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Three routes that I think would make sense would be reviving the North Coast Limited, parts of which are under some sort of planning. Having a through train from Chicago to Seattle/Portland is not a huge ask. The second one is the Desert Wind. The change I would make being that it run north to...

I personally see this plan as incredibly underwhelming. There are a lot of other routes that should be on the map that aren’t (Oklahoma City to Tulsa being one of the biggest misses), the planned frequencies are pretty crap on most of the routes and this comes off as an NEC bailout with some...

They do have a daytime setting. With some extra padding on the seats and it will be fine. As for an open sleeper of some variety, I never really got the "people will sue them into oblivion" argument. People sleep in coach all the time and there isn't a weekly law suit. I would say they are...

Offering a 4 person room similar to a couchette doesn't mean a 1 for 1 carbon copy. It could be spruced up in the design phase. Which could be a more efficient use of space or at least give next gen Viewliners a family room.

Losing 1 bedroom in a Viewliner is more what I see as the minimum that would be lost should a rule like this get implemented. More than likely both with narrower roomettes. The other option I could see are European style double rooms that are perpendicular to the window being modified to fit...

Moving between the cars isn't the problem with the superliners, it's moving between the levels. If the federal government is going to set regulations that require unrestricted and unassisted access to all public parts of a train, future single level cars will be effected by the same rules. And...

At this point, if Amtrak were to do an RFP for long distance cars, the options still are Siemens, Stadler or Alstom. Frankly, they'll probably be the only option for most North American fleet orders. If Amtrak were to order new long distance cars, their sleeper offerings would need to be...

Would a separate Southeast Owl make sense? DC to Charlotte is approximately 9 hours. That’s not a terrible trip length for a night train.

There are a lot of problems that would be made by having a "common" fleet. Multi level cars would either have to have both low and high level doors to deal with the US having 2 different platform heights. Which would mean lost revenue space that at best would be a pain on trains running to New...

Under the current schedule, it takes about 18 hours to go from Chicago to Denver. That would be rough for an end to end trip during the day. It would make more sense as a Nightjet service with Chicago - Omaha day service along the old Rock Island route and a daytime Omaha - Denver run. Running...

The question of a revived Daylight and its run time is more a matter of are you reviving it for end to end travel or to support travel somewhere in the middle? If it’s end to end travel, a daytime train would be a poor option given how long it takes even compared to the train/bus option that...

I’ve mentioned this a couple times on various threads, but I’ve talked to my partner who is a Colorado native about this and watched one of CDOT’s town halls about it. Because of Colorado’s constitutional weirdness about taxes and spending, they will need to create a special tax district to fund...

"Fixing the underperformance of the cafe car" isn't that literally the line Amtrak's board and Republicans in Congress used to cut dining service on the East Coast along with cutting station staff and other amenities that add value to customers and thus attract them? I wonder what will be their...

By state level I do mean the Governor and Legislature. I have met with legislatures over the years and they are ambivalent about a lot of things. The political culture that induces the legislature to kick things off onto local entities is the Governor and Legislature not wanting to be on the...

When it comes to loyalty points, at least in my experience there are 3 variables you need to take into consideration; the frequency at which you accumulate them, the rate at which they are devalued/expire and how the points are exchanged for things. I've used both the Amtrak Guest Rewards...

I did. California at the state level is largely ambivalent at worst when it comes to train travel, but there are still a lot of constituencies across the state that are anti public transit in general. The normal way for them to go about cutting service is make it worse till it fails or their...

From a marketing standpoint, this seems like a very odd survey to send out. Out of 9 questions 2 were directly about Amtrak and 1 was the "are you even reading this" question. They don't ask anything specific of I'm guessing someone with a frequent rider status or someone who could get it.

I just read the article and its the typical mentality of someone that forgets that people actually live further than 20 miles inland from an ocean. And *gasp* we're a good chunk of this country's population and we frankly deserve and need better train service. God forbid us "people" not want to...

Automats are why I am starting to think the San Joaquin JPA is either trying to scuttle the service with a death by 1000 cuts approach or they don't ride the trains and don't understand that there is a difference between regional and intercity rail and that there will be different expectations...

This is going to be a bit of a rant, but not at anyone in particular, but at a notion that continues to pervade policy discussions, but this stupid set up with Pueblo just shows it too well. The notion that I am talking about is that "if something isn't a 100% solution for everyone, then we...