LGB 31202 - Amfleet® Passenger Car

This is a model of an "Amfleet"® design passenger car for the American passenger service company Amtrak, business class version. The paint scheme and lettering are prototypical for Phase VI. The car has factory-installed complete interior details and lighting with LEDs. The car has metal wheelsets, 2 of them ball bearing wheelsets for current pickup. The car comes with American knuckle couplers installed and LGB system couplers are included. Length 80 cm / 31-1/2".
Soon after the founding of Amtrak in 1971, it became noticeable there were no contemporary passenger cars. Most of them dated back to the Fifties and Sixties. New intercity cars were thus ordered from the firm Budd, which were based on the Metroliner powered rail car trains of the Penn Central. However, they had no propulsion, and they were pulled by locomotives. From 1975 to 1977, 492 of these 26 meter / 84 foot 6 inch long and around 50 metric ton units were built with up to 84 seats in open seating configuration, depending on the version. The maximum speed was 200 mph or 320 km/h but this pace was possible only on a few routes – chiefly the 750 km / 469 mile long Northeast Corridor from Washington, DC via Philadelphia and New York to Boston. There were various types such as coaches, various food service cars, or also club cars. There were even experiments with sleeping cars, but they were not pursued. The well-known "Streamliner" baggage cars were used, which in these trains seemed a little foreign … After the success of these cars, another 150 units were delivered, internally designated as "Amfleet II"®. They differed from their predecessors in that they only had entries at one end of the cars and the windows were somewhat larger. These cars are still currently used – if also converted and updated several times, mostly on shorter routes in the American East and Midwest. The long intercontinental express trains are firmly in the hands of the bi-level Superliner cars …