First Rebuilt Amtrak Train Washing Facilities Coming Soon: Report

Passenger train passes construction covering one track in marshalling yard — The Westbound *Texas Eagle* passes the Chicago maintenance facility’s car wash building on June 10, 2024. Replacing the tracks leading to the building was a contributing factor to the construction delays. Some car wash work was performed intermittently before the major renovation began.

WASHINGTON — The Rail Passengers Association has learned from Amtrak that construction of four new or renovated train-washing facilities at its departure terminals will finally be operational this summer and fall. The facility in New Orleans is scheduled to open before the end of July, and the facility at the Southampton Street site in Boston is expected to open in August, the report said.

The laundry facilities under construction in Chicago and Seattle are scheduled to be completed sometime “this fall.”

Completely resurfacing the exteriors had always been a problem at places like San Antonio, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, where trains had to run same-day or overnight, but windows were typically washed at those locations and at long-distance stops along the way, such as Albuquerque and Denver. But running trains through the washers as part of terminal service began to decline when current management decided to forgo repairs at those facilities.

According to the RPA report, “a capital program to replace all the wash racks was deemed too expensive, so the mechanics had to resort to a Plan B consisting of a combination of replacement wash racks and targeted repairs to other wash racks, plus a temporary solution requiring workers to manually clean the windshield wipers at select stations.”

In recent years, trains such as the New York-New Orleans Crescent and the Chicago-San Antonio Texas Eagle never washed, with caked-on dirt from the road building up until a rain shower would do the trick (or maybe not).

Two men use tractors to clean the windows of a semi-detached passenger car. — Maintenance personnel wash windows of the *California Zephyr* in Denver on June 5, 2016. Before reaching the Denver stop, the original CZ operated via a Burlington clothes horse, a practice that continued into the Amtrak era. Bob Johnston

Because existing facilities were allowed to deteriorate and local environmental regulations affected how wastewater was collected, completely new designs had to be created. In a progress update Amtrak gave to News Wire last December, construction was underway in New Orleans and Boston. Designs in Chicago and Seattle were complete and construction had been contracted to an outside firm, but construction had not yet begun.

As of December, designs ranged from 75 percent to 95 percent complete at seven other locations: Hialeah, Miami; Washington, D.C.; Sanford, Fla.; Los Angeles; Goleta, Calif.; Rensselaer, Albany, N.Y.; and New York’s Sunnyside Yard. News Wire will update the expected completion dates of the laundry racks as that information becomes available.