Commuter railroading in South Florida, 2017. Considering my feelings about Amtrak, I should like Cesar Vergara a lot, and exempting aesthetics, I do- he’s a great designer and he has lent his talents to an industry that needs good design but rarely has the cash or the flash to attract it. Despite the fact that he may have given the P42BH many of the characteristics that explain why most of the fleet (and possibly Amtrak itself) is still on the road today, I was downright disappointed when I first saw an AMD103, and the Brookville BL36PH on the left here, also one of his designs, shows why. A new passenger locomotive is such a rare opportunity to make a bold statement, and even in the darkest days for passenger trains in this country, EMD’s FP45′s, SDP40F’s and F40PH’s had a chiseled handsomeness that gave even the most pedestrian San Joaquins and Hiawathas the authority of Emilia Clarke riding a dragon. Vergara’s wedge-faced diesels, on the other hand, are too much function over form to me. I know that the engineer in that BL36PH probably loves that visibility and its probably great in any kind of weather, too, but the proportions of that windshield are completely off. Enough ranting, though: my treat for the evening was riding the last Southbound back to Miami behind screaming, fire-breathing GP49PH3 815, which despite having just a 12-cylinder prime mover (compared to the V20 + HEP genset in the BL36PH), made quite a bit more noise!
