The National Transportation Safety Board Team investigating the wreck left the scene on Sunday, and the line was reopened to freight and passenger traffic early Sunday morning.

The probe into the cause of the derailment is focusing on potential track problems at the derailment site 60 miles north of Orlando on CSX's Sanford Subdivision.

The NSTB said that an inspection of the consist of northbound Amtrak train No. 52 found nothing unusual that would lead investigators to believe an equipment problem caused the wreck.

Instead, investigators are focusing on the possibility that a southward coal train may have knocked the track out of alignment minutes before the northward AUTO TRAIN came through the area at 56 mph, The Washington Post reported.

Drainage problems led to genereal instability in the area, NTSB member George Black said. CSX performed routine surfacing maintenance at the site on March 12, and the track had been inspected repeatedly since then - including in the hours just before the derailment.

The AUTO TRAIN's engineer told the investigators he put the train into emergency after seeing the track misaligned by about 10 inches. A relief engineer and the conductor reported feeling the unusually rough spot as the train passed over it, the NSTB said.

The train's two locomotives and the first two cars made it over the spot, but the next 14 passenger cars derailed - including seven that overturned - and the first seven of 23 auto racks derailed.

The derailment revealed how durable rail cars in general, and cars in general, and Superliner equipment Superliner equipment in particular, can be when put under extreme stress. "The good story is that the cars stood up like champs," Black told the post.

The wreck also demonstrates the depth of Amtrak's car supply problems, which have worsened as the cash-strapped railroad's financial situation has deteriorated.

To resume daily AUTO TRAIN service - abeit with a shorthened northbound consist - Amtrak is pulling Superliner equipment from Los Angeles and Chicago. The Superliners were extra and protect cars that were waiting to fill out the summertime consists of the COAST STARLIGHT, SOUTHWEST CHIEF, and EMPIRE BUILDER. They were shipped to Florida via the SUNSET LIMITED and the CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.

The equipment loaned to the AUTO TRAIN will return to the Western trains in time for the summer travel season.

Auto Train wreck puts spotlight on passenger car shortage

With its out-of-service numbers rising and wreck-damaged cars languishing at the Beech Grove shop complex – sometimes for years – Amtrak’s car supply margin has been eroding steadily.

Before the wreck, changes were already on tap for the consist of several long-distance trains. Now the Auto Train derailment has put Amtrak in a bigger bind.

When the Auto Train’s borrowed Superliners return West for the summer season, it will use Superliner equipment bumped from the Cardinal and Kentucky Cardinal.

Here’s a scorecard:

On May 5 one Viewliner sleeper, one dorm, and one diner will come off of the four sets of Silver Palm equipment.

The Viewliners and two diners and two dorms will then go to the Chicago-Washington Cardinal, making that a single-level train with coaches bumped from the International. The Chicago-Louisville, Ky., Kentucky Cardinal also will become a single-level train.

The International, in turn, will receive Northeast Corridor Amfleet equipment made available by another Acela Express frequency.

The Cardinal's two Sightseer lounges, diners, and sleeper will go to the Auto Train. The dorms will go to two other equipment sets that had been using Super Sleepers as dorms. That gives Auto Train four standard Superliner sleepers, replacing what it lost in the Thursday wreck, and one protect deluxe sleeper, leaving the train one deluxe sleeper short.

Why won’t Amtrak just repair the cars damaged at Crescent City?

The kind of damage cars suffer in wrecks has been so expensive to fix that Amtrak has allowed more than 40 damaged Superliners – some from as far back as the 1995 Sunset Limited accident near Phoenix – to sit at its Beech Grove Maintenance Facility near Indianapolis, rather than incur the cost of repairing them.

All are first generation Superliner Is of unit design dating from 1978-1981, the last intercity passenger cars Pullman-Standard ever built. Some are a lost cause, and will have to be cannibalized for parts and scrapped because of fire damage or bent frames.

Up until the Auto Train tragedy, all Superliner IIs, assembled by Bombardier between 1994 and 1996, had been involved in only minor scrapes and had been returned to active duty. This is in part because their modular construction made replacement of individual parts easier.

Between these cars and the serviceable Superliner Is, the company barely had enough equipment to operate its daily schedule, although revenue and ridership was limited by not having enough capacity to meet demand, especially in sleepers.

Though unwilling to divert funds to overhauls because such a move would have short-circuited the self-sufficiency deadline mandated by Congress, Amtrak management did ask for $17 million after the September 11 terrorist attacks to repair 32 cars and seven locomotives.

No extra money was appropriated, in part because Amtrak critics such as Rep. John Mica, a Republican representing the district in which Auto Train’s Florida terminal is located, were steadfast in their belief that the company was simply trying to climb on the gravy train at a time of national crisis.

But after the accident, Mica told The New York Times that, "In the past five or six years, I worked with Auto Train to put new equipment in place, so most of the rolling stock, to my knowledge, is state-of-the-art equipment. We replaced sleeping, coach and dining cars and recently refurbished the car-carrying equipment."

In fact, Auto Train became a mostly Superliner II train by 1996 thanks to an initiative started in the early 1990s during the administration of the late Amtrak president W. Graham Claytor, Jr.

Each of the two trains making a daily round trip features three all deluxe-bedroom sleeping cars built specially for the service; five standard Superliner II sleepers; four coaches; two dining cars; a sightseer lounge; and a first-class lounge converted from a diner.

The auto racks may have been repainted, but they are the original cars pressed into service back in 1983 when Amtrak first re-established the train after private operator Eugene K. Garfield went bankrupt running it in the 1970s. Replacing the aging enclosed auto cars had been on the pre-George Warrington "wish list" for a decade. The plan was to buy enough extra cars in order to institute a West Coast Auto Train service on the rear of the Los Angeles-Seattle Coast Starlight.

Now, with 14 Superliner IIs added to the "scrap or repair" list – and 16.6 percent of its Superliner fleet out of service for regular repairs – Amtrak's long-distance trains are all one major accident away from annulments. And the national network's revenue and ridership capacity has been diminished at a time when demand has had the trains bulging.

–Bob Johnston

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Originally posted by lakeshorelimited:

Also, it'll be alot harder to take in those spectacular views along the Cardinal's route in Amfleet II's and viewliners. Take the Capitol Ltd. instead! It still has it's viewliners. But one would expect that a train that runs only 3 times a week would get the short end of the stick

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It seems to me that North Carolina has a rarely-used full dome car, and Amtrak may still have at least one?