Passenger Trains > A Late Borealis

1333 was 45 mins late out of Chicago due to engine 309 on the east end going haywire with electrical faults. Engine 78 was pressed into service to replace it. 517 still working the west end of this set due to ongoing power shortages in Chicago. The train is seen arriving and departing from Glenview, IL and following an on-time Metra 2115 to Deerfield. They caught up to the scoot around Morton Grove.

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Engine is 35 years old.
On amtrak Day 1 in 1971 a 35 year old unit would have been built in 1936.
I thought amtrak's purpose was to replace the old, ill maintained private carrier service, not to
recreate it.

Tired equipment, poor food service, cancellations. To Hell in a Day Coach.

Englewood Wrote:
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> Engine is 35 years old.
> On amtrak Day 1 in 1971 a 35 year old unit would
> have been built in 1936.
> I thought amtrak's purpose was to replace the old,
> ill maintained private carrier service, not to
> recreate it.
>
> Tired equipment, poor food service, cancellations.
> To Hell in a Day Coach.

As usual from you, a far too pessimistic view. It got better and was better for quite some time, and you know it. Yes. with problems on occasion, some serious. But overall better than what was left of service by most of the Class 1s in the final days.

It's more marginal now. Many problems, often discussed here. But there is a major cycle of fleet renewal in process, and most service is pretty good, often very good. Plenty of positive trip reports here on TO and elsewhere, along with the horror stories. That's my experience too, and I suspect yours as well (would you ever dare to admit it?). You really need some realism about that. But you've needed that for a long, long time.

Amtrak has a few very serious problems. Lemon locomotives from Siemens and an aged fleet that is at the same point in its lifecycle as the old pre-Amtrak equipment was, with resulting capacity limits, service unreliability and serious impacts on timekeeping and overall quality of service. Getting cooked meal service restored on LD trains that still don't have it.  Better seats on Midwest Venture cars, but that's at least in part the result of the states, and maybe mostly or entirely - nobody seems to be able to nail that question down. And inconsistency in the quality of onboard service.

That's a tall list to fix, but hardly Hell In a Day Coach a la Penn Central or some others (Santa Fe definitely excepted) in the late pre-Amtrak era. I was a passenger then too, and they were often awful. Only the rosiest of rose-colored glasses could lead to another conclusion. And I'll bet that you know that too. Again, would you ever dare to admit that, so dug into your knee-jerk across-the-board anti-Amtrak pessimism? Doubtful. At least many of us have the honesty to admit it's a checkered thing right now, and can be good, bad or indifferent.

The motive power issue is the biggie, clearly. Without reliability of service and good timekeeping everything else suffers, often badly.l That's a tough nut to crack in the present environment. The options are very, very limited, as often discussed. But Amtrak has to find a way through the mess that Siemens has created. My own view has been expressed several times: get a waiver from the emissions Tier requirements that drove Amtrak into Siemens' arms in the first place, and return to older, more reliable designs. Rebuilds and schedule adjustments at first to bridge the gap, then new units built to the technology and reliability standards of the past, with Siemens explicitly excluded as a bidder. Obviously very hard to do, fraught with politics, and maybe impossible. But something outside the box has to be done. If Amtrak can't get motive power all-weather reliability and timekeeping back under control then all of the rest of the other service improvements are just moving the deck chairs around on a slowly sinking ship, to mix metaphors. Motive power reliability is Job One, period. All of the rest can follow along if that one gets solved and reliability and timekeeping improves, and none of those other service issues are that hard to solve. Motive power is.

The new Airos look pretty good, including the seats (there appears to actually be some contour to the seatbacks, which is important to comfort, in contrast to the board-straight Venture seatbacks in the Midwest). Although again there are motive power concerns, such as with the dual power units. We'll see. Likewise the NextGen Acelas. Now that the decision has been firmly made to go with a single-level LD design, builders can proceed with proposals, and that project can move along. Railroad freight train delays are gradually getting under control - if Amtrak can hold to its slots with better reliability and timekeeping, they will further decrease. The freights have a point that Amtrak doesn't help its own case on freight train interference by its own poor reliability, which is again largely the motive power problem.

It could be Hell in Day Coach, particularly if the motive power / reliability / timekeeping  issues don't get fixed. But it's not, and I think you know that. So, less pessimism please.

MC