Design
The Superliners were the first Amtrak car type to be equipped with an onboard waste treatment and disposal system linked to all toilets. The initial design of this system retained toilet wastes until the train attained a preset speed (or a manually operated lever was moved) to dump the waste along the tracks beneath the moving train. Eventually a full-rentention system was installed that stopped this practice. Initially the cars could not be worked east of Chicago because of limited overhead clearances, but by the 1980s many eastern railroads had raised clearances on their tracks to permit tri-level auto-carriers and double stack container trains, which also permitted the operation of the Superliners.
The Superliner I and Superliner II differ somewhat in interior fittings, primarily in color - the newer cars tend toward gray, aquamarine, and salmon rather than the shades of brown and orange favored on earlier cars. Externally, the two classes differ in a number of subtle respects, but they are readily distinguished by the type of truck (bogie) the car uses: Superliner I cars use a German design originally fitted with an air bag suspension (replaced with springs), while the Superliner II cars use a General Steel Castings truck of the same type used on Horizon, Viewliner, and the original self-propelled 1969 Metroliner cars.
Read more about this topic: Superliner (railcar)
Famous quotes containing the word design:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)