WASHINGTON — Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General today issued a report highly critical of a manufacturing process that has led to defects preventing Amtrak from accepting any of the 12 of 28 New Acela trainsets and 22 of 28 café cars already produced at Alstom’s Hornell, N.Y., facility.
The 38-page report contains redactions of monetary amounts “due to [their] sensitive nature,” so the true cost of production errors has not been revealed for what had been called a $2.45 billion project when announced in 2016.
Since Trains News Wire attended an “open house” at the Hornell plant in June 2019, Amtrak and Alstom have only offered cursory explanations for why none of the trainsets tested on the Northeast Corridor had been placed in service [see “New Acelas face further delays,” Trains News Wire, May 30, 2023.] Today’s report confirms numerous issues, including:
— Alstom trainset designs have not yet met federal safety requirements, and each of the trainsets produced has defects Alstom is required to fix or modify before Amtrak launches revenue service.
— The inability to produce a validated computer model of the equipment’s performance will result in indeterminate further delays in the start of service. Predictions of performance from the computer model must be submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration as part of the qualification testing plan before it will allow the trainsets to proceed with additional operational testing.
— Alstom built more than half of all New Acela trainset units without a finalized design. The report notes that unanticipated design changes uncovered during model validation will need to be retrofitted onto the already-produced trainsets.
— The Inspector General found that Alstom hasn’t established a schedule for addressing defects, “which creates a secondary risk to the overall program schedule. Without more complete information, Amtrak cannot verify whether remediating the defects will impact the overall program schedule and revenue service launch,” according to a press release summarizing the report.
The failure of Alstom to produce and Amtrak to exercise oversight over New Acela trainset deployment comes more than three years after the company’s Inspector General warned of “significant risk” to the project in a January 2020 report.
It continues more than a decade of badly delayed or failed procurements that have plagued foreign manufacturers seeking to enter the U.S. intercity carbuilding market utilizing U.S. facilities:
— Spanish manufacturer CAF USA took more than 10 years to complete an order for 125 Viewliner II diners, sleepers, baggage-dorms, and baggage cars; Talgo, also based in Spain, was unable to maintain its Pacific Northwest foothold after Wisconsin’s Republican governor cancelled his predecessor’s order for Series 8 trainsets
— Japan’s Nippon Sharyo won a bilevel order for California and Midwest states with the low bid, then couldn’t produce a prototype.
— German-based Siemens encountered production issues that required retrofitting parts in already-produced Venture coaches that were substituted for the failed Nippon Sharyo procurement, slowing their deployment in the Midwest. The California cars have yet to be introduced, 11 years after the original Nippon Sharyo order and a year after Siemens and the state’s Department of Transportation said Caltrans had accepted the first seven cars in that 49-car order [see “California, Siemens say first Venture cars are ready …,” News Wire, Oct. 5, 2022]. The company did successfully build 10 trainsets for Florida’s Brightline and is in the process of constructing 82 Airo trainsets to replace nearly 50-year-old Amfleet equipment.
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