forty new Talgos." Wisconsin would have gotten the jobs, and the entire midwest could have new passenger train sets. Mr. Doyle, Walker and La Hood could have all claimed victory. Sad but it was not to be.
I have heard that whereas the Cascades Talgos do not meet the most recent and upgraded FRA crush force standards, and operate under a waiver requiring a locomotive at one end of the consist and an equally heavy non-powered cab car at the other end (they actually wrote that into the waiver), the Wisconsin Talgos meet all applicable FRA standards, accounting in part for the 40 million dollar price for the two train sets. I saw a picture that they have a Talgo duck-billed cab car at the end of the consist away from the locomotive in contrast with the Cascades Talgos that use a heavy F40PH with the prime mover removed and concrete weight substituted so they set right on their springs.
As to the arguments and rejoinders about the Talgos being exotic orphans, exotic nature and being orphans is all in the point of view. It is indeed arguable that Talgos are no big deal and why-doesn't-Amtrak-buy-them-from-Wisconsin. I am not speaking to my personal opinion about the Talgo but the mind set at Amtrak.
Talgos are plainly in maintenance and couple-to-other-cars sense not interoperable with Amtrak's fleet. Amtrak for better or for worse seems to have a low tolerance for equipment that is not fully interoperable. They scrapped the Turboliners and won't operate the refurbished-at-considerable-expense New York Empire Corridor Turboliners -- those were less "different" than Talgo, but those two required a special and separate maintenance facility, which is what Amtrak seems to want to get away from.
The need for a separate maintenance facility and Amtrak not wanting to provide one in Chicago is indeed a holdup with the Wisconsin Talgos because as far as I can tell, Wisconsin is contractually bound to pay for the two Talgos, two that were intended as an upgrade for the Chi-Mil Hiawatha service and the purchase of which pre-dated the 810 million dollars that the Wisconsin Governor sent back. The hangup is that a legislative committee doesn't want to come up with the bucks for the maintenance facility and doesn't want to honor the contract with Talgo for their maintenance, even though the Governor now wants to have a Wisconsin maintenance facility to at least operate Talgos on the Chicago-Milwaukee run.
Were it not for the political dustup in Wisconsin and the effect of not following through with the special maintenance bay for the Talgos, those Talgos would be up and running between Chicago and Milwaukee. The trains are (I believe) paid for by Wisconsin, but Amtrak does not want to shoulder any responsibility for their maintenance and hence they sit in the carbarn.
Amtrak seems to have "issues" with the Pioneer III inside bearing trucks on Amfleet and the radius-link trucks on the Superliner I's, a style of truck developed out of European, Japanese, and English experience with the requirements for high-speed passenger operation, preferring the clunky "pedestal" style trucks on the Superliner II's and the Horizon cars (the Comet cars on which the Horizons are based have Amfleet-style trucks.) The problem with pedestal trucks is they can wear and develop play between the axle boxes and the pedestal guides in the truck frames, leading to very bad ride at high speeds as the British were among the first to learn the science behind this. When you ride Amtrak and experience a bad ride "at speed", maybe the problem isn't bad track but instead worn trucks or worn wheel tapers on the passenger car. If people encounter patches of bad ride, I am curious as to reports as whether it is equally bad in different cars in the consist. I am also curious about differential experience between Amfleet, Viewliner, and Superliners I and II in this regard -- it may be the car and not the track.
Maybe Don Oltmann can enlighten me more on any inside scoop he has on Amfleet trucks or Amtrak's preferences, and maybe modern pedestal trucks have some kind of "self-adjusting wedges" that go into the axle box guides. I had ridden some modern Metra gallery bi-level cars on an express train that didn't bounce and sway like the Northwestern bi-levels on the North Line back in the 1970's -- maybe the modern pedestal trucks are improved, maybe the train cars I rode on were not riding on worn pedestal guides with wheel tapers worn down out of spec, maybe the track has been upgraded since the C&NW days.
Whereas the Talgos are a forward-looking design, both from the standpoint of onboard amenities as well as their guided axles and passive tilt, I have a hunch that Amtrak is going to go with the most conservative possible tech, with pedestal-trucked bi-levels and eventually new locomotives meant for 110 MPH with track pounding nose-suspended traction motors, but hey, the track maintenance comes out of another budget. Forget the passive tilt, I bet Amtrak won't even go with an outside-spring style truck like on Amfleet that is qualified to negotiate curves faster than the plain-old plain-old they seem to want to go with.
The original idea behind Talgo is that it wouldn't just be a Cascades thing or a Wisconsin thing, but that there would be a big Talgo buy for the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative and Talgo would be the de-facto next-gen Amtrak train. That is part of what former Governor Jim Doyle was betting on, putting Wisconsin in the lead with the Talgo order and getting both the Talgo factory and the Talgo maintenance barn in his state. I guess not only is the new Wisconsin Governor not buying into this idea, Amtrak and the neighboring Midwest Regional Rail Initiative states don't seem to be buying into it either.
Being incompatible with other equipment is irrelevent since they are a complete train.
My point is that the Wisconsin Talgos are not the first on Amtrak's system and are not unique, since Cascades have been running them for over a decade.
They certainly are less flexible, but that's not the same.
The Talgo is most certainly exotic. I know of one other train using guided single-axle trucks -- it is used as a commuter train in Denmark. I know of no other train within the past 100 years that lacks a solid axle connection between the wheels and has bearings to allow the wheels to rotate independently. The Talgo keeps its wheels on the tracks using engineering principles employed by no other train.
The WIsconsin Talgo is an orphan. I assume a Talgo train set has couplers at each so you can attach a locomotive in service or a switch engine to shunt it in a coach yard or a maintenance bay, but it does not have any provision for passage between it and any other passenger equipment or even itself. At least the TurboTrain had those clamshell doors that allowed joining a pair of train sets, which was part of the original Alan Cripe concept and was tested in Canada.
