Amtrak booking website/issues/timetables removed

[dcipjr]

Are timetables still available in stations and onboard?

 

[jis]

Are timetables still available in stations and onboard?

Printed timetables even as posters? No

I was just looking at 49 CFR 700.3, where timetables are mentioned in clause (b).

Maybe someone should file an FOIA request asking for a copy of the National Timetable which is supposed to be published in April and October and see what happens.

Maybe RPA should take this on if it can get over its fears of pissing Amtrak off.

 

[Ryan]

I think it would be absolutely amazing if Amtrak was buried in requests for copies of the National Timetable.

Edit: This sounds like pretty goood reading as well:

(c) Also available to members of the public at most staffed Amtrak stations, and usually maintained in the offices of travel agencies authorized to sell Amtrak tickets, is a copy of the Reservations and Ticketing Manual (RTM) which constitutes a compendium of information governing Amtrak employees in furnishing transportation to the travelling public. It contains substantial segments dedicated to the following topics: Amtrak's computer system and its communication codes; interline service agreements; passenger and baggage services; customer relations functions; reservations policy and procedures; acceptance of checks and credit cards; refunds; missed connection policies; ticketing; accommodations; employee pass travel; location maps for Amtrak stations; and intermodal state maps.

 

[PaTrainFan]

National timetable not necessary anymore, but up to date route schedules should be available.

 

[saxman]

Wish I could find this again, but another Amtrak employee was posting in social media about getting rid of PDF timetables. He said they were very time consuming and since they are constantly changing its very difficult to keep up with, but it's now better because we can just type in the city pair.

Of course we all know every city pair isn't entered into Arrow, so when someone that knows nothing about Amtrak is looking to travel from some small town to another small town, it'll just return service not available, even though it is.

 

[AmtrakBlue]

Wish I could find this again, but another Amtrak employee was posting in social media about getting rid of PDF timetables. He said they were very time consuming and since they are constantly changing its very difficult to keep up with, but it's now better because we can just type in the city pair.

Found it. Alan's reply to John Humphrey ("Here is an idea, that just came to me.....") . Facebook Groups

 

[acelafan]

Printed timetables even as posters? No

I was just looking at 49 CFR 700.3, where timetables are mentioned in clause (b).

Maybe someone should file an FOIA request asking for a copy of the National Timetable which is supposed to be published in April and October and see what happens.

Maybe RPA should take this on if it can get over its fears of pissing Amtrak off.

Well isn't that an interesting little gem. I will contact RPA again next week and ask them about it. I will also call Amtrak Customer Relations. It's a little aggravating we have to beg for updated timetables, or timetables at all.

Also, making the National Timetables PDF is easy - all you do is concatenate the individual TT together and add page numbers. There is probably a macro or script that could do it if someone was savvy enough.

 

[PaTrainFan]

For goodness sakes alive, it is not hard at all. Constantly changing? How much have Amtrak schedules changed over the last few years? Minimally. Maybe tweaks to the NE Corridor. And yes there may be details that in a schedule like connections, etc. need to be kept up on. You just go into the program that created the document, edit, save as .PDF and you're done. I'll do it for them for crying out loud!

 

[jis]

Wish I could find this again, but another Amtrak employee was posting in social media about getting rid of PDF timetables. He said they were very time consuming and since they are constantly changing its very difficult to keep up with, but it's now better because we can just type in the city pair.

Of course we all know every city pair isn't entered into Arrow, so when someone that knows nothing about Amtrak is looking to travel from some small town to another small town, it'll just return service not available, even though it is.

Well, if he does not like PDF, how about HTML or XML, just to be more modern and incidentally, much easier to automatically generate?

Actually, in this day and age they should be able to on the fly generate route timetables, automatically from the working timetable that they must have somewhere, though it may be too much to expect that their antiquated museum piece IT provides a JSON or XML interface for such information for such documents. Afterall their advanced way of interfacing appears to be screen scraping in some cases too!

Producing multi-leg connecting time tables would be just a bit more work admittedly.

 

[me_little_me]

National timetable not necessary anymore, but up to date route schedules should be available.

You, like everyone else, is entitled to his/her opinion.

