Nostalgia & History > Amtrak Equipment manual from the 1970's

Click on the Flickr link for a scanned copy of an Amtrak equipment manual:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9448097@N02/sets/72157680960995784

I named it after my good friend, the late John Arbuckle, who was an expert on everything Amtrak, especially passenger car history. Each car has a diagram of the interior and then of the underside of the car. Most cars have 2 photos, one of the exterior and one of the interior. I scanned, enlarged and enhanced the small photos from the underside car body page. There are some rare shots of the interiors, albeit black & white and a little fuzzy. Where there are similar cars, but some in a different numbering sequence, then I have omitted the duplicate photos. This manual is a snapshot of Amtrak's equipment just as the first Amfleet cars were being ordered. It does include schematics of the new Amcoach, Amclub, & Amdinette cars at the end. The variety of equipment is amazing, with many oddball configurations. Most impressive is the contributions of the SCL and the ATSF to the equipment pool. The BN also had many nice cars that made up a lot of the Western long distance trains. Many of the cars had short lives with Amtrak. Maybe 7 or 8 years of service before they starting be replaced by Amfleet and the Superliners. Amtrak also suffered from many derailments in those early years, and they were also determined to achieve fleet standardization. They ran the pants off these cars and in addition a couple of brutal Winters also took their toll. This was a gargantuan scanning process and I'm glad to be done with it. I hope this helps in your research on Amtrak & pre-Amtrak car history. I'm not sure how many of these books were printed. My copy came by way of John Mills, former Amtrak manager. He was involved with the ex-Santa Fe hi-level HEP program as well as the 2nd order of Superliners from Bombardier.

This is fantastic. Very much appreciate your effort in putting this together and making it available.

DAMN I miss John , he helped fans of the Chief Route immensely, and loved his pass car knowledge. I had an Amtrak HEP manual but left it on the last run of the Steam heated SFZ e/b

I am not with it for computers, but unable to open on IE-Google-Fire Fox.

IE opens one page.   How do I view the manual.


Now google, flicker says page not found !



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/17 11:27 by mundo.

mundo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am not with it for computers, but unable to open
> on IE-Google-Fire Fox.
>
> IE opens one page.   How do I view the manual.
>

Same for me. Only one page shows up, and it won't open to show the entire document.

Flickr shows this as an album with ONE image. I can open that one image but there's nothing else.

Also, if the point of all your hard work was to share it, once the page situation is figured out you may want to consider changing the permissions to allow this to be downloaded, or compiling the whole works into a .pdf that you could send out by PM request.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work, I'm sure Jon would approve of your efforts.

NZ

OK, I had failed to change the permissions to public.
Everything should load now.

It works fine now and it's massive.

NebraskaZephyr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Flickr shows this as an album with ONE image. I
> can open that one image but there's nothing else.
>
> Also, if the point of all your hard work was to
> share it, once the page situation is figured out
> you may want to consider changing the permissions
> to allow this to be downloaded, or compiling the
> whole works into a .pdf that you could send out by
> PM request.
>
> Sounds like a hell of a lot of work, I'm sure Jon
> would approve of your efforts.
>
> NZ

Yeah, he knew before he passed, that I had started this project, and darn it, I wanted
him to see it. I had meant to mention to him just how many
interesting cars that Amtrak owned in the beginning, which of
course he was well aware of. Also wanted to tell him of all the SCL cars too!
The SCL must have had an extensive passenger operation, especially the NY to Florida service.

MartyBernard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It works fine now and it's massive.

I put that book away, and I don't want to see for a long time. LOL!

Thank, mp51w. I got mine from a former Amtrak employee who became a yardmaster and then left the company for another passenger railroad, going on to a high management position and retiring a few years ago. Between us, it's dog-eared and a scanned file on the computer will be handy and prevent more wear on it.

I don't think I'd have had the patience to scan it all...so never even THOUGHT about doing it!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/17 08:53 by GenePoon.

This is very cool. Thanks! Many of the car diagrams are familiar from Wayner's "Amtrak Car Diagrams" book published in 1980, but it didn't have any photos. These photos are priceless. Thanks for doing all of the work to put this online.

Maybe the most usefull post ever on TO.  This comes from someone also having the info.