BEECH GROVE, Indiana — Museums and preservation groups are being offered a chance to request donations of heritage dining cars and other equipment among the latest batch of cars Amtrak is otherwise offering for sale.
The company has announced it is putting 99 additional passenger and baggage cars up for sale or donation, a month after it began accepting bits for a variety of cars and locomotives deemed to be surplus, a group most notably including five ex-Santa Fe Hi-level lounge cars. [See “Amtrak to sell Parlour Cars, locomotives as surplus,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 18, 2018, and “News analysis: Amtrak equipment sale reflects lack of emphasis on growth, revenue,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 22, 2018.]
The latest offer includes 51 baggage cars built between 1946 and 1962, seven refrigerated express cars from Amtrak’s ill-fated ExpressTrak initiative 20 years ago, four Hi-level coaches that the Budd Company built for Santa Fe’s El Capitan in 1956, and 18 crew dormitory cars converted from former Union Pacific 10-roomette, six-bedroom sleeping cars.
But the most varied assortment of equipment is the collection of 19 dining cars. With Viewliner II dining cars beginning to arrive following production problems at CAF, USA’s Elmira, N.Y., plant, Amtrak began retiring heritage diners in 2015 and hastened the process by dropping them entirely from the New York-Miami Silver Star in 2016.
The cars are costly to maintain because replacement parts are no longer available; the largest expenses are incurred during truck rebuilding or custom body work.
The company’s conditions of sale announcement says it will consider donation requests from museums and preservation groups accompanied by a letter “stating the reason for the donation request and the intended use of the equipment should the donation be granted.”
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari tells Trains News Wire that “donation requests will be evaluated within the finance department,” but he declined to speculate on what plans might be viewed more favorably between competing proposals or who would make the decision.
Beginning next week, Amtrak will hold inspections at its Beech Grove Heavy Maintenance Facility near Indianapolis, where all but the refrigerated express cars and one crew dormitory are now stored. As in previous sales, the equipment is offered “as is-where is,” with no performance guarantees and an understanding that Amtrak will not perform any work required to make the cars acceptable for interchange by a freight carrier. The bid document also states the equipment may not leave the property in Amtrak service and successful bidders must remove or dismantle it on site (if scrapped) within 90 days.
The bid closing date is Jan. 4, 2019.
For what it’s worth, Amtrak diner No. 8502, formerly Burlington’s “Silver Cuisine,” has ended up with the Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum (hodrrm.org).
I see how much Amtrak wants to increase service. NOT!!
“What other non-monopolistic company would make such a self-destructive, anti-taxpayer decision?”
A non-monopolistic company would be private enterprise. It would not be concerned with being anti-taxpayer because it would not be reliant on the taxpayers to cover its losses.
By the same token, I cannot imagine a for profit corporation keeping seven refrigerated express cars from Amtrak’s ill-fated ExpressTrak initiative 20 years ago in storage before deciding they no longer had any value to the company. A competitive company would have gotten rid of them years ago.
I’m more concerned that Amtrak is not using the new diners they ordered. Love to see real food service returned to the Lake Shore for instance.
I hope some of the ExpressTrak Reefers that were just recently added to the list end up getting preserved in a museum as they are historic as well as I believe that the reefers were remanufactured from something else although I don’t remember what.
However since the 7 remaining ExpressTrak reefers have been added to the sale, I guess that IPFX (The company that bought some of the others) didn’t want the remaining Amtrak Reefers that are currently stored in Amtrak’s Redondo Yard here in Los Angeles and still have Reporting Marks IPFX and they have been stored here in LA for years, but over the years as I have passed by the reefers a number of times on both Amtrak and Metrolink Trains, I have noticed that Amtrak has done a few things to them including they removed the refrigeration units at the ends of the cars but have put them back on.
Rather than mourning the last breath of this equipment, where is the concern and interest to identify why Amtrak unloaded its Budd 480 HEP cars?
Was this action taken not only to prevent access to private operators, but to keep Amtrak in its narrow place to prevent any potential expansion of frequencies, extra sections, or even to be able to provide service to new, expanded routes?
What other non-monopolistic company would make such a self-destructive, anti-taxpayer decision? To what extent does Amtrak serve up this anti-public philosophy from its cookbook found in Izvestia?
The Santa Fe hi-levels would look nice behind Illinois Railway Museum’s Santa Fe FP45.
oh lawdy i wish i had the money to buy some of this stuff…
The above comments are general in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn lawyer.
I would hope that Amtrak would give a diner, hopefully still in decent working order, to the Friends of 4449 group and the PRPA group who are the caretakers of SP&S 700. Also, I’m reasonably sure that the folks in New Mexico, working on the 2926 would love to have a usable diner for 2926 to pull. Maybe the 3751 group could use one too. Decent food service cars are always to be desired on excursion trains.