Stephen,
Possibly Amtrak, in their original car selection, didn't want any Q
cars because all of the post 1946 cars were built to the million
pound buff load specification while most if not all other available
passenger cars were built to a buff load specification of 800,000
pounds. Maybe someone at Amtrak felt that intermixing cars of
different buff load specification would somehow be detrimental or
even remotely subject to litigation during an accident.
Bill Barber
On Jul 2, 2008, at 3:24 PM, CBQ@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> Re: Why didn't Silver Inn and Silver Manor go to Amtrak?
> Posted by: "Stephen J. Levine" sjl@prodigy.net sjl_prodigynet
> Tue Jul 1, 2008 4:18 pm (PDT)
>
> I remember that the original list of cars that Amtrak was going to
> take did not include any Q cars, which surprised me. I would have
> thought that the Q cars would have been the most desirable because
> vestibule doors and climate control systems were the simplest. On a
> zephyr, it seemed that the only air-operated sliding door on the
> whole train was at the dining room end of the diner. Cooling and
> heating systems operated independently of each other.
>
> I remember in June of 1975, on a San Francisco Zephyr trip, my wife
> and I were riding in a 1952 ex-Santa Fe coach, behind which was one
> of the 1956 ex-DZ coaches. The latter got sidelined when a water
> pipe broke in it and people were moved into the our car. But then
> the air conditioning failed in our car and, because it was tied
> into a complex climate control system regulating both heat and air,
> the car became unbearably hot. So we ended up moving into the DZ
> car where the water vapor made the car cool. It was simply
> ridiculous that a car's heating system would remain on when the air
> conditioning failed, but that was the Santa Fe's complex climate
> control system. Had the water line not broken in the ex-DZ car (I
> think it was the Silver Bit), it would not have had that sort of
> failure.
>
> I think violations of the KISS principle in post-war passenger
> equipment made the situation worse for Amtrak in its early years.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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