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.
