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That report is from 2014, I wonder if anything changed after that. Their biggest challenge is staff levels and staff salaries. Restaurant work is often low salaries, plus tips. Amtrak is paying an average of $50k/year per dining car staff member, plus railroad retirement and other benefits of...

> at this point it's more like "open high, if it sells slowly we can lower them and sell tickets 5-6 months out". Sometimes that happens, and sometimes because of demand the prices just stay high and they successfully sell the train out at higher fare levels (particularly in this day and age of...

Amtrak is the sole customer for long-distance (sleeper) passenger equipment on US rail and under US regulations. There is no rolling stock manufacturer with US-legal passenger coaches "in stock" for order or delivery. Amtrak has to order unique cars, and cannot simply "acquire a car". They...

AAA does their own estimate, based on the 5 most popular cars in the US, and comes up with a $/mile of $0.82 if you drive ~10k miles per year or less: https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Your-Driving-Costs-2020-Fact-Sheet-FINAL-12-9-20-2.pdf $0.62/mile is low for many drivers...

Comparing train and air travel by $/mi is never going to be favorable for trains. They're just too slow, and the fixed costs per hour are going to swamp the efficiency savings. If you compare them on an hourly basis, trains do pretty well. A 7-8 hour plane flight from JFK to Europe in a low...

Anyone connected to an engineering firm enough to request the RFP documents from Jessica Nesbitt? Or anyone willing to try to get them as a member of the public?

I think the important thing to note about the aforementioned five-year plan is that the process will be pretty formal, with likely both Amtrak-produced RFI and RFPs published publicly. We will learn a lot about Amtrak's priorities and goals from those documents, whenever they are released.

There are a lot of unknowns with a possible December stoppage. It's post election and post holiday-shopping, so the impact is slightly reduced. It's during the holidays, so some rail shippers might be more willing to accept delivery delays with factories running shorter/reduced shifts. It's a...

By late November, rail supply chain for Christmas is completely done, and everything will be in stores or regional warehouses. The big season for Christmas wholesale distribution is now.

I would not be surprised if the plan by both the unions and Biden was to kick the can down the road past the election.

How would you use this for the far-side window, that's not adjacent to the platform? Any tricks there?

Another great day trip is all the way to San Luis Obispo. There's a nice little railroad museum across from the station, open only on Saturdays. It should be doable to arrive in the morning, see the museum, then train back to burbank same day. The stretch between SB and SLO is away from the...

I think equipment shortages are going to be an issue for the foreseeable future. I was watching a Youtube video of a #5 CZ run from March, and the #6 they passed going East had the TS, one sleeper, and no Dining Car! At least they got a Sightseer Lounge, but no dining car would definitely...

The bucket fare list is here. This chart shows end-to-end fares in each bucket and fare class for each train. If you're not riding the train end-to-end, you can usually tell what bucket your partial fare is in by getting pricing for end-to-end on that train and then comparing that to the chart...

San Luis Obispo has a nice one, an easy day trip up on the surfliner. Saturdays only.

I think it's essentially random based on how the cars are placed in the yard when they are building the consist. They do keep similar cars together, and often use the service cars (cafe/dining) to split the coach from sleeper, but which set gets the quieter location at the end of the train is...

There's also the issue of station length. Most passenger train operators prefer each train car to be able to be directly exited at a stop. Having people assemble at the cars within the station, or moving the train to allow later cars to disembark are not ideal. Freight cars have no need for...