WASHINGTON — The Rail Passengers Association has learned from Amtrak that construction of four new or refurbished facilities to wash trains at originating terminals will finally become operational this summer and fall. The building at New Orleans will be activated before the end of July, and the facility at Boston’s Southampton Street yard is set to begin working in August, according to the report.
Wash facilities under construction at Chicago and Seattle are to be completed sometime “this fall.”
Giving train exteriors a complete once-over was always a problem at places like San Antonio, Tex., and Portland, Ore., where trains would make same-day or overnight turns, but at least windows were usually washed at those locations and en route at extended stops for long-distance trains such as Albuquerque and Denver. But pulling trains through washers as part of terminal servicing began to decline when current management decided to forego repairs at those facilities.
According to the RPA report, “A capital program to replace all the wash racks was deemed too expensive, so the mechanical forces had to fall back on a Plan B built around a mix of replacement wash racks and targeted repairs for other wash racks, plus a temporary workaround of having workers manually squeegee cars at certain stations.”
For the past several years, trains like the New York-New Orleans Crescent and the Chicago-San Antonio Texas Eagle never got washed, with caked-on road grime accumulating until rain storms might (or might not) do the job.
With existing facilities allowed to deteriorate and local environmental regulations affecting how waste water is captured, entirely new designs had to be engineered. In a progress update Amtrak furnished to News Wire last December, construction was underway at New Orleans and Boston. Designs were complete at Chicago and Seattle and construction contracted to an outside company, but it had not begun.
In December, designs ranged from 75% to 95% complete at seven other locations: Hialeah (Miami); Washington, D.C.; Sanford, Fla.; Los Angeles; Goleta, Calif.; Rensselaer (Albany), N.Y., and New York’s Sunnyside Yard. News Wire will update anticipated wash rack completion dates when that information becomes available.
After 3 years of dirty windows, Amtrak finally decided to rebuild the car washers ?
After riding Amtrak for 50 years, I have came to the conclusion that the USA is incapable of operating an interstate passenger rail system.
Close it down and refund the $66 billion back to the Treasury Dept.
Let the NE states pay for the Boston-Washington corridor.
This is great news. It’ll be nice for passengers to be able to see out the windows again.