Posted on 05/25/2020 7:17:36 PM PDT by Morgana
Delivering Amtrak's New Acela High Speed Trains
In February 2020, Amtrak's first Avelia Liberty Acela set departed the Alstom factory in Hornell, NY. We made the trip to capture the action, along with the first "production" set which departed a month later to the Northeast Corridor!
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I’d still rather take Amtrak over United Airlines any day of the week
Thanks — good memories! He still talks about it and he’s closing in on 30.
I took him on another surprise trip only by air about the same time. We flew to Orange County to go to the California Speedway in Fontana to see NASCAR or an open-wheel event. I was doing a lot of business travel at the time and I told him “Let’s go to the airport so we can check out the planes.” I secretly gave my boarding passes for the two of us to the boarding agent and we went on board. After a short while, they were closing the doors and the poor boy freaked out — “Dad, we have to GET OFF NOW! They’re closing the doors!” I finally told him it was ok, that we were taking a trip. (I think I had one overnight bag for the two of us and told him I was dropping it off at the airport for a business trip the next week).
Again, he was surprised when we drove up to the huge motor speedway and got to our seats.
Isn’t it amazing how small things can create such wonderful memories?
When Barry Bonds was chasing the home run record, I asked him spur-of-the-moment “Want to go see the Giants game tonight?” Turns out I picked the night Bonds broke the home run record. Talk about dumb luck! That’s another one he talks a lot about.
In the dining car I've dined with and spoken to: an author, a spec-ops E-5, a BNSF executive, the owner of a private rail car, and a Brit living in France who is a historian of medieval European history. In the Pacific Parlor Car of the Coast Starlight, I've drunk brandy with a Scottish tourist who knew his British railroad history. You can't get that kind of experience on a plane.
My recollection of the Acela Express from Boston to New York City was nearly four hours and New York City to Washington D.C. a little more than two hours. New York City mile-wise is halfway. The New England corridor is too crooked for fast travel.
From New York to New Haven, the line is owned and dispatched by Metro North, and the maximum speed is 90 mph.
The section between New Haven and Boston has some stretches where 150 mph speeds are in effect but only in a few areas. This is why Amtrak would like to build a genuine Swiss-style rail speedway to replace the existing former New Haven RR line in Connecticut. The cost of that would be astronomical.
One other note: the new generation Acela being built in Hornell, NY is not like the new generation TGV Inoui! trains in service in Europe (the French national rail operator SNCF operates this equipment trans-border into Luxembourg, Switzerland and Germany as well as on the high speed lines inside France). I rode the Inoui! between Luxembourg City and Paris East Station (Gare de l’Est) as well as between Gare de l’Est and Strasbourg last year. The train cars are low profile double deckers, and are very sleek on the outside yet remarkably comfortable and roomy on the inside. This train hit 320 kmph (200 mph) on the high speed tracks (these train sets can run on both the dedicated high speed lines and the regular lines where the top speed is only 100-120 kmph (60 to 75 mph).
The famous Eurostar channel tunnel trains use equipment built by Siemens; other than the paint job, these are almost identical to the ICE trains operated by the German national railway DB, and these can also operate on both conventional and high speed electrified tracks. I think Siemens also built the train sets in use by the Spanish operator RENFE, known as AVE trains, on the high speed network in Spain.
>There’s a good chance I’ll be visiting Japan this summer.One thing I plan to do is ride the bullet train.
Depending on your schedule there are JR 7/14/21 day rail passes at $300/$450/$600. Considering a trip from Tokyo to Osaka is like ~$150 one way, it’s a very good price.
I took my daughter backpacking and got the 14 day. We went from Tokyo to Nagoya, Nagoya to Osaka, stayed four nights in Shikoku and three in Kyushu, and then went all the way back to Tokyo. I probably spent $1000 worth of fare for $450.
Have fun!
Amtrak won’t be able to run the new Acela trains more than 90 mph, except on a few miles in rural Maryland where they can hit 100 mph. The current tracks can’t safely accommodate a higher speed.
Not true at all. Read Post #26.
I was born in ‘47. My Dad worked on the New York Central Railroad, and we could ride on the train for free. We didn’t own a car, so it was a treat to be able to ride the train every so often with our parents. We lived in Rochester, New York, and the farthest west we ever went was to Niagara Falls, and then New York City on the other end of the State. My oldest son worked as a dispatcher for Conrail for about 8 years before deciding the job was just too stressful to deal with. By then, Conrail had joined with CSX and Norfolk-Southern, and the area he had to cover was far larger than before. Conrail had good benefits, but if you bid and won a job on a specific shift, anyone else with more time could bump you off of it, and then you’d end back up on the crappy shift. I worked for New York State, and we bid our jobs as well, but once you won the job, it was yours to keep until you retired, died, or bid another job.
The last time I flew United Airlines, it was a great experience because I accumulated enough Mileage Plus points to get a first-class seat. But with the new restrictions on flying, I may never fly anywhere again.
Once upon a time, the New York Central ran a four-track main line between Albany and Buffalo. (The Roar of the Four!) Now it’s down to two tracks, and CSX is studying reducing it to one track.
>Amtrak won’t be able to run the new Acela trains more than 90 mph, except on a few miles in rural Maryland where they can hit 100 mph. The current tracks can’t safely accommodate a higher speed.
Yeah, people who think that there’s a new high-speed boom coming are out of their minds. Lefties can’t have high-speed rail AND companies bulldozing through municipal and city zoning issues at the same time.
If you’re going to put infrastructure in like Europe or Japan, you’ve got clear massive amounts of land that would compete with zoning and existing roads, and that takes years maybe decades of bureaucracy.
I’ll have to find some pretext to check that out. It sounds impossible. Wife and I recently took the Auto Train from Sanford, FL to Lorton, VA. The accomodations onboard were OK, but the trackage was so rough and bad and jarring, I swore they’d never get me on it again.
“I took a round trip from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor, Mich. on Amtrak in 1980. The train was 14 hours late getting there and 12 hours late returning. I swore at the time that I would never ride Amtrak again—and I never have.”
Bought a private compartment from LA to New Mexico in the summer (mondo expensive). A/C went out. Windows don’t open. It was hell. They refused to refund my fare. I will never ride Amtrack again.
That’s not the case. Much of the former Pennsylvania Railroad corridor has been 125 mph since the 1980s. Their big excuse for not expanding the running of the original Acelas at 150 mph was the condition of the former PRR wires and the fact that they are variable-tension and would sag in hot weather; all this time they have never converted to constant-tension wires.
Swiss-style? Switzerland isn’t known for too many high-speed rail corridors; that would be France, Germany and (to a lesser degree) Spain and Italy, and whatever high-speed trains are in Switzerland are TGVs from France and ICE from Germany.
BTW, the former New Haven from the NY/CT border to New Haven is owned by Connecticut DOT, and within Massachusetts the ownership is that state DOT.
There are some former New Haven rail alignments that could have been utilized for higher speed than the Shore Line, e.g. the former Air Line, but the redevelopment was discarded as quickly as it was considered.
The current plans for “TGV-style” corridors parallel to the Northeast Corridor are absurdly expensive, about five to seven times more per mile than what France and Germany build their new lines for.
Oh, good grief!
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