The equipment fleet used for California’s three corridor routes has reached a breaking point. There are no major orders for new cars, and the rebuilding of the current fleet is just commencing. The result is mechanical failures, schedule cancellations, or the substitution of commuter equipment for intercity equipment. If new cars are not ordered regularly, at some point there will be no flexibility and services will suffer. We have reached that point. We are now seeing a triage of services occurring. This is fleet “triage,” prioritizing the critical rebuilding of the fleet over consistent service, is making the best of a bad situation.

Paul Dyson, RailPAC’s Vice-President of Government Affairs, has been warning about for a decade the dangers of this, a slow cannibalization of the fleet.

There are several underlying factors. The first is the stop and start funding policy for intercity rail service over the years. Stop and Go funding combined with supply chain gaps and environmental studies means any rail investment takes a very long time. The second near-term factor is the delays in certification of the Venture Car fleet, which has limited fleet flexibility for the rebuilding.

And it gets worse. Because of California’s Zero Emission Rail Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, the only new equipment in the pipeline is a very expensive per car, Hydrogen MU. Because their per-car expense is higher than for standard rail cars, this H2 initiative is not bringing much capacity to the table. In addition, there is the issue of the cost and availability of hydrogen fuel.

Also, until the H2 MUs arrive it is unknown what their dispatch rate will be, and what their operating cost (hydrogen fuel and its source) will be. The California Corridors could easily face a situation where; congratulations, you have some additional capacity, new Zero Emission rail cars; the bad news is the cost of fuel associated with running them in service blows up your operating budget. It is my understanding that because of the ZEV mandate, California will likely not be able to address its capacity issues by utilizing some of the forty-three additional diesel-powered Amtrak Airo trainsets just funded by recent Federal/State Partnership grant.

So, while there are no route discontinuances yet (as Paul warned of), what we are seeing compromises to maintain the service. Caltrain locomotives have been leased to backfill for the overhauls of the F59s. This is now an emergency because Caltrans failed to overhaul its F59’s when maintenance was due. This was masked until routine servicing shifted from Amtrak to Herzog. Amtrak had been using its locomotives to backfill F59 dispatch failures, and Herzog lacked that flexibility. Hence the Gold Runner and Capitol Corridor train cancellations that we saw earlier this year.

Caltrans is also rebuilding the first generation of California Cars. With a set of California Cars out for overhaul, this means there is no “protect” set of California Cars available in case of a consist dispatch failure. The Caltrain commuter cars have been leased to serve as this protect set and will operate when a California Car set fails at departure time. Apparently, the almost 60-year-old Comet Car set is performing the same role in Southern California. Neither “protect” trainsets has food service. So, you either get a train with no food service or a schedule cancellation; you cannot have both. Leased Caltrain Cab cars can also operate as cab cars on Gold Runner trains until the shunt antennas on the Venture Cab cars are installed. California Cab cars can then be sent for overhaul or used to build additional Southern California and/or Capitol Corridor train sets.

As was noted the Comet cars and the Caltrain commuter cars as well as the Venture Cars on the Gold Runner route have no food service. So, to reiterate there were two choices:  

> Option one: Park all the Venture Cars until the cars that could be food service cars are delivered and certified for operation. The Gold Runner would continue to use California Cars. The Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliner would not be able to restore frequencies to reach their pre-COVID frequency levels

> Option Two: Put the Venture coaches in service as they are delivered with no food service. This frees up California Cars to bring the Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliner to their pre-covid frequency levels. 

So, which is the least bad: fewer frequencies with food service (which only a segment of riders uses) or a service with more frequencies and ridership but no food service? Caltrans and the JPA’s chose option two.

And when considering these choices, bear in mind the two root causes: the Nippon-Sharyo manufacturing failure which delayed a new car order almost a decade and resulted in the “bare bones” Venture Cars, and the transfer of the Horizon cars from California to the Cascades route to deal with the Talgo issue. 

As was noted above current California situation was directly affected by the Sumitomo/Nippon Sharyo’s failure to engineer and produce a fleet of new bi-level California Cars to replace leased Horizon fleet cars (now sidelined by corrosion) and rebuilt New Jersey Transit commuter coaches (the Comet Car train set). My assumption is that Caltrans and the Midwest States, to avoid a long court case with Sumitomo over breach of contract, ended up settling for Siemens Venture cars. And the Sumitomo/Nippon Sharyo court settlement Venture Cars provided to the states appear to be the “bare bones model” with hard seats and manufacturing defects that have taken months to resolve. Such is the state of the US’s rail car manufacturing base. 

A third complicating factor is that the cars, which could be Venture food service cars, are the last ones to be manufactured and they are only now being built, and they still must be inspected for manufacturing defects and certified for service. The reality is because of the Siemens car delivery process, the loss of food service on the San Joaquins for over a year was inevitable. It is a manifestation of the triage Paul Dyson warned of two decades ago. With the now out-of-service Horizon cars transferred to the Pacific Northwest the Venture cars needed to be placed into service without the food service cars to free up California Cars to allow the Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliners to return to their pre-covid frequency levels. In many ways the JPA managers are making the best of a bad situation. Worse still, the Sumitomo/Nippon Sharyo failure combined with the apparent zero interest from the car builders in Amtrak’s bi-level long-distance equipment order means there will be no bi-levels built in the future.

In conclusion, the ongoing issue has even deeper roots. It is indicative of the collapse of US’s, manufacturing base. It is an industrial policy failure of the first order. It also reflects the focus on short-term financial results and Congress’s lack of a passenger rail car procurement policy designed to develop and maintain a passenger rail car manufacturing base and supply chain. The lack of guaranteed financial support with advanced appropriations makes it almost impossible to attract interest from equipment manufacturers. Several manufacturers took the risk, made investments to build equipment, then had to enter bankruptcy when Congress did not provide the funds for follow-on orders.