Viewliner II - Part 1 - Initial Production and Delivery

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Thirdrail7 said:
This hardly seems mathematically feasible. If you roll out 3 per month, in 6 months you'll have 18 diners by the end of June. That is seven short and assumes that January is included....which I highly doubt.
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I presume that they already have several partially finished cars that need to be reworked. These will come out much quicker.
 
Good for Amtrak for finally disclosing the status of the new car orders. Wonder if this is an indication that Amtrak will be more transparent in the future about these type of issues under their new leadership.
 
Yeah, the 2-3 a month for 6 months definitely doesn't add up to 25. But I'll take them.

But, I think we're close to half a year or longer away from the LSL getting its diners back because my guess is the first batch of diners will replace the existing Heritage diners first.

So... need the bulk of the upcoming order for that.

I'm guessing my chances of a new diner on the Crescent in February to be below 50% at this rate.
 
StriderGDM said:
But, I think we're close to half a year or longer away from the LSL getting its diners back because my guess is the first batch of diners will replace the existing Heritage diners first.
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Possibly, I suspect the failure rate of the Heritage diners and the delivery rate of the Viewliners will determine how it actually plays out.
 
There are only 8 single-level diners in the regular daily service at the moment: Silver Meteor and Crescent. (Yuck.) There's one Viewliner diner in service, #8400, so they have to bring out 7 in order to replace the existing service fleet (most of the time, apart from maintenance cycles). Although we were told more than once that the LSL would be the first recipient of the new dining cars, I'm afraid they might replace the Meteor's dining cars first due to the location of Hialeah. :-(

Most likely some Heritage diners will be put into protect service initially until Viewliners are covering the full load (Meteor, Crescent, LSL, and perhaps Star and Cardinal as well). There are apparently 11 Heritage diners active as of early September. 3 are ex-Northern Pacific, 3 are ex-CBQ, 1 is ex-BN... there's 1 ex-SP, 2 ex-NYC, 1 ex-Pennsy (#7143, with a really crazy history of multiple conversions). I suppose they're probably be retired as their "need new inspections" (of whatever sort) dates come up, which I don't know the order of, but if they have to renew some of them and keep them active, I'm guessing it won't be the NYC diners which are from *1948*. (I'm surprised they've been kept going this long, and I'm also surprised that the many-times-converted Pennsy car is still going.) There seems to be a preference for the BN/NP/CBQ fleet (which was all pretty similar as those companies were quite incestuous).

I will say that if they manage to get #68000 and #68001 in service along with #8400 and they manage to get Chicago and New York trained to maintain the new cars, as well as whatever "training" is necessary for conductors and engineers, they could equip the LSL. That's the only one they could equip with that few cars. So if the two "prototypes" are finished and then there's a long delay before #68002 comes out, there is a possibility of the LSL seeing the Viewliner IIs and everyone else waiting for the mass production.

The LSL used to get half its diner patronage from coach, IIRC, the highest of all the trains with dining cars. Not having a proper dining car on the LSL is throwing away revenue. I hope they did it so that Chicago didn't have to maintain Heritage dining cars at all any more, which is a reasonable reason which might outweigh the thrown-away revenue. But it would make sense to restore service to the LSL before replacing the cars on the Meteor. (On the other hand, making it so that New Orleans doesn't have to maintain Heritage cars would *also* be a reasonable reason, so replacing the dining car on the Crescent first might make sense...)
 
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Would anyone be able to identify the shell in the foreground? I took these pictures a week before the 68001 was released in Elmira NY.

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Well with a guess there appeared to be 15 or so of those shells stored on the staging tracks inside the complex.
 
PVD said:
Which is one of the ways people end up sitting in the lounge. Crew packs and paperwork aren't supposed to occupy more than one table on any train, that isn't widely followed either
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Tell me about it. There were 2 tables "reserved for crew" this morning, and the car was a split cafe/club car with half the number of tables of the regular cafe car. Fortunately, the train was pretty empty, so no one was denied a seat.
 
Cho Cho Charlie said:
Elack801 said:
Would anyone be able to identify the shell in the foreground? I took these pictures a week before the 68001 was released in Elmira NY.
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OK, I was never very good at these kinds of puzzles in the Highlights magazine. What's different between the first picture and the second?
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Based on the file names it looks like the same picture was uploaded twice.
 
For those that can, it may be worthwhile to take a peek at 98(14). I believe there's a joyride afoot.
 
Amtrak's CAF baggage cars look pretty cool.

I think it would be awesome to see CAF get the amfleet 2 replacement contract at some point in the future--and model them as the baggage cars are with seats in them.
 
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