SO MUCH FOR THE ALL WEATHER MODE.

The current winter has been a missed opportunity for Amtrak.  First came those Christmas storms and a cold snap that made a total hash of airline service.  "Airlines cancel more than 12,000 flights during severe winter storms and scramble to rebook holiday travelers."  That story dominated the news cycle into the new year.  Now there's another cold snap under way, with more cancellations and delays at the airports.  This time, the big coastal cities might be less affected, and the news cycle less agitated.

Those cold snaps have not been as much fun on the roads, lately, between impatient motorists playing ducks and drakes with the semis, and electric cars running out of juice more quickly and stalling somewhere short of a charging station.

There aren't that many trains running, whether in the regional corridors, or elsewhere, and those that are running are either running with short consists, or subject to diesel failures.  The short consist problem has many causes, including the rolling stock getting old (the average age of legacy cars Amtrak acquired in 1971 and 1972 was less than that of the current Superliner and Amfleet II cars), the maintenance being deferred, and some silly axle count rules on Canadian National metals.

Trailing two P42 locomotives on the Capitol into Chicago on Jan. 15 were a Viewliner II baggage car, sleeper, diner-lounge, and one coach. Since early January, a second coach has been dropped; for most of 2022, the Chicago-Washington, D.C., train ran with two sleeping cars. The Capitol previously had lost a third coach, transition sleeper and glass-topped Sightseer Lounge during frequency and capacity cutbacks coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite increasing demand for longer-distance travel beginning in mid-2020, Amtrak management failed to reverse fiscal-year operating plans to forego the expense of Federal Railroad Administration-mandated air brake inspections and rehabilitation. Instead of preparing for a post-COVID surge, sidelined equipment accumulated as each car’s four-year brake expiration date approached.

Some overhaul maintenance capacity has been diverted to restorative brake work on Amfleet and Horizon single-level coaches used in corridor service, but Superliners had yet to get that special treatment when Trains News Wire spoke with Amtrak’s Vice President, Chief Mechanical Officer, George Hull, at the company’s public Board of Directors meeting in December.

Things have not gotten better with the new stock coming to the coach yards for the regional trains.

Given the equipment shortage made worse by the delayed deployment of state-owned Venture coaches, it isn’t clear whether Amtrak has an alternative to Superliners on the route it gets paid by Illinois to run. In the meantime, travelers attempting to ride long-distance trains are paying the price.

Those diesels, also built by Siemens, are less than stellar in rough weather.

The Amtrak locomotives that sustained mid-route failures on the Empire Builder in December, stranding the eastbound train in rural Minnesota, are undergoing software and hardware modifications intended to prevent the problems from recurring.

Responding to a Trains News Wire inquiry asking Amtrak why the Builder didn’t operate west of the Twin Cities for more than a week [see “Weather cancellations impact Amtrak and its western network,” News Wire, Jan. 6, 2023], Siemens acknowledged that issues have been identified and are being rectified.

In a statement to News Wire, a Siemens spokeswoman says, “Over the course of the past couple of weeks, Siemens Mobility has been working closely with Amtrak to identify the root cause of a number of isolated incidents of ALC42 power loss occurring under very specific and unusually extreme circumstances, where the locomotive experiences drastic changes in temperature. As a result, we’ve identified both a software solution and an additional hardware improvement that will eliminate the issue experienced. The software update has been implemented to the entire fleet, greatly reducing the potential for incidents. The hardware modification, replacement of a pipe, will be completed as quickly as possible. The [issues were] not encountered on other Charger locomotives, which have different power arrangements than the long-distance ALC42 locomotives.”

West of the Cities, the Builder comes close to serving the middle of nowhere, and its routing is a long way from any interstate highways, serving cities and towns that sometimes have rudimentary air service, if any at all.

That's life in Amtrak Joe's America, isn't it?  You can't get there from here.