THE OFFICIAL WEBPAGE

OF ROBERT D. WEST

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Amtrak Amfleet I Roster

Amtrak's first new passenger cars were the Amfleet I series of coaches and food service cars built by the Budd Corporation and delivered in the late 1970s. Originally the coaches were called Amcoaches and the food service cars were called Amcafes, Amdinettes and Amclubs. Those names were eventually dropped. Most of these cars are still in service today, though they have been renumbered and rebuilt many times, making an accurate all-time roster difficult to determine. (There was also a later group of Amfleet II coaches and lounge cars, but I am not including them here.)

The first difficulty is in the original numbers. According to a 1977 Amtrak Amfleet Announcement, there were originally 492 Amfleet I cars: 406 Amcoaches and 86 Amcafes.

The 1977 announcement didn't give the actual numbers of the cars, and I have yet to find a roster of the cars that matches the announcement. The closest I have found is this original Amfleet I roster at the Railroad.net forum. This lists the original Amfleet I roster as the following:

This roster does give a total of 492 cars, however it doesn't match the breakdown of 406 Amcoaches and 86 Amcafes as stated in the 1977 announcement. But, if the Amclub cars are counted as coaches, it would come close, with 401 coaches & club cars, and 91 cafe and dinette cars. Additionally, as stated in this topic at the Railroad.net forum, five of the partial Amclub cars were reconfigured to full Amclub cars not long after delivery. This doesn't actually change the totals, but if the five full Amclub cars had instead been reconfigured from Amcafe or Amdinette cars, and all the Amclub cars were counted as coaches, the breakdown would have matched the one listed in the 1977 announcement. Perhaps Amtrak's plans changed slightly between the announcement and the final delivery. I have also seen sources that have the Amdinettes starting at 20220 instead of 20200, or list the 21000-series Amcoaches up to 21285.

Over the years, Amfleet I cars were rebuilt and renumbered for various reasons. Cars that were equipped for Push/Pull service (with a locomotive on one end of the train and a cab car at the other, allowing the train to run in either direction without being turned) were numbered into various series in the 40000s and a rebuilding program in the early 2000s saw many of the cars renumbered into the 80000s. Other renumberings occurred when cars were made ADA accessible, assigned to Metroliner service, and/or configured as Business Class cars. The following roster lists all the number series that Amfleet I cars carried. Not all of the numbers in some of these series were used. The numbers that I think were the original numbers are in bold.

I don't have enough information to construct a complete Amfleet I roster, but based mostly on data from On Track On Line, I have made up the following tables of Amfleet I cars. They are not complete, but I am putting them online in the hope that someone will be able to use them. The numbers that I believe are original are in bold, and all the other cars would have had to be renumbered from them. I suspect that in many cases, renumberings were done in sequence, so that a car's last two or three digits would stay the same, especially the renumberings for Push/Pull and ADA, but I don't have any proof of that, so they are all listed separately. Numbers in black are number that I am fairly sure were actually used, based on information from On Track On Line or pictures from various sites. Numbers in grey may or may not have been used.

Amfleet I Food Service Cars