New MBTA paint schemes

So here's a couple-week-old one: The MBTA [just had] a contest to choose the newest scheme for their new engines from MPI (presumably more of the MP36/40 MPXpress family). These are the three options they gave:



(Okay, first off, why's the last one a different engine model than the other two - do or don't they have rear platforms??)
My initial reaction was a very railfan-typical preference for the first design that continues the current, classier lightning-stripe scheme (though the handling of the transition on the roof cowling behind the cab is weak).

With time though my designer side has found more faults with the detailing of that scheme (what's with that little strip in the middle of the nose??) and grown fonder of the other two. The front is really bold, which can feel cheesier and doesn't satisfy my railfan aesthetic, but does appeal to the rest of me. (Also the black on purple with gold pinstripe is just plain pretty.) I think it's fascinating how divided my design opinions are based on my headspace at the time! Regardless, these will be fun to see trackside.

Amtrak's 40th Anniversary Units

The Amtrak Heritage group on Flickr has a nice selection of photos of the different units (including a rebuilt F40PH they also did in phase III).
Heritage Line Up! by notcheight

Phases I through V lined up left to right.

Amtrak #156 by lukibob17

Phase I is still my least-favorite - I thought it was ugly the first time around, and it doesn't adapt well to the lines of the P40s. The old logo is still much nicer than the stupid swooshes at least (though I'd change a few details like the text placement and spacing of the lines...).

Rounding the curve Amtrak #66 by kschmidt626

Phase II was definitely a product of it's day and I always felt that it aged poorly to my "modern" eyes. Of course, my early opinions were clearly colored by my feelings on the designs from the early Amtrak days in general. I actually think this unit shows it off far better than the original F40PH's did, and certainly better than the Superliner's adaptation.

45 Pace close by notcheight

Phase III has always felt tired and cliche to me, but I think that's because it was the 'old' scheme when I was growing up. It's definitely the most classic and recognizably-Amtrak versions and I have developed a growing respect for it. It does work very well on the lines of the AMD-103s.

Untitled by akagoldfish

Phase IV has always been my favorite, especially some of the later versions (many still actively in use). I'm curious how well this design will age when I look back in 20 or 40 years.

2005-5-30 Palmer 91 by traingeek

And finally phase V (included for completeness even though I don't believe Amtrak has marked one for the 40th Anniversary). They feel like a weak austere attempt to mimic the Acela scheme without really suiting the different form of the AMD-103s. Some of the newer versions of phase V are notably better and feel more elegant and classy in comparison, though most of the adaptations to other locomotives like the AEM-7s are just bland. It's amazing what a difference small details like the reflective trim and lines of the engine make. (I also don't like how for the past decade or so the designs have been so fragmented across regions and types of equipment. I prefer how a lot of them look, but it's aggravatingly-inconsistent.)

I haven't been following the news, so I don't know but I'm guessing Amtrak won't do some of the more obscure schemes like the P32-8's Pepsi Can or the original AMD-103 "phase IIIb" fade designs. And certainly not the specifics like Amtrak California's stuff. Still, it is always fun to see old designs adapted to new units that have very different shapes and aesthetic considerations.

2011-03-08 Palmer

I did a little railfanning at Palmer yesterday.




This shot reminds me of a lot of the photos I've seen from the late 70's. Something about the lighting reminds me of the way a lot of the film from then performed/aged I think. Of course, the D&H-inspired paint scheme on an few-decades-old engine helps if you don't look too closely.

repealing railroads' antitrust exemption?

Time for another of my minimally-edited and haphazardly-written railroad ramblings.

I'm not sure what I think of this bill making its way through the system right now. As with every piece of legislation passed pertaining to the railroads these days, it doesn't understand the true context, ignores the root concerns, forgets history, has some massive unintended consequences, and will inevitably worsen the very problems it's trying to fix. Oh wait, never mind, I know exactly what I think of it. As reported by Progressive Railroading and Railway Age the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to pass the bill that removes American railroads' antitrust exemptions. In general I tend to side with antitrust protections, however there is no doubt that one of the key factors in the railroads' crash was the stifling government rate controls, and their removal did play a major role in the recovery.

