I wish it were a joke in a sad way, nice cars and all, and probably needed, but.....

Back when I met with Boardman in early 2009 at one of the conferences after he took over at Amtrak I heard that our number one priority was replacing and upgrading our intercity fleet. These cars will replace aging cars mostly on the Florida and Midwest LD trains, and are. like so much else with our pathetically underfunded rail system, "needed", but..... "Number one priority" though...well????

Unfortunately, this was Joe's entire number one priority for Amtrak. He was clueless and had no real input or priorities concerning the regional and corridor services. It was an "east coast" Amtrak Philly mentality, that failed to understand anything beyond whatever passes through Philly.

To be fair to Joe's myopic vision. The states were expected to take up the slack with the big stimulus order, and we've now screwed that entirely up, with an utterly incompetent and woefully mismanaged multistate procurement process. That is except, of course, for the handful of States that opted out, and or dropped out.

And, so CA in particular, will continue to see overcrowded and aging equipment, allowing for no added capacity on existing trains, or any new services, limiting ridership growth, limiting more revenue growth, and providing no traffic congestion relief along those congested corridors, served by (IIRC? need and updated source or to printout and recalculate all those damned corridor sheets on the NARP website.....good source) America's second, third and maybe 4th busiest rail corridors in the US.

Washdot was "lucky" in finding additional compatible equipment from Wisconsin's screw up. And, All Aboard Florida is actively taking delivery of high speed single level coaches, even after ordering those "off the shelf" cars much later..... Of course, those "Buy America" provisions in the funding requirement didn't really help create many
"stimulus" jobs in this case, did they? When they couldn't find any vendor at all........

Oh well.....