Bilevel rail car

[1] Double deck cars may not be usable in countries or on older railroad systems with low loading gauge, most notably the majority of the British railway network.

In some countries such as the UK new lines are built to a higher than the existing structure gauge to allow the use of double-deck trains in future.

These were successful, and led to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway introducing long-distance Hi-Level cars on Chicago–Los Angeles El Capitan streamliner in 1954.

Downstairs or lowest floor height is primarily determined by the thickness of the beams connecting the span between the wheels and bogies (trucks) of a rail car.

They use low-platform stations, because the traditional single floor trains all had exterior entry steps to maximize flexibility (emergency and temporary stops) and minimize infrastructure costs.

This was decided due to the overwhelming and increasing number of passengers using the 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) gauge urban Sarmiento Line, serving the centre and east of Greater Buenos Aires.

In 2013, these coaches were retired from the line and replaced with new CSR Electric Multiple Units, though it remains unclear if the Emfer trains will be moved elsewhere in the country.

For 2020, a public tender was launched by Trenes Argentinos to recover these double-decker coaches, for inter-urban and long-distance services, equipping them with reclining seats, USB inputs and other amenities.

The Public Transport Corporation in Melbourne ordered a prototype Double Deck Development and Demonstration train in 1991, a modification of the Tangara design used in Sydney.

In 1997 the national railway company ÖBB ordered 120 bilevel cars for the use in Eastern Austria and Vienna metropolitan area.

Canada's national passenger railway company, Via Rail, does not currently operate any bilevel coaches in its fleet, apart from the dome cars used on some long-distance services.

The Ontario Northland Railway operates a bilevel dome car on its Polar Bear Express service with two levels along the entire length of the vehicle.

The Bombardier BiLevel Coach was originally designed by Hawker-Siddeley Canada for the GO Transit commuter rail network in southern Ontario.

The private rail tour company Rocky Mountaineer uses bilevel full-length dome cars built by Colorado Railcar.

Additionally, a cross-railway bureau double-deck train service is provided between Tianjin and Baoji (via Beijing West railway station).

The cars are frequently operated in all-double-deck InterCity trains (known as IC2) with at-seat power supply for laptops and wireless LAN internet connection.

The East German railway company Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) implemented the first bilevel cars in 1974 for interurban lines.

MTRCL and formerly KCRC operate double-decker carriages with the KTT train sets on its cross-boundary route between Kowloon and Guangzhou.

The first Air-Conditioned double-decker service was introduced in 2011 on the Howrah – Dhanbad Double Decker Express between Howrah station in West Bengal and Dhanbad Junction in Jharkhand[12] which was subsequently followed by Delhi Sarai Rohilla – Jaipur, Ahmedabad – Mumbai Central, Chennai Central – Bangalore, Anand Vihar (New Delhi) – Lucknow, Visakhapatnam – Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam – Tirupati[13] and Mumbai Lokmanya Tilak Terminus – Madgaon double decker expresses.

As of 2016 some of units 951, usually with locomotive of class 350 (Škoda 55E), are used at international train service on Bratislava (SK) – Břeclav (CZ) main line.

The Swiss Federal Railways also operate the IC 2000 double-decker passenger coaches in most of Switzerland for high speed InterCity and InterRegio services.

[17] In the United Kingdom, due to the small loading gauge, the railway system cannot easily accommodate double-deck trains.

Other designs, including rolling stock made by Colorado Railcar, Budd, Pullman-Standard, Bombardier and others have an entrance on the lower deck rather than an intermediate level.

Nevertheless, commuter railroads such as the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, MARC, and MBTA all use bilevel railcars built to unique designs to clear specific structure gauge problems on those systems.

All LIRR bilevel passenger rail cars have two wide quarter-point doors on each side, for high level platforms only.

Its MBTA Commuter Rail system currently uses 277 bilevel passenger cars made by Kawasaki and Hyundai Rotem.

[35][36][37] FrontRunner commuter rail, operated by the Utah Transit Authority to connect multiple cities along the Wasatch Front, utilizes Bombardier BiLevel Coaches.

Belgian latest models (M6 and M7 cars) also belong to the Bombardier double deck family while the older M5 are based on the French VB2N.

NICTD South Shore Line Bi-Levels are similar to the Metra Highliner IIs but have entrances at the end of the rail car opposite the cab with a stairwell and trap doors for low-level platforms.

[28] After initial retirement from Metra in the late 1990s, many of these cars were acquired by other commuter rail agencies across the United States, including (among others) UTA FrontRunner, MARC, WeGo Star and Virginia Railway Express.