Quote:
Originally Posted by Klippenstein
Why do they keep the trains so cold? I’m riding the Amtrak for the first time ever and freezing my ass off. I didn’t realize I would need a blanket in the middle of the summer.
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How hot, how sunny, and how humid was it outside the train? Amtrak's trains are enclosed with stainless steel and lots of glass that would heat up to oven like temperatures on a sunny hot day. You could fry eggs on their roofs if the weather conditions were right. So the air conditioning system is pretty robust if allowed to run all the time.
I'm usually cold only at night on Amtrak trains after the sun sets. Let's assume the air conditioning turns off at night, and does not turn back on until the sun rises. It could take hours for the air conditioning system to cool the train back down once the stainless steel heats up. Then you would be complaining it is too hot.
For a cycling system to keep inside temperatures constant with huge swings in heat loads, the system would have to be twice as powerful than with small swings in heat loads. The key to keeping the heat load swings small is to over cool the train at night so that it can keep the train cool during the day. That's why. While there may be 20 thermostats, one for every room and roomette on a sleeper car, there are not 20 different air conditioning systems. There is no economical way to have all 20 rooms and roomettes in a car to actually have individual controls.
Once I got on a bus going to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, the driver announced before leaving the bus stop that the bus will be cold before reaching the desert, but once the bus got to the desert the bus would get warm. Reason, heat loads are different in different locations, and the bus system is balanced. They did not install too large a system for the desert, but that same system was too large a system for the oceanside.
Amtrak runs trains all across the country with different weather conditions that changes with the seasons. It is practically impossible to design a system to work economically nationally.