Amtrak's Five Year Plan

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/businessplanning/Amtrak-Five-Year-Service-Plans-FY18-FY23.pdf

First time I read Amtrak is looking at DMUs equipment. Makes sense if its more efficient than a Charger or Genesis pulling three Amfleet cars.

On page 15 it mentions Amtrak looking at DMUs.

Where could the DMUs be used? They are not intended for LD or NEC service, and new equipment is on the way for California and the Midwest. They could make sense on the Shuttle and Downeaster, but it doesn't seems likely that they would buy the equipment unless they have other routes in mind as well.

brianpmcdonnell17 said:

Where could the DMUs be used? They are not intended for LD or NEC service, and new equipment is on the way for California and the Midwest. They could make sense on the Shuttle and Downeaster, but it doesn't seems likely that they would buy the equipment unless they have other routes in mind as well.

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You can make multi-car DMUs. I've used a 6 car one in Turkey, though the economics start getting worse as you increase scale. They have power cars on each end, distributed through the entire trainset. So Downeaster makes sense, and so would some Midwest corridor routes if the host railroads allowed them. Maybe the Springfield Shuttle too?

Years ago, I thought there was some kind of idea floated out there about getting DMUs for the Hiawatha, before the state wound up ordering (and then cancelling) the Talgos.

Trogdor said:

Years ago, I thought there was some kind of idea floated out there about getting DMUs for the Hiawatha, before the state wound up ordering (and then cancelling) the Talgos.

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I forgot about the Hiawatha's, but they are so crowded now that a DMU might not make sense unless they can increase the frequencies significantly.

The accounting is even more garbled and opaque than before, which is saying something. There seems to be a deliberate effort to make sure nobody can actually tell what's going on -- and to make the so-called long-distance trains look worse than they really are. The devil is in the bogus "allocations", as always. At least the breakdown of the total budget into "transportation", "equipment", "infrastructure", "stations", and "national assets and corporate services" is probably legitimate.

The report does point out that Amtrak overhead has been going up, which is a problem. A capital-intenstive business will always have high overhead, but the whole point is that expanding should keep the overhead constant. Rising overhead on constant operations is undesirable. The report says they're going to try to get it under control but it's not clear that they know where the growth is coming from.