Upgrading old coaches with roller bearings, tightlock (H or F or CS) couplers, openable windows, etc. used to be more than adequate. Basic goal was to make the car as safe or better than original, and comply with FRA requirements.

The problem nowadays is that a lot of sponsoring agencies require compliance with the Amtrak Tier I standards, which are far more stringent than what the FRA requires for historic equipment used in excursion service (i.e. not used in regularly-scheduled service). This means safe at <=125mph, with cinder blocks and rifle bullets aimed at the car windows. This is far more than a mainline steam excursion needs. It requires a complete tear-down, exposing the underbody, cutting away the side sheets as needed to inspect side sills, massive truck rebuild, full HEP installation, new bulletprooof windows, etc. This extra work pushes the cost above $300k per car. Essentially you're making the coach into something it never was before. There aren't enough mainline steam excursion opportunities in the USA to justify this sort of massive investment.

Frankly, the money is better spent on other projects. $300k would pay for roof steel repairs and new 20-year-guaranteed "Hydro-Stop" system roofing on roughly 20 cars for museum railroad service.

- Doug Debs

Brother Debs covered some of this.

In response, I'll say: None of this matters one whit if the mainline railroad won't accept your equipment and/or premise.

And the astounding viral popularity of this particular video from overseas practically guarantees that, absent a particularly "enlightened" PR or management team equivalent to the Claytors, Bistline, Purdie & Co., it is extremely unlikely they ever will again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxmefBMepUo

Heck, the last couple mainline excursions of any sort I've been on, they wouldn't even let us open either "Dutch doors" or those vertically-sliding vestibule windows on Amfleet II equipment, not even when the train was stopped. (To be honest, it sure didn't stop a few renegades from opening them briefly for photos when staff's backs were turned.....) Considering I was one of those guys who preferred standing in the tape-recording section of the Chessie Safety Expresses (open windows, half-grated baggage doors) all day long to sitting in a comfy P70 seat, that sort of explains why most of the recent mainline excursions anywhere I could go are not very attractive to me......

OK, let's then posit that the new mainline excursion program is now a shortline / regional excursion program. What alterations are likely to be required for unoccupied interchange purposes to travel between the shortlines?

dave

I would think that the first set would be to find out what standards the railroads would accept, or TRAIN and the FRA come up with a standard that would be accepted so that older cars could safely be occupied. I thin the real problem is that no such standard exists, and the railroads, not being in the passenger train business anymore, rely on Amtrak standards. Some middle ground should be achievable where cars are safe for 80MPH operation without coming all the way up to Amtrak standards. It's worth a shot to see if something like that could be worked out, such as what happened in the wake of the Gettysburg Incident where the steam rules were reworked. It might be worth investigating...

"OK, let's then posit that the new mainline excursion program is now a shortline / regional excursion program. What alterations are likely to be required for unoccupied interchange purposes to travel between the shortlines?"--Dave

I'm not sure you want to send these cars around without an escort under any circumstances today. The equipment is unfamiliar to current railroaders, who will, because of this, couple a tank car with a shelf coupler to your passenger car--and whoops, there go the diaphragm and striker. Or someone will hump the car--good luck on surviving that! (Who was it--Roanoke Chapter, maybe--that had a car damaged in freight shipment, with a lot of broken glass and interior fittings?) Or someone will monkey with the air brake system, which is different from what's under a freight car. Then there is the problem of dealing with vandals, which the railroad doesn't have enough police to keep out (check out the graffiti that's on freight trains today).

No, no, no, if you have a set of cars, send someone with them. . .

All this again supports my opinion that the old excursion model is no longer viable. Regularly scheduled is the way to go. We don't have the luxury dealing with the Reading or the Burlington in the early 1960s, when those companies could pull out a bunch of then-not-so-old heavyweight commuter cars that were idle during the weekend, to be pulled by a T-1 or an O-5 that still had flue time and which would be run and maintained by men who were working on steam daily less than five years before, and in at least some cases had a section of railroad that still had steam facilities.

