On Wednesday July 20th 2022 Amtrak took delivery of Avelia trainset 4 from Alstom in Hornell New York. The plan was to depart Hornell around 10:30am and take the Southern Tier to Buffalo followed by the Rochester and Mohawk Subdivisions of the Water Level Route to NYP. This longer routing was due to delays during the delivery of trainset 3 by NS. The new routing was chosen to reduce the distance on NS and anywhere a pilot is needed. Once arriving in Buffalo no host railroad pilot is required as Amtrak crews are qualified on that track.
At 10:00am everything seemed ready to go, the train was built and ready to go and the Amtrak crew was all set but, the NS pilots were nowhere to be found. The exact same scenario that had played out last time and the hours of planning had been spent to avoid was happening again. The call then came in that the crew had just left Binghamton! Binghamton is about 2 hours from Hornell. This day was off to a great start.
The train was ready to go by about noon and all of the delays turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it gave the sun time to move and put the rear power car of trainset 4 into perfect sun.
I was able to catch the train in several spots before we lost the light shortly after Utica.
Nice photos. One thing I noticed is that there was no FRED on the rear. Not sure if that is normal or not. I did see that that they had the rear red marker lights on so I assume that was good enough.