Acela troubles seen as pattern for Amtrak

Missteps tied to need for new identity, revenue

By Raphael Lewis and Mac Daniel, Globe Staff, 9/1/2002

When Amtrak pulled its entire $800 million fleet of Acela Express trains from service three weeks ago, with cracks riddling the locomotives' suspension systems, the problem looked like another bad break for the hard-luck railroad.

But to many involved in the creation of the nation's first European-style high-speed train line, the crisis was just the latest evidence of a decade of missteps, strategic gambles, and failed policies.

From choosing manufacturers offering generous financing but no prototype, to design gaffes involving the train's width, to a hasty testing regimen, Amtrak's full-steam-ahead push to create the Acela Express was driven by a desperate need for a new identity, new revenue, and desire to please Washington.

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former Amtrak managers, federal regulators, rail experts, and politicians point the blame not just at Amtrak, but at the lawmakers who fund it, the federal agencies that regulate it, and, of course, the companies that built it.

And because the troubles may be due in part to a combination of strict regulations and antiquated track, the much-touted three-hour service between Boston and New York may never arrive.

''You can understand them wanting to build something that they could absolutely showcase, but the problem is, with limited dollars, you better make the right choices, and in this case, they didn't,'' said James E. Coston, a member of the oversight body, the Amtrak Reform Council.

Acela's woes can be traced to the mid-'90s, before Amtrak signed a contract with a consortium of Montreal-based Bombardier Corp., and the Paris-based Alstom SA, to build the trains.

After years of entertaining spiffy high-speed models offered by the Swedes, the Spanish, and the Germans, Amtrak's board settled on the Canadian/French consortium. But the consortium did not supply - and Amtrak didn't demand - a test train.

In what some analysts believe was a crucial first mistake, Amtrak ordered 18, and later 20, trains without testing a prototype extensively on the Northeast Corridor's harsh tracks.

The order also went through even though the Federal Railroad Administration had yet to issue safety standards - which would affect the specifications for the trains. Amtrak critics compare the move to buying a $1 billion car without a test drive.

Tim Gillespie, an Amtrak lobbyist from 1980 to 1998, said Washington lawmakers - from supporters in the Clinton administration to Republican skeptics in Congress - put tremendous pressure on Amtrak to get Acela on-line. Congress not only looked for higher speeds, but also better-looking trains, a requirement that consumed extra design time.

''There were, however, a great many mistakes made in this process,'' he said. ''You don't go out and order 20 trainsets and have them start the manufacturing until you know you've worked out all the bugs.''

David L. Gunn, Amtrak's recently appointed president, was reluctant to criticize past management, but made clear he would have done things differently.

''The way you would prefer to do a project like this is have a prototype, run the wheels off it for a year or so, and get it where you want it,'' Gunn said. ''But poor Amtrak has been so underfunded and in such dire straits that it didn't have the luxury of taking its time.''

Early tests of the Acela Express in Pueblo, Colo., and later in the Northeast revealed problems that many Amtrak officials believe are directly related to the troubles occurring today.

At first, the locomotives' wheels started to ''climb up'' the tracks. Engineers attributed the problem to crucial differences between American and European rails. The consortium had used wheels identical to the French TGV model - the bullet train that first impressed Amtrak.

The problem was emblematic of a flaw in the creation of Acela, said Anthony Perl, author of ''New
Departures: Rethinking Rail Passenger Policy in the 21st Century'': ''What we have is design teams from France and Canada, and the trains are put together from kits in this country to satisfy Buy American rules. The labor is American, but the know-how is not.''

Bombardier officials counter that they have built a wide variety of trains for American railroads - including Amtrak and the MBTA - and that Acela's problems are unique.

To fix the wheel problem, which causes a risk of derailment, the consortium changed its design, but soon a new problem appeared: extremely premature wear, from chafing on curves.

To overcome that problem, the consortium fiddled with the design of the locomotives' ''yaw dampers,'' which restrict lateral motion, or yaw, of the wheel sets.

But apparently, those repairs merely shifted the extreme pressure upward. Now, engineers are confronting cracks not only in the yaw damper brackets, but on the locomotive chassis, too.

''It's my suspicion that this all goes back to the problems in Pueblo,'' said Michael R. Weinman, an independent rail consultant and former Amtrak employee.

The decision to press forward with Acela despite serious questions about its viability, former and current Amtrak leaders say, had more to do with money than technology. The consortium offered to build the trains for at least $50 million less than Siemens, creator of the German ICE train and the only other bidder. The consortium also came to the table with a $1 billion low-interest loan from the Export Development Corp. of Canada, which tries to stimulate sales of Canadian products.

''Amtrak had no cash to pay for these, so a big part of this was their ability to finance the deal,'' said Amy Rosen, an Amtrak board member.

The decision, which Rosen defends as the best choice available, astonished some lawmakers, who had hoped Amtrak would put its money into a train proven to work on American rails, and into upgrading its deteriorating tunnels, wiring, and tracks.

Michael S. Dukakis, while governor of Massachusetts, had pushed for Amtrak to buy diesel/electric trains that were already on the market, but Amtrak insisted that all-electric was the only way.

''I'm a very conservative guy when it comes to using new stuff,'' said Dukakis, who nevertheless says the Acela Express is a ''fantastic train.''

