VIA New Corridor Trains - 2021 - 2023 Updates

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Urban Sky said:
Renaissance cars just have couplers which are incompatible with the legacy fleet, unless you use „Baggage Transition“ cars. Therefore, the Siemens trainsets (and also the Renaissance trainsets in the Corridor) operate as „pure“ consists, whereas the Ocean is a mix of Renaissance and HEP-1 cars and the rest of the Corridor is indeed a happy mix of LRCs, HEP-1s and HEP-2s…
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Except for the occasional anomaly like this:



Desperate times, desperate measures?
 
jiml said:
Interesting list, but may already be out-of-date. Mixed consists east of Toronto have been even more random lately. The example by @Anderson above (LRC Business car on Budd consist) passed me on Thursday afternoon and the mix of LRC and all flavors of Budd coaches has been far more random lately. Also, videographer "Cool Trains of Montreal" captured a Renaissance set with an F40 yesterday rather than the expected GE. It suggests VIA is struggling with equipment much like Amtrak but is doing the best it can to meet demand until more of the new trains arrive. Fortunately they seem to be having fewer problems with the Siemens sets. I'd like to think this had something to do with the extensive testing of the first one.

Indirectly you foreshadowed some of this in a post some time ago regarding the diminishing relevance of the LRC coaches moving forward.
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Just because cars and locomotives are swapped against equivalent car and locomotive types does not mean that a new plan is in place. Dispatching is a normal process in which a plan is adjusted on an ad-hoc basis to match it with the available ressources and the circumstances of the day.

PS: I’ve worked in VIA’s Network Planning department, where I would do such short-term adjustments (“Renaissance Set 2 is replaced by a HEP2 consist for the next 3 weeks” or “Replace PLC-PLC at the end of LRC Set 16 through a single PHM until it returns to MMC on Friday”) and also organize the CAD moves, like the one in the video you’ve just shown, but equivalent swap-outs like a F40 instead of a P42 for a Renaissance train are arranged by the dispatchers themselves…
 
jiml said:
I got that, however I wondered (per my previous understanding and your confirmation earlier that a baggage or Ocean-style transition coach was needed) how they managed to connect the two types.
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If I remember correctly, Renaissance cars have five types of couplers:
- the standard couplers are Male/Female, where male connects with female
- then there are Quick Couplers which connect with other quick couplers and allow to relatively easily remove entire blocks of cars
- then there are American Couplers, which can only be found on one side of the Baggage or Baggage Transition cars and connect with any other American coupler
- Finally, there are Emergency Couplers, which can be used to convert a Quick Coupler (I believe) to an American Coupler, but not for passenger moves

I would assume that they used such an Emergency Coupler…
 
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