Re: New Cars for Amtrak California?
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 09-04-2017 - 10:21
> Back in the day, you had Pullman, Budd and others continuing to improve their designs and compete for orders from the railroads. Now there are very few builders to compete according to government bidding standards, the government agencies (and their consultants) tend to write their own unique specification requirements, not to mention government safety standards that now seemingly change every 5-10 years often requiring substantial redesign and re-certification.
"Back in the day", the RRs tended to write their own specifications, although there was a lot of back and forth between them and the carbuilders. In the SP Daylight book there are pictures of failure tests Pullman made to convince the SP that spot welding was just as structurally sound as riveting.
> There isn't a real steady flow of orders split between the builders, so they are having to absorb the drawn out bidding and design process not to mention the buyer's funding cycles, so it has become a feast or famine business of building custom rail cars in limited runs, despite agencies trying to combine orders to save money.
Passenger carbuilding has always been a feast or famine industry, and this state of affairs goes back to before 1900.
> Imagine the locomotive market if EMD or GE only got a 500 engine order every few years? On the commuter side, that is exactly what is happening. What has GE built since the P40/P42? EMD can barely get the F125 into service which so far only has one buyer. Even MPI which had little trouble selling their fairly standardized MP36/40 line is now fighting for every commuter engine order.
Maybe if these suppliers built things which worked as well and reliably as a GP-9, F-7, F-40, -even a P-42, etc. One of the key concepts Harold Hamilton (EMC/EMD) learned early on is that you have to put a sufficient amount of your own design and production into your product. Today, the trend is to out-source components, and then assemble them into "a product", one which has been inadequately vetted for overall performance. The customer has become the beta tester.
Another one of the big problems is all the environmentally clean add-ons and systems which, no matter how well-intended, tend to degrade performance as a locomotive.