One reason why some questioned Amtrak's decision to invest in high-speed trains is that most Northeast Corridor track cannot carry a train faster than 90 miles per hour. Filled with sharp curves and built with rail interlockings and overhead wires that date back to the Woodrow Wilson administration, the corridor bears no similarity to high-speed lines in Europe or Japan.

In those places, bullet trains ply arrow-straight rails used by them alone, with no grade crossings, state-of-the-art interlockings and wiring, and signal systems that prevent collisions. By comparison, the Acela reaches its top speed of 150 miles per hour for just 18 miles, and Amtrak owns only a fraction of the corridor it shares with freight and commuter trains.

''They needed to make a big splash,'' said the Reform Council's Coston. ''They pegged their ability to become self-sufficient on the Acela.'' Building a glamorous train, he said, ''is sexier'' than buying and rebuilding miles of tracks.

Cognizant of the complications involved in putting high-speed rail on a busy, shared track, the Federal Railroad Administration, which regulates passenger trains, created a new set of safety rules for the Acela. But those rules, arriving some two years after design of the trains began, may have caused some of the problems that have plagued the project.

For conventional trains, the FRA has long ensured that locomotives can withstand a head-on collision by requiring ''buff strength'' of 800,000 pounds of pressure.

In some ways, analysts said, the figure is arbitrary, originating out of crude safety standards from the 1920s and 1930s, when it was observed that mail cars survived more crashes because they were reinforced with steel.

So when, on Oct. 1, 1998, the FRA issued new high-speed rail regulations that called for similar levels of buff strength on the Acela, project officials were crestfallen.

The requirement, despite fierce lobbying from Amtrak, meant Acela's locomotives had to be nearly twice the weight of European and Japanese high-speed trains, and, as a result, would put unheard-of pressure on its wheels and suspension - the exact areas that have caused problems for the Acela.

''You're dealing with a typical agency that has a lot invested in their approach to this particular kind of regulation,'' said Thomas Till, the Amtrak Reform Council's executive director.

Till compared the building of the Acela to taking a Ferrari chassis and putting an M-1 tank on it. Thomas Downs, president of Amtrak during the development of Acela, said: ''They turned them into rolling bank vaults. They are grossly overweight.''

But Jolene Molitoris, a high-speed rail advocate who headed the FRA during the creation of Acela, stands by her decision to require the trains to be as strong as possible. Critics, she said, are merely crossing their fingers and praying that the Acela would never collide with another train.

''The buff strength really gets a bad rap,'' Molitoris, who served as FRA administrator from 1993 to 2000, said. ''One of the things that I always had to bring up to people when they were frustrated about this buff strength is that the US is not Europe. It's a very different arrangement.''

Molitoris recalled a 1993 Amtrak derailment in Alabama, when a train plunged into a bayou but stayed largely intact: ''If you've stood in that boat and looked at those locomotives, half-submerged in the bayou mud, you would never think 800,000 pounds of buff strength was too much.''

And critics can't blame the FRA for all the problems during the design phase. According to a $200 million lawsuit filed by Bombardier last year, Amtrak executives micromanaged the interior design to the point of absurdity, taking months to choose drapes, lighting, and seat coverings.

More importantly, Bombardier alleges that Amtrak decided a year after production began to change the width of the trains, and the space through which the tilting passenger cars travel.

Not until Aug. 9, 1999, two years later, was the matter fully hammered out. Today, with the trains four inches wider, they cannot tilt to their maximum on curves. As a result, trip times are slower than originally planned. In fact, the Acela runs just 20 minutes faster than the New Haven Railroad's Advance Merchant's Limited in 1956.

Bombardier officials insist, however, that the reduced tilting has not made the trip slower, and that the FRA's regulations have little to do with the train's performance. What's more, they contend that the problems with the Acela will soon be repaired, and that the troubles experienced in August 2002 will someday be viewed as a blip in the history of high-speed rail in North America.

''Some of this is urban myth,'' said Francois Auger, Bombardier's vice president of engineering. ''This is the first high-speed rail application in North America, it's based on proven technology, and we can run on the existing track... The product has been designed for this particular application, and it's a good product. It's premature to make any conclusions.''

Amtrak's Gunn is less sure: He notes a list of complaints, and insists he'll never purchase another
Acela: While the locomotives can propel trains twice as long as the current ones, the Acelas were permanently fused at their present length. Not only that, maintenance facilities in Washington, New York, and Boston can't accommodate a longer train.

As it is, the trains still need about 200 modifications that will take months to install, Gunn said, so a full Acela schedule is years away. Until then, passengers can still expect to get trapped behind faulty bathroom doors.

And there are the constant breakdowns. The original contract called for trains to run 400,000 miles between equipment failures, but problems so far have cropped up every 20,000, Gunn said. Acela Express trains make on-time arrivals 74 percent of the time, as opposed to 88 percent for the corridor's other trains. An average of one Acela a day breaks down.

But despite Acela's flaws, Gunn said he is happy to have it. After all, it has provided the only strongly profitable service in the entire railroad.

''I can't redo history or change the decisions that were made,'' Gunn said. ''I've got cards in my hand. When it runs, it's a nice card. People like it. It's comfortable. It's a quick trip. Do I wish that it were available more of the time, that it didn't have cracked brackets, do I wish you name it? Sure.''

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 9/1/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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