It is also an orphan because as part of the Talgo contract there was supposed to be a Talgo-specific maintenance facility -- would anyone at Beech Grove know what to do with a Talgo trainset? So yes, if State of Washington wants to make a deal with State of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Talgos could probably be used out west, but they are most thoroughly incompatible with any other Amtrak equipment.
There is also the culture of Amtrak. Amtrak would have nothing to do with the Empire Corridor Turboliners, which are thoroughly conventional passenger cars apart from the turbine "power cars" at each end.
Why would the Talgos be considered Exotic orphans. Are these significantly different from the Talgos that have been running in Cascade service for the last decade+?
Of course, I would assume that Oregon, Washington and BC would get first crack at these for that very reason. They would be confined to a single maintenance location, but that not withstanding, I think it is incorrect to say that the Talgos are an unknown. I'd say that the cascades are as solid a proving ground as the Surfliner, Capitol Corridor and San Joaquins are.
Having said that, one advantage of the California cars is that they mate right up to superliner cars which means that California could grow the fleet with those superliners. I road many a surfliner with those cars. I actually prefered to ride in the superliner car.
Paul Milenkovic So why, then, is Amtrak or Illinois offering to purchase the Talgo sets, maybe even getting a "deal" on them by having Wisconsin "eat" some of the cost of the original contract?
So why, then, is Amtrak or Illinois offering to purchase the Talgo sets, maybe even getting a "deal" on them by having Wisconsin "eat" some of the cost of the original contract?
The bi-levels are a lower-risk choice as California has had good experience with them in the form of the Surfliners and Amtrak has had good experience with the Superliners I and II.
The Talgos are a "forward looking" choice as they are maybe half the weight per seat (if you leave out the locomotive and non-revenue cab car at the other end), which could mean energy savings, although the energy savings may depend more on the aerodynamics and how well the locomotive blends in with the trailing cars, and the real-world energy use of any of the corridor consists has never been disclosed, and not for lack of trying to find this information.
The Talgos also derive all of their wheel steering from "forced-steer" linkages (The newer radial-truck EMD locomotives also have guided-axles, but they work on the "self-steer" principle where only the axles within one truck are interlinked. The Talgo along with some European radial trucks are "forced-steer", where steering commands come from the pivoting of the truck relative to the body as well with the radial trucks, in the Talgo case, the train cars themselves are the trucks.) Also, the Talgo gets no steering corrections from the wheel taper as each wheel is independently rotating. Any steering forces in the Talgo have to come from the gravity effect of the wheels seeking the low spot on their flange taper along with the articulation of the train cars around curves steering each wheel set. The 1950's Train-X along with the 1960's TurboTrain had guided axles much like the Talgo, but they didn't go as far as the independently rotation wheels, which completely changes the tracking properties and the stability properties at speed.
One selling point of the Talgo is having the same low floor throughout the consist. The bi-levels have low floors at their boarding point and passengers need to navigate stairs if they want to go to the bistro car. A second selling point is the light weight and perhaps lower fuel consumption, on which there are not any public figures. A third selling point is the pendulum tilt, but the Talgos are not active tilt like the Pendolino trains but passive tilt, and for a variety of technical reasons correct for only about 1/3 of the centrifugal force. A fourth point is the that Talgos are nicely appointed, but nice seats and TV monitors, etc., etc. could be added to any kind of train. A fifth selling point is that the guided axle tech could give the Talgos some advantage in terms of lower wheel wear, lower rail wear, potential to operate faster than 110 MPH in the future, but I don't think this feature has been quantified.
As to the tilt, Amfleet cars are not tilting but they have outside springs and they tilt the wrong way going into curves much less than conventional equipment. Amfleet cars have an FRA waiver to run faster on curves, and Amtrak's trials of the LRC active-tilting train matched up against Amfleet didn't find and schedule time advantage over Amfleet. Subject to the limitations of the heavy locomotives Amtrak uses, you are limited in curve speed by the locomotive axle loading. Perhaps some small amount of passive tilt could be "dialed in" to the bi-level cars by minor suspension geometry changes to make them at least comparable to Amfleet if not slightly better. Is this on Amtrak's or FRA's radar screen in making this big bi-level buy the Amtrak will operate for the next 40 years?
One knock on the Talgo is that they are lightweight trains that sit close to the rails and share the same attribute of lightweight low-center-of-gravity trains ever since they were tried in the late 1950's -- a less comfortable ride. A lot of this is subjective, and the quality of the sound a vehicle makes when it hits bumps contributes to perception as much as motion from hitting a bump. There have been varying reports where some people love the Cascades Talgos and others could do without them, but this too could be subjective as to how different people rate-the-ride.
The final knock on the Talgos is that they are exotic orphans, and Amtrak doesn't want them in their shops thank-you-very-much. We went through this with New York State refurbishing the Turboliners at multi-million dollar expense, turbine powered but otherwise conventional with respect to trucks and wheels, and New York being told that Amtrak doesn't want anything to do with them.
The Talgo sets were paid for by the State of Wisconsin. They only way they will "move" to another venue is when they are sold/leased to another operator. They are not free to move about the country.
Why not move the whole factory? Part of it may be that Wisconsin is more hilly, and the Chicago St. Louis line is relatively curve-free.
We allknow tha tAmtrak is ordering more cars for Illinois inter-city service, and we also know that Wisconsin has cancelled the Talgo plans.
Why can't we just cancel the new shipment of cars and Move the Talgos down to Illinois for transport there, where we're planning on implementing new equipment on the routes?
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