Now, having said this, the prospect of a new or revised set of what we'll call "heritage interchange standards" for cars in this service as suggested by Txhighballer might be worthwhile, especially if you could get some government agency to sit in on this like the FRA or even Amtrak. However, you still will have to deal with some--some--railroad managers who have apparently been driven to paranoia about passenger trains by the insurance industry--which is to say, you can't deal with them at all until and if they get replaced by people with a more enlightened attitude.

Are you referring to THESE "Part 238" rules?

Golly, I think there's an echo in here.




Yeah, none of us have a prayer of advancing anything along this agenda until we know what the rules are. And we cannot possibly know what the rules are until we obtain them from actual, real documents instead of our backside.

In fact this ignorant knee-jerking is precisely the heart of the problem. Everybody is searching for, craving, and expecting to find a reference standard. Well, FRA has opted out. The Class I's don't know either, so they reach for anything they can grab - and what wins is the standard that is written, as opposed to the one not written. E.G. FRA or Amtrak. Somebody - who actually knows, and isn't making stuff up - needs to develop a middle standard.


And the problem there is not FRA, but ADA. I haven't deep-dove into the ADA regs on this, but the standard is pretty universally "you must do what is easy". A new design is considered a blank-sheet start from scratch, so everything is deemed "easy". Your new coach will NOT look like a 1930s coach. It might be disguised as one, that is the best you can hope for.

Nothing stops us from buying Chinese. Generally the people bound by "Buy American" rules are the people who buy 99.99% of all new railcars in this country - transit agencies relying on Federal funds. That is why nobody buys brand new Chinese PCCs at any price, and Brookville does a land-office business doing American remanufactures on foreign hulks, even though that is less efficient in the large.

As far as going offshore for fabrication, China is not a magic cornucopia in which drawings go in and flawless products come out. We don't go to China for skill - we go there for low wages, and we have to sweat a lot to actually get a usable product out of it, and their climbing wages have passed the point of not being worth it. It CAN be done - Apple does it. Apple products are tip-top for quality. But it's not easy. In a small quantity situation, where the engineering has to work closely with the manufacturing, you'll have distance barriers, work-ethic barriers, language barriers.

None of that exists in the place where Chinese and Japanese companies send a lot of their engineering work: southeast Michigan. Despite what you heard about Detroit proper, it's ringed with affluent suburbs full of very smart engineers and unbelievable prototyping capacity, and because of that, engineering departments of many companies in many fields. Figure every part on a car or truck got made in small quantity first, most in that immediate area, because you can drive over and take the contractor's engineer out to lunch, and he speaks proper English, so he actually gets what you want. You can find those capacities other places, but not together - there's a critical mass in southeast Michigan. That is where I would attempt such a project.

Allright...I get that, which is pretty much what I stated. We need to do something as an industry which will pass muster with the Class Ones.Just as the steam regs were re-written using the expertise of some of the best in the business, I think we should apply the same principle to getting the coaches that everyone can live with.

Who are the best coach restorers in our industry? Can they assist in writing the new standards for excursion coaches rebuilt here? Who is (are) a (the) coach restorers respected by BOTH the FRA and Class Ones to get the new standards?Who do we talk to at the Class Ones to even get the conversation started?Gettysburg forced the change in regs and they did a splendid job on getting that done.

What I think needs to happen is those who have extensive knowledge in rebuilding coaches and complete knowledge of the FRA regs need to come together and establish a standard, then go to the Class Ones and allow them to make any tweaks they request, then get the FRA involved. Once the standard has been established, we have a template to work from, and we have what the railroads and the FRA need. Amtrak might be consulted o provide a waiver for those cars moving on Amtrak trains.We need to start somewhere, and IMHO, sounds like the direction we need to be headed in.

