NYC prohibits diesel operation in tunnels, so there would need to be a swap in Sunnyside to an ACS-64 to enter/leave NYP. New York State would probably not allow the P32AC-DMs to be used on a Boston run.
It was nearly a century ago, but two major projects:
Were government projects;
Were completed ahead of schedule; and
Were under budget -
Hoover Dam and the Pentagon.
The frequency of lithium battery fires (in general) is low, but the results can be catastrophic. The seriousness of the fire is dependent on one variable - the joules of energy contained in the battery. The size of a locomotive battery would far exceed that of the bus that incinerated itself in...
Any fire department would rather deal with a hydrogen fire (not much different than an LPG fire) than a lithium battery fire. Of course, having neither is far, far preferable!
All these proposals will require a large increase in the Amtrak fleet size, and that gets into the design questions discussed on a separate thread. Might we see these in a decade? Perhaps, or perhaps not.
Batteries seem to be a short-range solution to issues such as no-diesel in NYP. But there are still a lot of problems with them. Note that a battery powered bus in Hartford was destroyed by a battery fire that took hours and thousands of gallons of water to extinguish. They should hold off on...
I would say that one constraint would be that the departure and final arrival should not occur between midnight and six in the morning. So, taking the LSL as an example with approximately a 19 hour run time, we could have the following NYP departures / CHI arrivals:
Noon / 7 am
3 pm / 9 am
9 pm...
US design requirements (FRA and ADA) are quite different from those in Europe. If Amtrak were to try to copy TGV, we would see these trains in perhaps 10 to 20 years even if they did get approval.
Just remember that there are two "non-negotiable" restraints on the new car designs - ADA compliance and crumple zone protection. Those will result in a loss of considerable passenger space. So, I doubt that sleeper capacity will increase.
There are definite advantages to having a uniform LD fleet, which would have to be single level. And having unit trains (semi-permanent couplings and open gangways) is a way of dealing with ADA issues.
I also fully endorse the idea of having a business class as an intermediate class between...
Back in the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad days trains like the Mayflower made the New Haven to GCT run in slightly more than one hour and 20 minutes.
Right now one of the problems on the New Haven to New Rochelle run on Metro North is the large number of speed restrictions, both those...