C1 (railcar)
class of American bi-level passenger car
The C1 is a type of bilevel commuter passenger car built by the Tokyu Car Corporation for the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). Tokyu built ten cars in 1990–1991 as a precursor to the larger C3 order, which would be built by Kawasaki in the late 1990s. The cars were designed by Comeng, one of the last projects that the firm undertook before closing in 1990. After the arrival of the C3s, the Long Island Rail Road sold the C1s to private owners.
Background
In the 1980s, the LIRR operated two types of trains: electric multiple units, which operated over the railroad's electrified lines, and diesel-locomotive-hauled trains on the non-electrified portions. Service into the borough of Manhattan was electric only. The rolling stock used for the LIRR's diesel service was aging, and there was political interest in offering a one-seat ride for commuters on the busy but only partially electrified Port Jefferson Branch. The LIRR decided to solve both problems simultaneously: it would acquire several dual-mode EMD FL9 locomotives from the Metro-North Railroad and buy a small fleet of new passenger cars to go with them. If the experiment was successful, it could proceed with a larger order and replace the diesel fleet.
History
The Budd Company had built the most recent additions to the LIRR's electric fleet, the M1 and M3, but by the mid-1980s, it was a subsidiary of Thyssen and exiting the railroad business.
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This entry incorporates text from “C1 (railcar)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.