Passenger Trains > Mangled Superliners

I guess these two are write offs.

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Well, they might be able to repair the ends. It\'d be a shame to scrap the whole car for a "little bit" of end damage...

I would think that it the frame and structure over all doesn\'t have any major damage that those would be fixable. Looks mostly sheet metal work really.

Its been reported that a diner, lounge and one coach will be parted out and scrapped. The lounge is in the photo.

So could well be a lot more frame damage then shown in this limited photo.

Unless any of the Kensington wrecks or really any other wreck exceed $1.5M, they should repair them. A new car would be at least 3.0M.

Yes, 1.5M is a lot of money, but Amtrak needs the cars. Yes, it will mean some major structural work on parts of the cars, but so what.

I was at Beech Grove and watched them rebuild a Superliner sleeper. It had major fire damage on the lower level. It is time-consuming intricate work, but the results were splendid. They were welding new members in the stainless steel frame on the day I was there.

Amtrak, just do it!

I did see the two sleepers outside the shop here at Ivy City. I can\'t tell if they are in the shop becuase I work for the High Speed Rail (Acela) side.

If there were an assembly line out there churning out Superliners - scrap \'em and move on!

But failing that, Mike Koch has a good point; time is of the essence in this case - and the quickest way to have cars back on the rails and putting $$$ in the coffers is to rebuild what you got on hand.

It would be nice if it was just a matter of pulling off the old stainless steel and replacing it with new stuff however, sometimes it is the damage that you cannot see that will doom a car to the torch. I just found out today that another coach car from the auto-train wreck will be scraped. From the outside it does not really look too damaged, but the center beam on the car is bent and twisted in a few places. I do not know much about superliner construction but I would equate the center beam to the frame on an automobile. After the frame is bent the car will never be the same. You could probably try to fix the beam, but I wonder how well the car would run after that. I\'ll try to get the car number tommrow.

Actually I believe that Superliners do not have a center beam, in the manner that heritage cars had a very heavy center beam. I rather think that Superliners have several main beams and then considerable lattice work to construct a very strong frame for buff strength.

Now if some of the main members are twisted in a Superliner, and the costs exceed $1.5M, then perhaps it is a scrap candidate. But I find that hard to believe in the Kensington wreck that the diner and lounge car are scrap candidates.

I rather think that Amtrak has placed the dollar amount for scrapping much too low (perhaps $1M). Beyond that figure they don\'t want to mess with it.

Scrapping would be a valid thought, IF they could order new cars, but they can not. Repair is the answer.