Air conditioning on the Crescent?

Hi all.

We are going PHL to NOL and back over the next few weeks. I'm wondering if the AC is working on the Crescent these days? Anyone taken the trip lately and care to comment? We are getting excited about our upcoming vacation - so any comments about the Crescent are welcomed. Thanks all and let the good times roll!

John King said:

Hi all.

We are going PHL to NOL and back over the next few weeks. I'm wondering if the AC is working on the Crescent these days? Anyone taken the trip lately and care to comment? We are getting excited about our upcoming vacation - so any comments about the Crescent are welcomed. Thanks all and let the good times roll!

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They were working fine in the cars I was in weekend before last.

John King said:

Hi all.

We are going PHL to NOL and back over the next few weeks. I'm wondering if the AC is working on the Crescent these days? Anyone taken the trip lately and care to comment? We are getting excited about our upcoming vacation - so any comments about the Crescent are welcomed. Thanks all and let the good times roll!

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If you are riding in a Sleeper it will be a Viewliner! Sometimes the Bedrooms (there are only three, A/B/H) will be warm and the Roomettes (#1-11) will be cool to cold! Ive not experienced this myself while riding the LSL/Cardinal or Crescent, but others have! You should be OK! If youre going in Coach I cant comment, Ive not ridden in an AMfleet II Coach on this Route! :unsure: Nice Trip, enjoy New Orleans!

jimhudson said:

John King said:

Hi all.

We are going PHL to NOL and back over the next few weeks. I'm wondering if the AC is working on the Crescent these days? Anyone taken the trip lately and care to comment? We are getting excited about our upcoming vacation - so any comments about the Crescent are welcomed. Thanks all and let the good times roll!

Click to expand...

If you are riding in a Sleeper it will be a Viewliner! Sometimes the Bedrooms (there are only three, A/B/H) will be warm and the Roomettes (#1-11) will be cool to cold! Ive not experienced this myself while riding the LSL/Cardinal or Crescent, but others have! You should be OK! If youre going in Coach I cant comment, Ive not ridden in an AMfleet II Coach on this Route! :unsure: Nice Trip, enjoy New Orleans!

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That's encouraging. Nine of us going in roomettes - but not all in the same roomette!

John King said:

Hi all.

We are going PHL to NOL and back over the next few weeks. I'm wondering if the AC is working on the Crescent these days? Anyone taken the trip lately and care to comment? We are getting excited about our upcoming vacation - so any comments about the Crescent are welcomed. Thanks all and let the good times roll!

Click to expand...

I live in Atlanta, have ridden the Crescent regularly for many years. No real problem with any system not working. I do remember once the AC and restroom was off in my sleeper and I was put in a coach and got a refund. That is one trip out of so many.

Keep in mind that the things on any train that can go wrong like no heat, no air, rude employees, noise in the room etc are so sporadical in no way predictable or planned.

Keep in mind that it takes four sets of equipment to schedule the Crescent on a daily basis so you are dealing with much more equipment than you might think at first.It would be a big hassle if a certain amount of cars could be expected to have mechanical problems nearly every trip.

Forget about it and have a good trip.

I happened to be in New York during the great northeast Power Blackout a few years ago...The temperature did not get corrected as much as one would like in my hotel room.. But then there I was all relaxed in my bedroom on the Crescent to go back to Atlanta, and the air conditioning was 100 per cent perfect, never more needed or appreciated.

John King said:

That's encouraging. Nine of us going in roomettes - but not all in the same roomette!

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Then again.... nine people in a single roomette would be quite an achievement IMHO

Out of 4 round trips between Atlanta and New Orleans in the past 4 months, only one leg of one trip did we lose AC in the sleeper. So it does happen from time to time.

I've had a suana in the bedroom end of the Viewliners and was able to hang meat in the roomette end. The coaches seem to be controlled by the SA and usally are OK. If you want to really cool off head to the diner or lounge car.

had8ley said:

I've had a suana in the bedroom end of the Viewliners and was able to hang meat in the roomette end. The coaches seem to be controlled by the SA and usally are OK. If you want to really cool off head to the diner or lounge car.

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And the diner was indeed where I hung out last Sunday for the bulk of the ride from Albany down the Hudson to NYP. The AC in our sleeper went out around Utica and remained off for the rest of the trip. The first few hours weren't too bad, as it did take a while to heat things up. But by Albany it was getting rather warm.

Mechanical looked at it, but failed to fix it in ALB. Not even sure if the guy knew what he was doing based upon the excuse he gave the attendant prior to our leaving. Could be that he couldn't fix it and had to make something up, but if that was the case then he should have been a bit more creative. He told the attendant that once the batteries charged up in the car, the AC would kick back on.