Railroads in America are a unique industry, one that few really understand or appreciate. They are very different from every other rail network in the world, and not at all like any other industry in America. In many ways they are most akin to a utility, and in almost all of the rest of the world would be treated as a public entity. But here we have yet another weird not-free market, not-socialist, not-anything else system that evolved over decades into something very peculiar. America (and Canada - the two networks are functionally one and the same in most situations) is perhaps the only place with private, profitable freight railroads. Certainly the only of this scale or of a comparable context. Nothing else comes close, and our freight rail network is far and away one of the best in the world ("best" meaning efficiency especially, and to a lesser degree, capacity and utilization relative to population though some of that is debatable). But just a few decades ago under very different regulatory conditions (and much more - economy, technology, etc) that was not the case. It's outside the scope of this rambling to go into, and has been covered a million times over. All that matters is that we were very close to having a freight rail network of comparable quality to most of the rest of the world in large part due to the regulatory environment of the time, and we're very lucky that didn't happen.

We treat utilities very haphazardly in America, and on the whole very stupidly I think. We set up the system through regulations in such a way that both true competition and the protection of the public interest are prevented. Not to mention a system that economically-encourages poor investment in the network, helping to worsen our infrastructure gap with the rest of the developed world. And yet our railroads are somehow outside of that usual pattern.

I think that going the route that England and a few others have tried to some degree could possibly work, depending on the details. It's always the subtle nuances and follow-through that make or break seemingly-similar systems. Nationalize the backbone network, and allow open competitive access to all companies over the same track. But the path back towards antitrust regulation and rate-setting will almost-certainly cause the same problems it did last time. As it stands, the railroads are regulated, the standards under which they're regulated are just very different. The rate monopoly complaints of shippers that have prompted this legislation? Some of it is very legitimate. Some of it is total bullshit when you look at the overall transportation system in America. But it is still far less of a problem than it had been under previous regulatory environments.

Mostly I just think this will make things worse in the long run if passed, though it probably won't have a significant immediate impact.

some recent(ish) favorites from photographers I follow

By Set and Centered:


By familymansystem:


By VirginiaSouthern:


By familymansystem:


By mudpig:



(More Here)

Amtrak P-32BWH unit as biodiesel testbed

Somehow I missed (or just ignored) the news back in April that Amtrak's testing one of their GW Pepsi Can P32-8's as a biodiesel unit. I'll bet good money on this: it'll be sidelined within a year of the test being over. The minute it needs a moderately-expensive repair. A never really-successful run of 20 units that are just-unusual-enough to be among the first to get sidelined and then have one converted into a one-off unit with a moderately-unique parts inventory? It's a goner. The one-off testbeds are always the spare units they have lying around with little useful life left that they want to ditch but can't justify retiring quite yet. Biodiesel testing is a headline-grabber that won't catch on for at least another decade, if ever in the north American market. It's not enough-better than conventional diesel and just-enough non-standard to warrant a fleet switchover. In another part of the world maybe, but under the north American practices? Not gonna happen. Oh well, as a way to end it's life, I suppose this is a pretty good end at least and is better than just sitting in storage like many of Amtrak's other units. At least this way it's earning Amtrak very cheap "Green" [washing] publicity.

(Much easier politically for them to get money for brand new units than refurbish perfectly-good 1-2 decade old units that need mid-life overhauls but are too valuable to retire. The same goes for the dozens wreck-damaged Superliners sitting in storage. With no domestic conventional passenger car manufacturers left the damaged cars would be a million or more to replace per unit and are quite valuable given the tight supply of cars Amtrak has left, but it's way harder to get funding for the price it would be to refurb them. So they sit. For decades in some cases.)

New Amtrak Northeast Corridor Electric Locos

I'm very interested, excited, and a little anxious about these coming new engines. The order for 70 Siemens “Cities Sprinter” ACS-64 electrics will completely replace the existing AEM-7 (the older DC and the newer AC units), and the quite recently-build HHP-8 units build as part of the Acela order.

