WASHINGTON — Amtrak is preparing plans for new maintenance facilities in Seattle, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and is providing advance notice of its procurement plans to allow companies time to prepare bids for those projects.
The facilities will handle maintenance, repairs, inspections, and cleaning for new Acela, Airo, and long-distance equipment.
Each location will house multiple facilities, such as those for heavy maintenance; routine maintenance and inspections; and service and cleaning. Additional information is available in the “Advance Notice to the Construction Industry” on Amtrak’s Procurement Portal.
“These modern maintenance facilities are an essential part of Amtrak’s plans to introduce new state-of-the-art passenger trainsets around the country,” said Norman Forde, Amtrak vice president, project delivery fleet and facilities, in a press release. “Thanks to funding provided by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act, Amtrak can upgrade our existing rail yards with modern facilities that feature additional working space and enable more efficient maintenance practices.”
Time for Senate to reject the illegal board nominees. Thie NEC centric board is useless. There is certainly not enough real estate to properly lay out a facility in BOS and SSY! Not sure about WASH!
AMEN Charles. Would be interesting to actually see what all the funding sources are for each mode, revenue, expenses and all the other stuff you covered.
By the way, while this is not part of this article, I should mention that today is May 10th an importnat day in railroad history and Im surprised that no railfan or historian even mentioned this but I will Exactly 154 years ago the Golden Spike was driven into the last section of rain thus completing the nation’s first Transcontinental Railroad and for its time a truly great engineering feat and accomplishment. Of course in today’s world that has been forgotten and only remebered by the most devoted and dedicated railfans and historians. This day May 10 should be always considered as National Railroad Day even though the practice was sort of discontinued and forgotten several years ago.
Joseph C. Markfelder
Plenty of maintenance facilities being planned and built but it don’t mean anything if the present equipment both locomotives and cars are just sitting in those shops not being repaired and returned to service as quickly as possible to fill the gaps and shortages in available equipment causing widespread delays and cancellations of service and trains. Right now there is more equipment sitting in the present repair shops than actually in operation. Before building any new shops, let’s get that bad order equipment repaired and up and running and whatever it takes to hire and train the right people to do the job in getting both trains and service back up to speed and cut the cancellations in service. The money that will be spent on building new repair shops can be better served by getting all the bad order equipment up and running on the tracks and not sitting around waiting to be repaired
Joseph C. Markfelder
Wash, NY (Sunnyside) and Boston already have such facilities for Acela. Presumably the new Airo Trains (what does that sound like?) will need new buildings.
Meanwhile, Wilmington Car Shop maintained wood cars, MP54’s and all sorts of equipment. They do not need a new building.
Chicago definitely needs one of these facilities in Chicago. They really need to weatherproof as much of the operation as possible.
It looks like Amtrak’s NEC centric board is trying to spend every last dollar available in the NEC before a new board can be confirmed. Congratulations to Anthony Coscia on his lifetime appointment to the Amtrak Board!
So three sites along the NEC & 1 in Seattle, none in the middle of the country for the LD routes or even midwest corridor servicing. Obviously this is another clue as to Amtrak mgmts plans for the future of the LD routes gradually eliminate the routes through attrition as the Superliner equipment wears out with no replacements & then probably charge the midwest corridor states for a service facility with plenty of bill padding & vague charges they can funnel the $$$ back to the NEC to run near empty trains.
So, one more subsidy to Amtrak. I have no problem with Amtrak being subsidized. What I want, though, is a clean accounting. Amtrak is subsidized under so many different budget allocations that one loses count. How about put it all in one basket so we know the true amount born by the taxpayers.
Ditto anything else that’s subsidized above and beyond revenue or user fees — airlines, highways, transit systems, etc. (It’s a very long list.)
What will happen with Beech Grove and Wilmington? Will AMTRAK be able to hire enough qualified people to properly staff these new facilities? Will AMTRAK actually repair and return cars and locomotives to service?
James, Amtrak and Siemens spent a small fortune building a new shop to maintain the ACS64’s at Wilm years ago. What used to be Car shops 1&2 has used for MW repairs for years. there is still plenty of space to maintain cars and locos at Wilm and Bear shops. but for many yrs now Amtrak has placed the majority of that work on Beech Grove to do. If they would just go back to having the 2 Delaware shops handel those kind of repairs and rebuilds from the east coast, there would be more cars & locos back in service . (retired with 40 yrs and 2 Brothers and my father and uncle who worked there. PRR PC & Amtrak )