Now let's see; first the AC doesn't pull power from the batteries, ever. The batteries are for emergency lighting and the PA only. Second, since our car had never lost HEP, the batteries were never drained.

All I can say Alan is Albany never has shown me much in railroading...remember the old fiasco of trying to fold the Boston section to the NYP section. My chocolate lab could have had the train out in half the time. :lol: :lol: :help: :help:

The worst AC failure I have experienced was in a Superliner Sleeper on the California Zephyr in the middle of Nevada. I believe AlanB was also in the same car and he had it worse.

jis said:

The worst AC failure I have experienced was in a Superliner Sleeper on the California Zephyr in the middle of Nevada. I believe AlanB was also in the same car and he had it worse.

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Yup, the Bedroom end of the car was worse than the roomette end of the car. My mom likes to travel with chocolates to eat after dinner, by the time we got to Emeryville all the Hershey's Kisses were just blobs instead of their normal shape.

Interestingly though, unlike this recent experience where the entire system failed including the fan, the Zephyr incident was different. At night the AC could catch up with things, but once the sun was beating on the cars it lost the battle. On our second day, about half the day was cloudy which helped to provide some relief. On the final day, with her car partially empty after Sacramento the attendant from that car offered us a room in her car for the remainder of the ride so as to stay cool.

had8ley said:

All I can say Alan is Albany never has shown me much in railroading...remember the old fiasco of trying to fold the Boston section to the NYP section. My chocolate lab could have had the train out in half the time. :lol: :lol: :help: :help:

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I remember it well, in fact I stood there and watched it more than once and have described it here on the forum more than once in fact.

Frankly I can appreciate the fact that with limited time and not normally seeing Viewliners, that he couldn't fix it. My issue is more with his stupid story about how we had to wait for the batteries to charge up before it would start working. Just tell the attendant that you can't fix it and leave it at that. No point in getting people's hopes up.

AlanB said:

Interestingly though, unlike this recent experience where the entire system failed including the fan, the Zephyr incident was different. At night the AC could catch up with things, but once the sun was beating on the cars it lost the battle. On our second day, about half the day was cloudy which helped to provide some relief. On the final day, with her car partially empty after Sacramento the attendant from that car offered us a room in her car for the remainder of the ride so as to stay cool.

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I've experienced this a number of times too where the sleeper's AC does fine during evenings and mornings. But as soon as the sun begins to shine from above, it's as though the AC and sun are in a race where the sun pulls ahead for the rest of the day. The rooms stay warm until dusk falls. Do you think this is attributed to a setting being too low at the control panel or is it literally that the AC is pushed to the limits of its cooling capability and cannot outpace the sun's warming effects?
Having an overheated room is one of my biggest concerns during an LD trip. I'm pretty self-sufficient and can stand in to do the SCA duties if mine is MIA, but there is not much you can do about your room temp if the SCA tells you it cannot be changed. And I never know whether I am being told the truth that the AC is indeed maxing out or if it could be adjusted by the SCA but that s/he doesn't want to do it for whatever reason. Some SCAs have told me that they can definitely change the cooling settings while others have said that it cannot be done.

I suppose that there are times when the attendant simply doesn't want to be bothered with adjusting things, but that was not the case on the Zephyr. The attendant really did try everything, as did one conductor who got involved. He thought that it might just be a compressor that had iced over (something that he'd apparently had before). So he turned everything off for a while.

Not only did that not help at all, it made things worse that day because with no air moving for about 2 hours the car got hotter than it would have had he left things alone. Not a complaint; just an observation in hindsight.

But the crew really was trying to deal with the situation, it was just something beyond their ability to deal with/fix enroute.

My favorite AC story takes place in Europe. I was traveling from Rome to Zurich on an overnight sleeper service. 10 minutes out for Rome, the AC in the Couchette car that I was in stopped working. A bunch of passengers went and asked the attendant to do something about it. He promptly disappeared from the car never to be seen again, and of course nothing got fixed!

Next morning as the train was handed over by FS (The Italian Railway) to SBB-CFF-FFS (the Swiss Railway, who insist in stating their name in three languages hence three acronyms) at Como, as soon as the Swiss crew took over, everything started working! What is even more interesting is that the car we were in was actually owned and maintained by FS, and yet the Swiss managed to get it to work better than the Italians!

jis said:

My favorite AC story takes place in Europe. I was traveling from Rome to Zurich on an overnight sleeper service. 10 minutes out for Rome, the AC in the Couchette car that I was in stopped working. A bunch of passengers went and asked the attendant to do something about it. He promptly disappeared from the car never to be seen again, and of course nothing got fixed!

