Railcars

Railcars have a maximum 60-year life, which can be reached with good maintenance and significant overhauls at regular intervals.

 
  Gallery car. Source: Nippon Sharyo, LTD
The gallery car (also called "galley" cars by railroaders) is a bi-level design with lower level seating and upper level seating on "galleries" suspended from the car sidewalks. All seats can be viewed for safety and fare collection from a central aisle on the lower level main floor. The first gallery cars were introduced on the Burlington Route (Chicago) in the early 1950's. The gallery car is used in Chicago, Montreal, and on Caltrain. Including 165 electric MU gallery cars on the former Illinois Central in Chicago, nearly 1000 cars of this design are in service. Former Chicago gallery cars were acquired by Virginia Railway Express to expand their service.

 
source: Bombardier Transportation  
The lozenge car is named for its unique profile, near standard height at the ends and 16' at mid-car. It is a pure bi-level layout, withthe upper level in the center of the car completely isolated from the seating area below which itself is comprised of a split-level design, sometimes with a portion that is sunken. The "Bomb" car is the current catalog offering of Bombardier corporation, which acquired this design from the Urban Transportation Development Corp. (UTDC), a Canadian government project. The first UTDC cars entered service in Toronto in 1977. ACE uses the Bomb car, and Caltrain also has some in addition to their older fleet of gallery cars, using them mostly for its "Baby Bullet" express service.

While not built on speculation, Bomb cars are easier to order for new start properties ("I'll take ten of those") and they have a wide geographic distribution from Florida to Vancouver. However, currently there are more gallery cars than Bomb-type cars in operation in the U.S.

Other railcar designs exist.  Design affects how quickly people can board or disembark from the train -- depending on how many doors it has, how wide they are, the location of steps in relation to the door -- and thus impacts how long a train is stopped at a station and overall travel time. It can also affect people's comfort from drafts that are introduced when the doors are open, if there is no vestibule.

See also our level-boarding page.