Amtrak catenary wire procurement fraud case

Full development as the lecture's lead applied case. Tom's December consulting trip to Rome, NY; rejection of $4.5M product on December 23rd; arbitration in Old Saybrook, CT; FBI raid on the British supplier company; the elongation-spec upper bound (8–14% required, Phelps Dodge product was 18%); the orange-peel-effect mechanism revealed by Providence test-track sparking video.

I want to start showing you some types of flow you get from inhomogeneous deformation. Here's hot upsetting of steel with sticking friction. Sticking friction means the stuff under the tool doesn't move at all. The material is stuck to the workpiece — all you have to do is not put on the glass lubricant. For steel forging, like I showed you, you don't use any lubricant; you just let the oxide scale fall off. But for a nickel-based superalloy, you encase the whole thing in a glass frit, and when you get it hot, you have this syrupy layer of glass — the glass melts and gets thick, and if you pick the right glass for the forging temperature, it'll be a good lubricant.

A British contractor on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor electrification project tried to install a sub-spec copper wire (Rome, NY) to capture margin on a fixed-cost contract, told the federal government no other supplier existed, and was caught when the FBI walked passports off the executive team after a mediation Tom helped resolve. The Providence test track shows the inferior wire arcing on the train pass.

By the same token, I was involved in the northeast extension of Amtrak a few years ago. They had a British firm doing a $300 million Amtrak contract — remember Amtrak is basically covered by the federal government. This British firm, which had all kinds of electrified commuter train tracks elsewhere, was in charge. It was a fixed-cost contract, and they needed a bunch of copper wire for the overhead conductor that these electric trains run on — a very special type of copper wire.