[And now for some off-the-cuff ranting and rambling that need some more solid research to clarify some of my assumptions and impressions to be truly valid about Amtrak's sad history of locomotive designs.]

These engines are needed, there's no doubt there. The Northeast Corridor is at (or past) it's limit for capacity possible with the existing fleet and train cancelations from insufficient equipment availability have been increasing. But it speaks to the frustrating history Amtrak has with locomotives. Every single engine they've ever purchased new has been a modified design of freight units, modified foreign designs, or designed from scratch. The problem is there has been almost no market in North America to support domestic passenger engine design. The commuter rail field has had enough of a sustained market for a couple designs over the years - most recently the Motive Power family, and before that EMD's F59PHI. But those don't meet most of Amtrak's intercity needs. So freight designs have been modified - sometimes with great success as in the F40PH - but more often with designs that failed to meet the operating needs and were retired or deprecated very rapidly - the 8-32BWH or E60. The foreign imports have occasionally been amazing - the AEM-7 (and the Talgo trainsets) - but more often mediocre - the HHP-8. Both foreign and freight operating conditions and design needs are different enough from Amtrak's that a simple design modification is very likely to fail. The problem is that designs from scratch have the same issue of never being able to fully-anticipate every issue and even with heavy prototype field-testing will have unforeseen issues in the future.

The thing is, this issue is ALWAYS true of design in any field. The ideal is one like the North American freight diesel loco market which is large and robust enough to support multiple strong manufacturers with decades of experience to constantly iterate on their designs and specialize to the very distinctive operating conditions of this continent. (Foreign imports end up being unsuited and retired far before the anticipated lifespan the vast majority of the time.)

So Amtrak has no good options here, right? Well, somewhat. It is true that whatever design approach they choose will be fraught with teething unforeseen design issues. But by being very careful with which firms they select they can stack the deck in their favor. I feel that Siemens is probably among their better options, and they should have the skills to succeed. The problems will come when the decisions get made for political reasons instead of design qualifications. That's how you get HHP-8's being retired decades earlier than the average electric locomotive lifespan. One big advantage for these ACS-64's is their large fleet size. The one-off orphan units are always the first to be retired for maintenance and fleet management efficiency. The other big risk for these new engines? Sustained funding for maintenance. I don't know the details offhand enough to say, but given the recent Amtrak operating environment, I would bet that these engines were run into the ground with insufficient maintenance funding. That can shorten the lives of even very solidly-designed engines by decades. It is far easier to get money for something new and shiny than to maintain something people take for granted. (I'm guessing that's why the AEM-7's which as far as I know have been a very successful series are going to be replaced. They're not young, but in many other contexts they would be kept on for another decade or so with regular maintenance and overhauls, not discarded because that's more politically-viable.)

So what was the point of this diatribe? Well, essentially that I'm worried that these will become yet another in the long line of failed designs that needs to be replaced in a decade. But I am still excited, if only for the chance to have something new to photograph!

[via Progressive Railroading]

train photo of the day

Worcester MA, 2005-08

this set from 2005-08 still has a couple of my all-time favorites...

pair of beautiful shots of railfan photographers at Fullerton by Ken Szok

the conflict between high speed passenger service and freight rail in america

(a minimally-edited off-the-cuff draft):
As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in an article I find a bit skewed and thin on context, the freight railroads see national high speed passenger service as a serious threat [via The Infrastructurist]. And, while we desperately need passenger service of anything even pretending-to-resemble a functional national network, the freight railroads are right. Passenger service is a huge liability for them. After decades of starvation, the US (well, US and Canada - the two are functionally one and the same in the railroad world) railroads have finally had significant growth for the past couple decades, and in the past decade have actually reached the point of spending billions on infrastructure capacity upgrades to handle the traffic. They now carry way more traffic than ever on a fraction the route-miles through much more efficient networks. North America (US and Canada primarily, but Mexico is catching up fast) has the most successful and efficient freight rail systems in the world, and one of the few that is fully-privitized. They simply do not have the capacity for passenger service on any of their core lines without heavy capacity expansions. When there is plenty of open capacity on a line, the incremental costs of an added train are not too major - when the line is at capacity, incremental costs can escalate exponentially in extreme cases (need another track and you're in a mountain range? have fun blasting lots of rock...). A single passenger train actually has the capacity needs of several freight trains - the greater the speed-disparity, the more a passenger train delays the surrounding freights, and their tighter scheduling requirements (federally-regulated and hard-fought in the courts over the decades of Amtrak's life) mean that a delayed passenger train destroys the schedules of every other train around it. Excellent freight and passenger networks can coexist, but that takes massive capital, and exists almost nowhere in the world. Not in Europe, thats for sure - all those countries in western Europe with their excellent passenger service? Yea, they have freight networks varying from small-and-plucky to abysmal. If you have to choose one or the other, then America needs freight way more given our geography, economy, and the far greater efficiencies of freight transport than passenger by rail due to the inherent nature of their traffic patterns (with occasional exceptions like urban mass-transit).

