Alstom is a significant supplier of trainsets, especially in Europe - notably SNCF (think TGV), some rail in the UK and the private Italo company in Italy (among others - those are the three I can recall off the top of my head). I just returned from Italy and have just finished putting together a post for OGR on riding the Italian high speed trains which I hope to post later today once I sort through my photos. In doing so, I spent some time digging around on the web trying to get some details on the trainsets themselves. I confess to being slightly confused about the relationship between the Alstom product they are producing for Amtrak and the two trainsets they've done for Italo. I thought their Avelia Evo (ETR 675) done for Italo was the twin to the Avelia Liberty being built for Amtrak. Here's a couple of front-end shots of the ETR 675 taken from the Alstom website:
You can see the profile looks similar at the head end - though the big difference is that the Evo uses distributed power (described in my soon-to-come post) so there is no 'locomotive' per se. The Amtrak Liberty uses separate power cars - one at each end - apparently due to the differences in the FRA regs compared to the European standards regarding crash protection for the head-end (I'm inferring here a bit...). However, the Liberty is/will be articulated, using a common bogie between the adjacent cars - the Evo is not - having bogies at each end of each car.
OTOH, the other trainset Alstom made for Italo, the ETR 575 (dubbed the AGV, apparently because it is a design successor to the TGV) looks like this:
This 11 car trainset - also distributed power - is articulated and does have the Jacobs bogie design (shared bogie). Even though this trainset has 11 cars vs 7 for the Evo, it is rated for 400 km/h vs 250 km/h for the Evo... Neither of the Italian trains tilt.
Perhaps TMI above - but one hopes that given that Alstom isn't new to this the rollout of the Amtrak Liberty will be fairly painless - its even the same track gauge (at least in Italy) and, I think, the same voltage (25 kV AC - well, ok, 60 Hz vs 50...).
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but its really hard not to like anything in Ferrari colors.
