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| Re: Amtrak may Lengthen Acela Express Trainsets to ''Meet Demand'' (673475) | |||
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Re: Amtrak may Lengthen Acela Express Trainsets to ''Meet Demand'' |
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Posted by WillD on Wed Aug 27 19:39:31 2008, in response to Re: Amtrak may Lengthen Acela Express Trainsets to ''Meet Demand'', posted by JournalSquare-K-Car on Wed Aug 27 18:47:25 2008. The AEM7AC rebuild turned out a decent product, but was a logistical nightmare from everything I've heard. Amtrak would pull a unit from service, get it torn apart in Bear, DE, and Alstom would take weeks getting them the parts to rebuild it. During that it was unavailable for service, and this was right as the HHP-8s were dying with extreme regularity, so Amtrak was scraping the bottom of the barrel for electric locomotive duties. By the time Alstom finally got spun up for the project and was hitting target dates with regularity Amtrak was over budget and behind schedule and could not pursue the conversion of the second set of AEM7s. Considering the age of the locomotives and the higher cost to restart the conversion of a smaller group of locomotives with a different manufacturer (AFAIK ABB, Siemens, and Bombardier all expressed some interest) Amtrak likely found it cheaper to simply replace the unrebuilt AEM7s with new ALP46A based locomotives. |
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