In all of this it's also important to remember that our freight railroads have grown incredibly-protective and wary of any government involvement - one of the biggest things that saved the entire industry from death was the Staggers Act which largely deregulated them and eliminated decades (close to a century even?) of heavy pricing regulations - a holdover from the Robber Baron era. They are still massive corporate interests with great power, but despite being many times larger geographically than ever before (to oversimplify: UP and BNSF are Mississippi to Pacific, CSX and NS are Mississippi to Atlantic, CN and CP are Canada), they have a tiny fraction the actual power and have to compete with the massively-Federally-subsidized highway network. Amtrak was a government bailout that took the passenger service out of the hand of the freight railroads and relieved them of a government-mandated service were collectively hemorrhaging some $700 million annually as early as the '50's and literally bankrupted several mid-sized railroads. But it was inherently a compromise that satisfied no one. It retained a fraction of the routes and was structured in a way that it would be perpetually fucked financially and politically, but they survived at all. And it still forced the freight railroads to give these trains priority dispatching that earned them no money, but at least they were not directly costing them millions.

If we want any remotely-decent national passenger network, we need to mimic the approach of the regional commuter agencies negotiations with the freight railroads. If guaranteed their train capacity needs, some liability protections (liability costs are OBSCENE these days), and some say, they will happily cooperate, hand over some control, and even pitch in some on infrastructure upgrades as long as they see some benefits. The key is not expecting them to give up capacity, control and liability just because.

(Interestingly I am biased in both directions on this matter - as a US railfan, the freight networks are something I know well and care about a lot, but similarly as a train nerd and someone interested in transportation planning, I have always thought our passenger network needed tens of billions in investment annually for a couple decades at least to fix the crimes of the past half-century.)

[edit: an example of a more detailed description of the costs from Union Pacific]

train photos of the day

A few 'oldies' from my 2005-2 Syracuse & Selkirk NY set


Dad was w/ me (and actually shot that top image too) and captured an interest one of me:

still rocking my Mom's old all-manual 35mm & our crappy point-and-shoot, which is the camera that captured most of these shots (still have to scan in the 35mm ones I guess?)

Szoksnapshots is one of my perpetual favorite railfan photographers

rest of Ken Szok's library

train photo of the day

re-crop of 2010-06 San Francisco 10 - MUNI Market Street historic PCC car

train photo of the day

2005-08 Worcester MA

funky Taiwanese nonstop-station-boarding bullet train concept

'how to board a train that doesn't stop'

[via my friend 'Professor C']

Nick Suydam's photo 'Moving Freight While You Sleep'

BNSF Galesburg, IL yard, by Nick Suydam

train photo of the day

2009-10-11 Selkirk

train photo(s) of the day

(Okay, so I know these have been anything but "daily" ... but, meh.)
These are a couple shots from Stamford CT in my early railfanning days (exact date never recorded, or year even) - they were shot on a hand-me-down 1.3 megapixel Canon point and shoot from my grandmother - and they're still a couple of my favorites - I'm very proud of younger-me who took these pics.

Beautiful "subway style" Amtrak route map

can't wait to buy the poster...

2010-06 San Fran Photos (batch 1)

finally going through my photos from the San Fran trip a couple months back - full set on Flickr





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