So this just came across from Facebook, but it seems that two trailers and one of the powered cab units from Tri Rail's DMU sets have made it to the French Lick Scenic/Indiana Railway Museum...

https://www.facebook.com/FLScenicRailwa ... SjPY7TJVMl

April Fool's post are allegedly banned here. Even I can't craft an April Fool's joke that big. And they're three weeks early.

Oh, wait................ they might be serious............. ??????

I guess the question becomes what do these get used for? Even if they are just used as coaches, they do have a high capacity. I think 218 seats per car?

I have fired steam loco #208 in the late 1980s. I remember a long tunnel..........

Sheesh, that's like saying Amtrak is going to be rebuilding HHP-8s into cabbages to replace the ex-Metroliner cab cars, until replacement Airo sets are delivered and tested. What maroon would believe that one?

Another strange chapter in the long and tangled story of Colorado Railcar.

I got to ride in the single-level DMU demonstrator across Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg when it was on the barnstorming sales trip across the US. We got all kinds of excuses on why it couldn't run by itself and it was being towed by an NS unit. And it hadn't operated on the AVR by itself in Pittsburgh either, another excuse.
Closer examination showed the driveshafts were removed.

The interior, however, was remarkable, as well as the view. One of the best ADA restroom designs I've ever seen.

This is the unit that ended up with the mysterious fuel pad fire in Pueblo.

The basic passenger cars appear to have had a better service life than any of the DMU's, I think Alaska demoted theirs into a coach, are any of the powered DMU's still out there ?
Are the Portland WES still operable?

I'm pretty sure WES's examples are in service. Alaska's bi-level one was built with the added ability to be used as a cab car, and that one is still in service at least in that capacity (I think?). Which begs the question about the Colorado DMUs, what was the issue with them anyway? From what little I understand, it sounds like the bi-level cars had major problems with the transmissions not being able to handle the weight of the car itself?

That brings to mind the issues that apparently dogged the Budd SPVs--a DMU version of the Metroliners and Amfleet cars.

I don't know what was really wrong with them. The carbodies certainly were good, considering how long they've held up in original and long distance Amfleet versions.

So what went wrong? Is there problems with diesel-mechanical drives today that weren't around in the days of RDCs? How do other companies in other countries build what are apparently serviceable cars, but we don't seem to be able to do so?

Maybe--just maybe--could it a problem of trying to do something on the cheap, such as using a bus transmission where something might have to be a bit heavier?

The problem with the CDOT SPV cars was not so much the transmissions as it was a 'weight on drivers' issue. Engineers were paid on a weight on drivers scale. The SPVs were designed to have all four axles powered, unlike the original RDCs, which only had the inner axles powered. To keep the weight on drivers down, as well as engineer pay, the drive shafts between axles 1 and 2, and between axles 3 and 4, were left off. So the cars were slippery and deemed unreliable. What should have been a successful concept was sabotaged by the operator.

They are, their north endpoint is less than a mile from where I live, occasionally you will see a Budd RDC on the route but normally it is the Colorado/ Rader DMUs. I recall an article in Trains Magazine around fifteen years ago or so when the DMUs were late in being delivered, Tri-Met went to their factory in Ft. Lupton Colorado and realized Rader was not set up for constructing rail cars, they were moving completed car shells around with forklifts, etc. Rader went bankrupt, and I believe the assets, patterns etc. were bought by a company in Ohio, and Tri-Met had to finish the cars themselves in the bankrupt factory. Eventually Tri-Met wants to build a light rail line down to Tigard, which would make the (poorly patronized) DMUs superfluous. Diesel heavy railcars protected enough to interact with freight trains just can't accelerate like light rail cars.

There was more to the story than that. The SPV design was, in part, intended to have a top speed comparable to Amfleet, touted as about 120mph at the time, and this was not only the reason why the trucks were designed to have both axles gear-driven but also the reason why the main engines were designed to be propulsion-only.

