Trimming the Fleet

One of the benefits of having a software solution to keep track of the car and locomotive fleet is that it gives you a better idea of what you have. In planning out trains for the layout, I realized a few things:

• Trains on the layout are less than 12' long
• I have 12 Amtrak Superliner cars.
• I have 16 Amtrak single-deck passenger cars. 
• I have 5 miscellaneous Amtrak freight cars - material handling cars (MHCs) and boxcars. 

Each Amtrak car is about a foot long, which means I had enough Amtrak equipment for more than 3 full trains. While I enjoy passenger trains, that's a lot of Amtrak traffic. In addition, I have an 8-car VIA Rail LRC consist that will be traveling the rails too.

The result? It's time to trim the fleet down. For the Superliners, I found a site that showed the typical Empire Builder consist, which includes 3 sleepers, a transition sleeper, a diner, a lounge, and four coaches. I don't have the lead baggage car that the consist typically includes, but that's something I can get later. This means that two of the excess coaches I had purchased are off to the sales floor.

In terms of the single deck Amfleet and Horizon cars, I decided to keep 6 Amfleet and 4 Horizon cars. This gives me some flexibility in running two short trains or one long train. Typical single-deck Amtrak trains are 4-5 cars long, but some are longer than that. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the Viewliner sleeper cars, which would work nicely with the short cars. I'll keep those on the watchlist.

As far as the freight cars, I decided to sell the MHCs and keep the two boxcars. While Amtrak has since gotten rid of these cars, I like them since they can provide some operational variety to running passenger trains.

From now on, unless I'm upgrading a car or adding missing cars (like a baggage car), I won't be buying any more Amtrak equipment. By making simple decisions like this, it's easier to look at for sale groups and not go crazy with purchases that you don't need.