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:
“The reason American cars don’t sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That’s why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.”
—Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1938)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)