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)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)