The California company that purchased two Talgo trainsets from the Washington Department of Transportation has placed them up for sale, but that offer may not stand for long.
“It’s a sensitive matter for everyone involved, and it wasn’t supposed to turn into a spectacle,” said Noah McCann of NSM Transportation Company in an interview with Trains magazine.
“If anyone is interested, they are still available, but they are going to be gone in a matter of two or three days.”
WSDOT sold the trains sets to NSM for $21,000, but the buyer was responsible for the expense of moving them.
“We paid a lot more than that,” McCann said of the purchase price. “After the purchase, we aggressively tried to market them, but Amtrak doesn’t want them.”
The trainsets are the Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier, which moved from Seattle to Southern California as a special Amtrak move.
The special ran on the schedule of the Coast Starlight on a day the Seattle-Los Angeles train was not scheduled to leave Seattle southbound.
McCann told Trains that if no one buys the Talgos soon after they reach Los Angeles that his company will dismantle them.
“We’re reusing the interior fittings on other projects, but it’s a private job to dismantle them for the State of Washington. In reality, nobody is going to come in to pay to move these things, and they’re getting scrapped,” McCann said.
WSDOT had put the Talgos up for sale last year and rejected bids and requests for a donation of one trainset to a museum.
Trains reported that the Southern Rail Commission had inspected the Talgos to determine if they could be used in a proposed corridor service between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama.
However, SRC’s Knox Ross said his agency’s delegation was unable to meet with a WSDOT representative for the purpose of getting answers to questions about the equipment.
Ross said a third-party representative sent to meet with the SRC delegation “wouldn’t answer any questions, so we didn’t bid.”
The Mt. Hood and Mt. Olympus have been out of service since July 2020. A third Talgo, the Mt. Adams, was destroyed in a Dec. 18, 2017, derailment of the Amtrak Cascades train.
The Mt. Adams had originally been owned by Amtrak, which later sold it to WSDOT.
Two Talgo trainsets are owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation and continue to operate in Cascades service between Seattle and Eugene, Oregon.
Amtrak owns two Talgo trainsets that have been sitting idle at its Beech Grove shops in Indianapolis.
Three other Talgo trainsets that originally were built for use in Wisconsin corridor service but never operated there remain idle.
Tags: Amtrak, Amtrak Cascades, Amtrak western corridor trains, MSM Transportation Company, Oregon Department of Transportation, Talgo trains, Washington State Department of Transportation
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