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Originally Posted by ardecila
A recent Greg Hinz blog post said that, in the forthcoming new schedule for the Chi-StL line, there will be five round trips, but only three of them will attain 110mph speeds. The other trains will have to go slowly - probably not much faster than they are today.
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The three trains running at 110 mph while the other 2 (one Lincoln Service, the Texas Eagle) don't run at high speed have struck me as odd. However, if you look at the applications that IL submitted it refers to the 2003 FEIS and 2004 ROD in some of the references to 3 high speed trains. Back when all that analysis work including scheduling and track use modeling was done, the Lincoln Service was 3 trains a day.
It may be that the current agreement language with UP only covers up to 3 110 mph trains. The IL applications also just repeat a lot of the 2003 material. So the three 110 mph trains in the applications and public material may in effect be a placeholder. My guess is IL DOT does not want to spend the time and money to update the schedule modeling, until the improvements to entire corridor, including the announced upgrades for the East St. Louis to Alton sections are fully defined. Then rerun the schedule modeling with UP for 5 or more round trip trains to work out all of them would be able to run at 110 mph. There are years of construction work to be done before the trains on the corridor will be able to take full advantage of it. They have time to rework agreements and schedules.
However, one would hope that for the amount of money now being spent on the corridor that they would be able to add an additional daily train. Spending that much without increasing the frequency by even only one additional daily train is not going to look very good.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Has anybody heard anything about the railcar/locomotive procurement? The Midwestern states just got a huge pot of money to buy new trainsets, but so far we only have two Talgo trainsets which may or may not enter service.
There are plenty of local manufacturers... ElectroMotive, Nippon Sharyo, possibly Talgo, etc...
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The recent grant the mid-West received along with CA are to purchase bi-level passenger cars which are compliant with the recently published new standard bi-level specification. I added up the total number of bi-level cars listed between the earlier CA and IL grants along with the Florida HSR redirection grants and it came to a interestingly round number of 120 bi-levels. Sizable enough order to attract competitive bids. It certainly appears that the plan is that CA, IL, and the other mid-West states (excluding WI) will combine their order. It is likely going to take a while for the state DOT agencies, Amtrak, and the FRA (who is providing almost all the funding here) to work out agreements, sign them, put together a rfp package, and go through the whole bid process. Probably won't hear much until a contract award is announced, and my guess is it won't happen for a year or longer.