WASHINGTON — According to the Globe and Mail, Amtrak president David Gunn has praised Bombardier Inc. for working hard to fix the troubled Acela Express high-speed trains, but he warned that the Montreal-based manufacturer must still shoulder the cost of a permanent fix.
Mr. Gunn said Bombardier has gone out of its way to get the Acela operational again, even dispatching two top executives to Amtrak headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“I have to give the manufacturer really high marks for putting resources here and trying to fix the problem,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Gunn, the former head of the Toronto Transit Commission who took over financially strapped Amtrak in April, acknowledged a history of contractual problems between Amtrak and Bombardier over the Acela, a train that can reach a top speed of 240 kilometres an hour.
But he said what counts now is getting all of the 18 train sets operating again in Amtrak’s lucrative Boston-New York-Washington corridor before its peak season gets under way this fall.
“Clearly the history has not always been smooth,” Mr. Gunn said of the Amtrak-Bombardier relationship. “What I’ve said is: ‘Look, what’s past is past.’ We at some point we have to settle the issues. But the most important thing now is we have to work together to get the short-term fixes back in place.”
Mr. Gunn’s conciliatory comments are in marked contrast to his earlier vow never to buy another Acela train, a project in which Bombardier has invested enormous development costs and considerable corporate pride. Bombardier has sued Amtrak for $318-million, blaming Acela’s earlier performance problems on frequent design changes and poor tracks.
Amtrak has so far taken delivery of 18 of the 20 Acela trains it ordered under a $972-million contract awarded in 1996.
Last week, cracks in the wheel assemblies of the Bombardier-built locomotives forced the cancellation of about 75 per cent of Amtrak trains. The railway has been working steadily to get service fully up and running again.
He said he assumes that Bombardier will have to pay the entire cost of a patchwork solution now being put in place to secure the cracks as well as a long-term engineering fix.
“They have the maintenance contract and they have a contract to supply the equipment,” he explained.
“They may claim otherwise later on. But the design of the product is clearly in their hands.”
For its part, Amtrak may never be able to recover its lost revenue from its flagship service. “My sense is that operating losses are probably ours, but I don’t know that for a fact,” Mr. Gunn added, saying the lawyers will have to sort that out later.