Brightline contracts out its maintenance to Siemens. I doubt they have the expertise or want to develop such for doing work on random Amtrak equipment. So No. This is not going to happen.
Yeah, some may be sitting in Hialeah too, but their work is queued after Superliner etc., because the work has to be done at Beech Grove not in Hialeah. There is no reason to hold up things at Hialeah because of Superliners. Hialeah does not do those.
Alstom is far more likely to work on superliners and viewliners than Siemens is. Alstom built surfliner cars and owns all the designs for superliner cars. They've overhauled california cars built by MK.
The work needed to bring the backlogged VL1s out of Mothballs has to happen in Beech Grove. Amtrak has a perfectly well equipped facility in Florida at Hialeah and Sanford to do everyday repairs and 92 day inspections and such. They do so for the Viewliners, Amfleet II and Auto Train Superliners, and also the SunRail rolling stock at Sanford. But the work involved in de-mothballing apparently is more elaborate.
Does Alstom own the Superliner designs? I had thought that they were designed by an Amtrak contractor, with in house input, and then they were contracted out to Pullman Standard for production. Bombardier did buy PS plans for the Superliner II production.
And Alstom bought Bombardier.
My point being, that Amtrak owns the plans, so that they could use them with any builder that would bid on an updated order...
The obvious facepalm here is that every time Amtrak asked for money, they got it. In a few cases, though, they just didn't ask and then did this stupid stuff.
That wasn’t always true, Amtrak asked for money for a massive LD car order in the early 90 and congress said no.
Well with this its technically not the case. Amtrak informed Congress that it would have to cut to tri weekly service and furlough employees (deferring overhauls was part of this) in FY21 when the initial COVID stimulus package ran out without supplemental funding and that funding would have to be given by a certain date in order for them to continue normal operations. Congress considered additional COVID relief but ultimately declined to pass any supplemental funding before FY21 began and thus the cuts took place - there was an effort by a couple Senators to pass something requiring Amtrak not to move ahead with reductions but Congress ultimately did not pass that - one could interpret that as a tacit approval of Amtrak's plan by the Congress at the time. The funding to rescind the cuts wasn't finally given until a few months later after the election and new Congress was seated. There's certainly an argument to be made that they should have ridden things out and burnt through reserves since Congress would probably eventually act due to the hole the cuts would put them in which would take far longer to recover from (RPA made this exact point), but it is of course easier to say that with 20/20 hindsight as well.
The expectation from amtrak was this fleet would start arriving late 2020s into early 2030s.
The actual order is supposed to be placed by the end of this year.
So basically the 2040s.
Not that I am aware of. It is unlikely that anything will be released before vendor selection and determination of the shape of the order, since it is the vendors that will provide those as a proposal to fulfill the requirements in the RFP. The thing to look out for at present is the RFP and the requirements in it.
Na it will be ordered in the next year thats 5-6 years plenty of time
Extremely doubt they’ll be bilevel due to ADA requirements. The elevators required for ADA compliance are notoriously unreliable.
