Amtrak will freely admit it has used a patchwork of locomotives to pull its trains over the last three or four decades, and those locomotives have racked up nearly four million hard-earned miles. Starting tomorrow, though, it hopes that one new workhorse will haul American trains in the future.

No less a locomotive enthusiast than Vice President Joe Biden traveled to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia this morning for the inauguration of the ACS-64. (ACS stands for Amtrak Cities Sprinter.) Built by Siemens, 70 of these locomotives will go into service to replace their aging predecessors on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line that connects Boston to Washington D.C. and many cities in between. The 64 in the name refers to the locomotive's output of 6.4 megawatts, which works out to about 8600 horsepower. With that much get-up-and-go, Amtrak promises, the ACS-64 will get its 217,000-pound weight, plus the weight of all those cars it pulls, up to the Northeast Corridor speed limit of 125 miles per hour faster than anything they've ever had. That should keep the trains running on time.

Siemens gushes about the new tech it built into the Sprinter. The locomotive has positive train control, which can slow down the train automatically if the driver is not able to. The locomotive could recover about 15 percent of its electricity use through regenerative braking. ACS-64 is built to do steady self-diagnostics. And Siemens built in a few key features to help the locomotives survive the harsh weather of the eastern seaboard, which can vary wildly from the heavy snows we're seeing this winter to intense summer heat that wore down many of Amtrak's older locomotives. That includes individual blowers to cool down motors and a machine room design that maximizes conductive cooling.

Says Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman, America needs "a new railroad that's been invested in—not just held together."

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