Since this is the fifth unit (with the first four used for testing), it indicates that the testing has gone smoothly with no serious problems that would require a significant design or production manufacturing change. TO also reports that the Amfleets used at Pueblo have been shipped back east to WAS over the past week, so the testing at Pueblo must be wrapping up.
Will passengers notice a difference (other than visually seeing different looking locos at the front of the trains) - or will this change only be seen by Amtrak management/beancounters?
It will be interesting to see whether they opt to use those saved minutes to cut scheduled journey time, or whether they will keep them as padding. I haven't yet seen any announcement that they intend to tighten the schedules at any point.
If they do trim the Regional schedules because of the ACS-64 acceleration and power, it won't be until after there is a uniform ACS-64 locomotive fleet or close to it. So long as they are running a mix of locomotive types with AEM-7DC's to ACS-64s, have to set the schedule on the lowest performance loco in use. At the reported delivery rate of 2 per month, it will take another ~32 months to deliver all 70 units. In the meantime, the better acceleration and, one would hope, better reliability of the ACS-64s as they are deployed should boost the overall on-time performance of the Regionals.
Being on the other coast (still), I have an understanding that the 7DCs weren't the most reliable loco to be had... two questions: 1) just how unreliable were they, ie, how many spare units did they have to keep so as to have enough to run the scheduled trips, and 2) did the 7DCs tend to have a single point of failure, or were they like a 1980's chevy: fix one thing and something else would break, fix that and something else would fail?
Silly me again. I would love to see ALL the trains that are permanently on the NEC between WAS & BOS get Acela-esque trainsets, albeit longer. Much longer. And maybe without the articulated bogies. The difference in service then would not be the equipment, but rather in the schedules. Acela would be much faster, stopping at 5-10 stops, Regionals would double that, and the commuters would pick up everything else. Then, the ACS-64s would be used for only LD trains with a power change in DC.
Definitely less. This is easy:- First of all, some of the electrical generation for the NEC is from hydroelectricity and other carbon-free sources.
Yes. Diesel locomotives are actually very good compared to gasoline cars.
An excellent, well thought out answer - thank you.
yes, given enough money that would be an ideal situation. But I don't see that happening in the next several decades.
I don't believe X2000s are articulated. See for example:
Unless they're incredibly well damped, isn't there too much of a chance of introducing degrees of freedom that translate into resonances (and in the extreme self-destructive behaviors) - from the auto racing world: at high speeds, when things go wrong, they go very badly wrong, very quickly? Maybe supporting that many tons this is less of a concern or problem??
You can't really compare trains to auto racing. In auto racing, cars are built to go as fast as possible and this can sometimes be at the cost of optimizing to the limits and leaving very little margin to absorb things when things go wrong. A train is designed to provide 30 to 40 years of service clocking up many millions of miles whereas a racing car may at best be required to provide a season or two of performance with a lot of breathing space between races to thoroughly rebuild anything that has gone wrong.
