Western Railroad Discussion > What ever happend to Amtrak's Material Handling Cars?

Late in the 1980's, Amtrak's California Zephyr trains began to run new box cars called "material handling cars". I have not seen any in several years. Zephyr trains seem to run with classic "heritage" baggage cars now. What happened to the box cars? Did they go the way of Amtrak refers?

James

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There is a bunch of them stored up on the Santa Maria Valley R.R. in central coast California.

The Web master got some pics of them in a tread of his way back.

Cima Scrambler also got them in one back ground of his pics he took a few weeks ago on his Coast Starlight trip.

Hope this helps

P5r24, out

The MHCs were all sidelined after some derailments at speed. Reportedly there were issues with their trucks "hunting" and jumping the tracks. There were threads about their retirement in on TO.

I went back and found that thread about the cars on the Santa Maria Valley RR. The pictures posted in January 2006 showed express boxcars, not MHCs. Those two car types are significantly different from each other.

There are several, like 25 to 30 parked in Harrisburg, Pa, just east of the web cam.
UP4306

There were three types of box cars that Amtrak used over time. The first cars, the Material Handling Cars were built using and new body and rebuilt high-speed trucks from former express cars. The MHC cars had pass-through cabling for HEP and usually operated on the head end of the train. The Southwest Chief usually had four or five daily. I believe there was an issue with metal fatigue in which an equalizer failed and caused a derailment. That's the basic outline, but I am not sure of the exact details.

Later on, Amtrak got into the express business and started hauling box cars at the rear of the train. These were much more standard box cars. The trucks were modified with dampers to improve their high-speed performance, but were always problematic at high speeds. I think Amtrak had a couple different orders of cars.

Amtrak also hauled refrigerator cars under the Express Trak name. Those cars were rebuilt mechanical refrigerator cars, with a refrigeration unit on one end that looked more like what you see on a semi truck these days. Those cars are mostly (if not all) stored in Santa Maria.

I had heard that due to the various derailment issues as mentioned in the previous responses that the MHC's were governed down to 60mph or less. Because most Amtrak trains operate at much higher speeds, the MHC's were dumped.

I had also heard that someone proved the mail contract was losing Amtrak more money than it was worth and there was no need to continue it. The same happened with the plain boxcars and ExpressTrak reefers, too expensive and not worth it.

Rio Grande Fan
Denver, CO

last i heard was from trains magazine that the boxcars were being a discontinued service, and Amtrak was storing several in a area and possibliy selling them off.

The only reason for the discontinued service according to the magazine was it wasnt making money, the service was costing amtrak more than it was worth.

This is the way it was told to me:

The express-freight business indeed turned out to be a loser, particularly because Amtrak could not manage to complete the network expansion that it announced when it started handling the traffic. That resulted in the conventional boxcars, and later the ExpressTrak reefers, being parked. The reefers outlasted the boxcars for a little while because of contractual commitments.

The MHCs had been used primarily for handling bulk mail. Once they were sidelined, Amtrak sought a USPS commitment for future volume of business sufficient to justify the capital cost of obtaining replacement rolling stock. USPS refused and so Amtrak got out of the bulk-mail business.

toledopatch Wrote:
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> This is the way it was told to me:
> (snip)
>
> The MHCs had been used primarily for handling bulk
> mail. Once they were sidelined, Amtrak sought a
> USPS commitment for future volume of business
> sufficient to justify the capital cost of
> obtaining replacement rolling stock. USPS refused
> and so Amtrak got out of the bulk-mail business.

That's a shame. Handling the mail was always a significant money maker for the railroads. PennCentral and Conrail ran a lot of dedicated mail trains over the years.

How about the road railers Amtrak hauled for awhile! I went east on the Chief few years ago, during service stop at Albuquerqe,was a dozen or more road railers behind the superliners? Remember when we left LAUPT we pulled out, then backed up on another track to hook up to the roadrailers!

PWB Wrote:
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> How about the road railers Amtrak hauled for
> awhile! I went east on the Chief few years ago,
> during service stop at Albuquerqe,was a dozen or
> more road railers behind the superliners? Remember
> when we left LAUPT we pulled out, then backed up
> on another track to hook up to the roadrailers!

I for one hated that manuver! Took forever to get that junked hooked up and a lot longer just to get a brake test done! Good riddance! I for one know Amtrak made good money with just the MHCs, the problem is that article in Trains that started the whole crap to begin with! I'm glad Amtrak's back as regular passenger trains, but the managemnt they had durin' that time thought it was a great idea to add more, and yes, it turned out as a joke, and if I remember with the roadrailers, it's like almost everyday No. 3 had to set at least one out because the Bogies became BO! Like I said, good riddance, but I do still miss the MHCs!

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
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> toledopatch Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > This is the way it was told to me:
> > (snip)
> >
> > The MHCs had been used primarily for handling
> bulk
> > mail. Once they were sidelined, Amtrak sought a
> > USPS commitment for future volume of business
> > sufficient to justify the capital cost of
> > obtaining replacement rolling stock. USPS
> refused
> > and so Amtrak got out of the bulk-mail
> business.
>
> That's a shame. Handling the mail was always a
> significant money maker for the railroads.
> PennCentral and Conrail ran a lot of dedicated
> mail trains over the years.

NS is still handling a lot of the mail business Conrail used to move. The first-class mail that used to be sorted in RPOs, though, substantially declined in the 1960s when the USPS switched most contracts to trucks or aircraft, and has been completely gone for three decades.

PWB Wrote:
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> How about the road railers Amtrak hauled for
> awhile!

Norfolk Southern's Triple Crown Service bought many, if not all, of Amtrak's RoadRailers. I see a couple just about every time I see a Triple Crown train.

General Mills uses ex-Amtrak MHC's. There are always some rambling around Des Moines, IA from the plant south of town in Carlisle.

-Justin

Here's the Southwest Chief when it had a little of everything hanging on the rear. This was about 2002. The theory of the express business was superficially attractive, in the sense that the marginal cost of adding a few cars to a train should be small. But the equipment was not cheap, the switching moves were time consuming and expensive, and the impact on passenger convenience was severe. Simply too much had changed since the days of the traditional headend mail and express business. Interesting idea, poorly executed, thank God it's overwith.

JBW

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jbwest Wrote:
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> But the equipment was not cheap,
> the switching moves were time consuming and
> expensive, and the impact on passenger convenience
> was severe. Simply too much had changed since the
> days of the traditional headend mail and express
> business. Interesting idea, poorly executed,
> thank God it's overwith.
>
> JBW


A friend (now deceased) who was very involved with all of this said that in addition to all of the above, there was no efficient way to gather the cars from hither and yon and they were scattered all over the system, the LCL orders were often not loaded properly and you would have such things as cases of beer sliding all over the place in a car, or the destination of the cargo did not have a fork lift to unload them. This was one of those situation where someone started a vast project with half-vast ideas.
C.

Carol Voss
Bakersfield, CA