[bryananderson]

The Caltrain KISSes are not really off the shelf, in many ways, good and bad and ugly.

The (arguably) good: 1) they have a boxier profile than the standard KISS, which some have complained about, but the reason the European version is less boxy is because Europe has a more restrictive loading gauge (the allowable cross-section of the vehicle), resulting in a more cramped upper level. Caltrain doesn’t have this issue, and so the upper level will not be cramped. 2) The Caltrain KISS is more powerful than the standard, which would allow for a faster top speed… if the corridor was upgraded to make use of it, which it is not. Maybe someday.

The bad/silly: two sets of doors… a higher set since HSR might allegedly someday come to this corridor and require changing the platform height, and a lower set because that ain’t happening for a long time, if ever. I think there are some other bad/silly things which I’ve willfully forgotten about (I think they fucked up the ADA lifts somehow?), which I’m sure are documented somewhere on Clem Tillier’s excellent blog.[0]

The ugly: “buy America” requirements forced Stadler to build an entire factory in the US, raising the cost by over 50% compared to the standard KISS. This is the bad kind of industrial policy which raises costs without actually building up US industrial capacity in this field (if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow, the US wouldn’t retain any expertise or capacity to build trains).

[0] https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com

[BobaFloutist]

Not that I think that protectionist economic policy is necessarily healthy, but if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow wouldn't we still presumably have some skilled workers that have been trained to do this kind of work? I don't think it's necessarily a huge or a lasting benefit, but if I wanted to open a plant the day after they closed theirs I'd probably look to do it in the same region, hoping to piggyback off of some of the expertise they established, no?

[bryananderson]

The way the Buy America rules work, there’s a certain percentage of work that has to be done in the US, and the rest can be done overseas. My understanding is that Stadler does most of the higher-skill work in Switzerland with its existing workforce, ships the components to Utah, and does final assembly there. Basically they do the bare minimum in the US that’s required under the law, so I’m not sure that this transfers a huge amount of domain expertise to the US workforce.

[tetromino_]

That depends on whether a significant fraction of those workers really are skilled (doing old-school manual machining, manual welding etc.) or they are just semi-skilled and thus interchangeable CNC operators and robot maintenance technicians.