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| Re: American Railcar gone (1005490) | |||
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Re: American Railcar gone |
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Posted by WillD on Sun Nov 21 02:46:10 2010, in response to Re: American Railcar gone, posted by Jersey Mike on Sun Nov 21 00:52:56 2010. Why? We already have cars you can pass through. They're hauled by these things called locomotives and, despite some neglect, are relatively successful. A 2mpg DMU's breakeven point with a .5mpg locomotive will be at just 4 cars, so why should we bother with any capacity to walk through the train when we can just tie two pairs of single ended DMUs together? There's little point to running a longer DMU train (if we demand better performance, then surely we'd electrify), and it creates just one discontinuity in the train's aisle. Of much more importance, it allows the railcar to be engineered in such a way that it actually protects the passengers by absorbing the impact rather than passing the impact from car to car until one buckles or jackknifes.We need to adopt Caltrain's FRA waiver on a nationwide basis. Give agencies the freedom to operate modern DMUs like the GTW 2/6, Desiro, Talent, and such in terminal and branch line settings alongside existing FRA compliant trains so long as some precautions are taken to keep them separated. |
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