Meanshile (and I am avoiding cracks about 'automotive engineering design philosophy') the cars were experiencing bracket creep -- they had heavy upholstered fittings, carpet, air conditioning, a host of electrickery and conveniences -- and were built longer than older RDCs. All that was supposed to be provided by an economically-powered genset "APU". And that would have made sense, if quite a few rather obvious (in hindshght, at least) detail design decisions been made about that.

But returning to the present story: the issue with the unions about weight on powered axles came to a head when the large, heavy, long SPV2000s could not have their gear and shaft kits installed in the trucks. This was a problem not only because the 8V92TAs suitable for 120mph constituted a lot of horsepower to run through two contact patches per engine, but because some aspects of the antislip provisions were ghastly. The throttle response of the engines was substantial, and what would invariably happen if you tried to get more than AEM-7-level sedate initial acceleration was that one or the other powered axle would slip. This caused the engine associated with it to overspeed, and then overcompensate and slow down, and this would rather promptly throw the car resistance onto the other axle which in turn would start slipping, now out of synch with the first one. So you had a sort of seesawing, violent at times, slip with the long driveshafts winding up and untwisting, that could only be solved by partly closing the throttle and waiting.

Now, as things turned out, it also eventuated that you couldn't slip the torque converters quickly enough to solve this, meaning that you'd have needed friction 'traction control' on the axles via the brake system to get something fast-acting or effective enough. This was in the era before effective electronic control of this sort of thing was cheap or even particularly good.

By the time I came into this, in the latter 1980s, the 'solution' was to put a torquemeter and much of the associated sensing electronics into an appropriately environmentally-hardened driveshaft, which was inductively charged (running the car no more than about 20 revolutions of the shaft would charge it enough to start running) and was 'optically coupled' to the car by a circumferential array of LEDs and a detector array inside a suitable boot. This would have acted on fast-acting actuators on an independent brake, the valves for the torque converters, and the engine governor in some planned sequences. Of course, by that time, the damage was done, including all the awfulness involving the APU, and everything was moving away from expensive self-powered cars to what we have today (in PRIIA, Airo, etc.)

As far as I was able to tell, all the subsequent 'action' in DMUs followed the same general idea that you needed ever-more-extensive luxury construction at ever-more-ridiculous cost, and any of the companies that decided to follow that paradigm 'for profit' in the United States eventually wound up losing their butts. Often without telling anyone ahead of time.

It would be particularly hard to compete with something like a Stadler FLIRT, which has a large experience base and construction in Europe and elsewhere in the world, ASSuming they can either CEM or waiver their way out of the more onerous mainline safety concerns with self-powered passenger trains.

The requirement for employing a fireman was also based on Weight on Drivers, not total weight.

Mark - Firing that 2-6-0 through the tunnel must have been fun! I have often wondered why the two Moguls that they had there at French Lick (numbers 208 and 97) were set aside. Did they have major mechanical problems? Or did they just decide that diesel was the easier way to go? I think that the 208 was owned by a preservation group down in Texas and was leased to French Lick. At one time they planned on bringing the 2-6-0 back to Texas, but I guess that plan fell by the wayside.

Les Beckman,
Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum
(Home of OPERATING Forney number 1)

A fascinating if depressing story, with so-called marketing gurus messing things up.

In the meantime, it looks like Stadler has been addressing US structural regulations and has equipment available that can run in mixed traffic here.

https://www.stadlerrail.com/media/pdf/f ... ail_en.pdf

One thing I think is ingenious is that the diesel FLIRTs are actually electric MU cars with a short diesel power car (called a "Power Pack" by Stadler) that is apparently just inserted into a standard EMU set. Battery, diesel electric, and dual mode versions of the Power Pack are available.

Think of how well such an approach works for standardization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadler_FLIRT

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... er_car.jpg

“In the meantime, it looks like Stadler has been addressing US structural regulations and has equipment available that can run in mixed traffic here.”

I was the initial FRA lead from the FRA Passenger Rail Division for both the TexRail and Redlands commuter rail projects. The Stadler commuter rail vehicles as built at their Salt Lake City facility for these projects are FRA compliant commuter rail vehicles. The vehicles for Caltrain that were also constructed in SLC are compliant as well. Any variance from FRA (waivers) are minor in nature.

Mike Ramsey