I strongly concur with Txhighballer, and would add one other thing--while we're at it, let's talk about movement of vintage freight and non-revenue cars such as cabooses, including cars on plain bearings. This would be with the idea of having a heritage freight car fleet for photo charters and the like.

Now, if only we could also get our mitts on all those two-bay hoppers that have been showing up, would make a real proper coal train to pull with the likes of the 1218. . .(dream on, dream on, yeah, I know. . .)

For the record, there WERE other than two-bay hoppers that ran behind steam in regular service. Triple-bay and even four-bay cars. The KEY is genuine vintage cars in authentic paint schemes. And yes....I dream too!

Les

The key is making this sort of dream an economically favorable enterprise for a host railroad to run. Mention it again when you have cleared that hurdle.

dave

"The key is making this sort of dream an economically favorable enterprise for a host railroad to run. Mention it again when you have cleared that."--Dave

Tried it years and years ago, and failed. Failed at some other things, too, including a television series about railroaders at work in the WW II era (spent two years of all my spare time on that, for nothing). Did all this from exactly the perspective you're speaking of, and it still didn't work.

I have come to the conclusion that you need to be dedicated, hard working, and smart to be successful in business--and that you have to be lucky, too. You can do everything right, and things will still fail because you aren't lucky. I attribute luck as being fully 50% of the equation of success, with your own hard work and intelligence as being the other 50%.

In my case, I attribute my failure to a lack of a "voice of authority," or a "voice of persuasion." None of this is what somebody can do on their own, like building a model railroad; you have to be able to get support, to get backing. If you can't get anyone to listen to you, if you can't get anyone to back you, you have no chance. That's me--and heck, I can't even get my wife to listen to me!!

If you aren't regularly failing or pissing people off, you aren't thinking or accomplishing anything. I've been trying for a couple months now to get even some meaningful feedback on a proposal that would - if implemented and successful - solve virtually ALL the development problems one organization is now encountering in reaching their goals. Nobody even wants to talk about what's wrong with it or how it can be made better....assuming they have even read it. A vote of no confidence followed by a rational explaination would be fine.....

Doesn't mean I won't keep trying and see if it might suit another likely group if this one gets no response where it is now. Doesn't mean I won't keep working on developing other new ideas. I wish any of the unresponsive people in charge would come forward with ideas of their own if they don't want mine, I gladly support good thinking from any source.

No ideas is something I can't justify supporting.

dave

"Doesn't mean I won't keep trying and see if it might suit another likely group if this one gets no response where it is now. Doesn't mean I won't keep working on developing other new ideas. I wish any of the unresponsive people in charge would come forward with ideas of their own if they don't want mine, I gladly support good thinking from any source.

"No ideas is something I can't justify supporting."--Dave

That's me, too, and why I post some of the things I do. I can't use them for the reasons cited above, but maybe some one else here can. . .and if they do, good luck! You'll really need it!

One good thing about this site is that nobody is going to call me a Communist for boosting rail service, including heritage service. I had that happen to me when I was promoting a light rail line--a modern interurban--that, as I envisioned it, would have used replicas of something like C&LE's Red Devils or Indiana Railroad's high-speed cars. The idea was that it would double as a transit line and as a tourist attraction. Got told I was trying to take away cars and bring back the horse and buggy, along with being reminded this wasn't a Communist country.

Now you know why I say, with apologies to Rodney Dangerfield, "We don't get no respect, no respect at all!"

I'm actively trying to buy a railroad, and most likely will until I get the one I want. Some things take awhile to make happen, but when they do...it's better than you ever imagined.

I'll say this..once I have the railroad I want, lots of good things that have been discussed on this board will take place because the freight revenues will help to support it..along with volunteer help.If you can't offer financing, at least offer prayers.....

Maybe the money would be better spent on whipping up an HEP car or two for use with rental Amfleets.

Sure, they may not look the part, but they work (and when they don't Amtrak will sub in one that will).