I'm just still sore that they killed off my beloved f40's.....
AMTRAKKER I'm just still sore that they killed off my beloved f40's.....
They were worn out. 20 years of high-speed operation will do that to a locomotive.
CSSHEGEWISCH AMTRAKKER I'm just still sore that they killed off my beloved f40's..... They were worn out. 20 years of high-speed operation will do that to a locomotive.
They had their warts, too. The gear driven HEP didn't have many fans in the mechanical dept. The short distance between truck centers wasn't ideal for high speed running. Those swing hanger Blomberg trucks have lots of moving and wearing parts, too - compared to the fabricated bolsterless ones on the P42. Fuel economy was okay for the 70s, but pretty poor for the 90s.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
blue streak 1 The circular design of Amfleets appear to be much harder to repair than Viewliners ?
Passenger cars don't take quite the beating locomotives do. Ease of repairing wreck damage is a lesser consideration for passenger cars.
Very few Amfleet have be lost due to wreck damage over their nearly 40 years.
OhioRiverTrail Whatever happened to BIG PICTURE WINDOWS. The Turbo Trains were bad but they had these big windows
Whatever happened to BIG PICTURE WINDOWS. The Turbo Trains were bad but they had these big windows
They still exist. I sat alongside one of them on the gallery coach that I rode to work this morning.
I like the Talgos! Maybe that is because it is fun to have something unique, but they look good. And those F59PHIs...beautiful.
Paul Milenkovic In the nearly trillion dollars in the 2009 ARRA (the Stimulus) to do the things for economic recovery that you indeed propose, my understanding is that the major part of it was to make up for the shortfalls in State budgets paying for school teachers, with a minor part going to the "shovel ready" infrastructure projects. Of that money, about 8 billion dollars filtered down for passenger trains, and this is from a President and composition of Congress as favorably disposed towards trains as you are going to see in a long time.
In the nearly trillion dollars in the 2009 ARRA (the Stimulus) to do the things for economic recovery that you indeed propose, my understanding is that the major part of it was to make up for the shortfalls in State budgets paying for school teachers, with a minor part going to the "shovel ready" infrastructure projects. Of that money, about 8 billion dollars filtered down for passenger trains, and this is from a President and composition of Congress as favorably disposed towards trains as you are going to see in a long time.
Your understanding is not correct. Over 40% of the ARRA money went to tax cuts. A little less than 11% went to education. A little over 14% went to infrastructure. See stimulus.org (click on "2009 stimulus".) The tax cuts were added to secure GOP support in the Senate (the bill needed a filibuster-proof majority.)
One problem with securing public support for passenger train investment is that it's not as well hidden from the taxpayer as some other spending. One observes many people (in this forum and elsewhere) waxing livid against spending $8 billion on rail, but very few people know that United Airlines alone dumped $7 billion of pension obligations onto the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. The PBGC is one of those agencies whose costs are and are not paid by the taxpayers: in theory it is funded entirely by premiums paid by the private sector, but in practice those premiums keep falling short, and the potential exposure to the taxpayers gets factored into calculations of the federal deficit, leading to a spiral where the more private sector companies dump their obligations onto the public sector, the more cries one hears from fiscal conservatives that the public sector is broke and can't afford new investment.
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