Next morning as the train was handed over by FS (The Italian Railway) to SBB-CFF-FFS (the Swiss Railway, who insist in stating their name in three languages hence three acronyms) at Como, as soon as the Swiss crew took over, everything started working! What is even more interesting is that the car we were in was actually owned and maintained by FS, and yet the Swiss managed to get it to work better than the Italians!

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Jis: Think I had that Attendant once on the CONO!! ^_^ Haven't you heard that nothing works in Italy including the workers!! (Old joke: LBJ declared a War on Poverty and the Italian Army surrendered! :lol: ) As to the Swiss, works like a Swiss Watch used to be the Standard of the World!

jimhudson said:

jis said:

My favorite AC story takes place in Europe. I was traveling from Rome to Zurich on an overnight sleeper service. 10 minutes out for Rome, the AC in the Couchette car that I was in stopped working. A bunch of passengers went and asked the attendant to do something about it. He promptly disappeared from the car never to be seen again, and of course nothing got fixed!

Next morning as the train was handed over by FS (The Italian Railway) to SBB-CFF-FFS (the Swiss Railway, who insist in stating their name in three languages hence three acronyms) at Como, as soon as the Swiss crew took over, everything started working! What is even more interesting is that the car we were in was actually owned and maintained by FS, and yet the Swiss managed to get it to work better than the Italians!

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Jis: Think I had that Attendant once on the CONO!! ^_^ Haven't you heard that nothing works in Italy including the workers!! (Old joke: LBJ declared a War on Poverty and the Italian Army surrendered! :lol: ) As to the Swiss, works like a Swiss Watch used to be the Standard of the World!

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Yeah Jis, don't you remember the shortest book ever written?~ Italian War Heroes ! :lol: :lol: :lol:

The layout of the Superliner Sleeping Cars makes it pretty tough to design an efficient and effective HVAC system. So, the system they installed is a compromise at best. Could they have done a better job? Sure, but that would have cost more money and it would eat a lot of HEP.

So, yes, it is a case of the HVAC not being able to keep up with the outside ambient temp and the sun. A savvy attendant will know how to manage the situation by working on air flow as early in the day as possible. But, even that can be a losing battle. Most attendants don’t understand or care about the airflow in the car anyway, nor are they really expected to be experts on it.

Not only do the Superliners have large, single-paned windows (two major no-nos of climate control designing), but the vestibule doors are left open for several minutes at each station stop. If you were to put a 1,000 square foot house out in the Nevada desert during July with 30 people inside, install as many single-paned windows as the Superliner has, and leave the front door open wide for five minutes each hour, you would have cooling issues as well.

I boarded #20 in NOL on Friday (7/29) and detrained in ALX yesterday. Even with all the hot outside air temps, the AC worked fine in my roomette, the DC and the LC, but I heard some of the coach cars were warm.

BTW: The damage in Tuscaloosa from last Spring's F-5 tornado is still a frightening sight and is visible on both sides of the train for a mile or two as you approach the station from the north. I was eating lunch with a gentleman who rode out Katrina in his house in New Orleans. When he saw the damage in Tuscaloosa, he said he would prefer to ride out another major hurricane than to ride out a tornado like the one that hit Tuscaloosa.

Yeah Jis, don't you remember the shortest book ever written?~ Italian War Heroes !

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The only time that the trains ran on time in Italy's history was when Benito Mussolini was in power. That might have been the only good thing that he did.

jis said:

My favorite AC story takes place in Europe. I was traveling from Rome to Zurich on an overnight sleeper service. 10 minutes out for Rome, the AC in the Couchette car that I was in stopped working. A bunch of passengers went and asked the attendant to do something about it. He promptly disappeared from the car never to be seen again, and of course nothing got fixed!

Next morning as the train was handed over by FS (The Italian Railway) to SBB-CFF-FFS (the Swiss Railway, who insist in stating their name in three languages hence three acronyms) at Como, as soon as the Swiss crew took over, everything started working! What is even more interesting is that the car we were in was actually owned and maintained by FS, and yet the Swiss managed to get it to work better than the Italians!

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SBB has always been amongst my favorites.

dlagrua said:

Yeah Jis, don't you remember the shortest book ever written?~ Italian War Heroes !

Click to expand...

The only time that the trains ran on time in Italy's history was when Benito Mussolini was in power. That might have been the only good thing that he did.

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He died. That was presumably good.

dlagrua said:

Yeah Jis, don't you remember the shortest book ever written?~ Italian War Heroes !

Click to expand...

The only time that the trains ran on time in Italy's history was when Benito Mussolini was in power. That might have been the only good thing that he did.

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Urban legend.