 

[me_little_me]

Wish I could find this again, but another Amtrak employee was posting in social media about getting rid of PDF timetables. He said they were very time consuming and since they are constantly changing its very difficult to keep up with, but it's now better because we can just type in the city pair.

Of course we all know every city pair isn't entered into Arrow, so when someone that knows nothing about Amtrak is looking to travel from some small town to another small town, it'll just return service not available, even though it is.

Did the employee offer to provide his/her phone number for those that need that information?

 

[zephyr17]

Well, if he does not like PDF, how about HTML or XML, just to be more modern and incidentally, much easier to automatically generate?

Actually, in this day and age they should be able to on the fly generate route timetables, automatically from the working timetable that they must have somewhere, though it may be too much to expect that their antiquated museum piece IT provides a JSON or XML interface for such information for such documents. Afterall their advanced way of interfacing appears to be screen scraping in some cases too!

Producing multi-leg connecting time tables would be just a bit more work admittedly.

Looked at the source on the website. The data underlying the UI are JSON objects. Arrow itself is at least one services layer away, probably more.

It would be easy enough to dynamically render a PDF from the JSON using a template on user demand. There are industrial strength commercial apps that can do it.

 

[jis]

Looked at the source on the website. The data is in JSON.

Oh cool! Then what is the hullabaloo about. It should be relatively simple to scare up something that generates a displayable and printable version of a table with appropriate fields extracted and collated and then made to look like a timetable using facilities available in the JSON/XML platform. This makes it doubly weird.

 

[zephyr17]

Oh cool! Then what is the hullabaloo about. It should be relatively simple to scare up something that generates a displayable and printable version of a table with appropriate fields extracted and collated and then made to look like a timetable using facilities available in the JSON/XML platform. This makes it doubly weird.

Yep, worked on acquiring a tool that would render a nicely formatted fancy PDF from structured data (JSON, XML, DB table) codelessly. The only code you needed was to call the object with the right parameters and the run time rendered the document. You'd only need to set up a timetable template once.

 

[jis]

Yep, worked on acquiring a tool that would render a nicely formatted fancy PDF from structured data (JSON, XML, DB table) codelessly. The only code you needed was to call the object with the right parameters and the run time rendered the document. You'd only need to set up a timetable template once.

Exactly. I have done so many of these sorts of things before I retired, mostly as a side thing to explain to programmers what I was looking for. My day job of designing systems did not include the coding part per se, but it is always good to do POCs before foisting the thing on someone else, and the coders loved to get the POC, since they could typically start with the skeleton code and fill it in with the bells and whistles. Saved them time.

 

[saxman]

For goodness sakes alive, it is not hard at all. Constantly changing? How much have Amtrak schedules changed over the last few years? Minimally. Maybe tweaks to the NE Corridor. And yes there may be details that in a schedule like connections, etc. need to be kept up on. You just go into the program that created the document, edit, save as .PDF and you're done. I'll do it for them for crying out loud!

Maybe not the actual timetable part, but with all the stations losing and then gaining back staffing. Checked baggage coming and going. Now some trains have walk up bike checking available. I understand it's a monumental task. As, Jis said, it should be easy to do a quick revision and issue it when there is a change or mistake made in a previous. I understand national timetables not being printed anymore, but it should be fairly easy to make a change and then put it out to the masses in whatever format they like.

With the likes a biketrain and Amsnag out there, if Amtrak doesn't want to have printed timetables, hopefully someone out there will keep up their own version. Someone with dedication and time on their hands. As AmtrakBlue pointed out, here is the relevant Facebook post where an Amtrak employee was asking for feed back about timetables. It looks like he's pretty receptive.

 

[neroden]

Printed timetables even as posters? No

I was just looking at 49 CFR 700.3, where timetables are mentioned in clause (b).

Maybe someone should file an FOIA request asking for a copy of the National Timetable which is supposed to be published in April and October and see what happens.

Maybe RPA should take this on if it can get over its fears of pissing Amtrak off.

Oh my goodness. Nice catch, given that that is a *federal regulation*. Yeah....

49 CFR 701.3 (a) seems relevant. I'll keep that in mind.
____

I don't really care how hard it is to keep the station information and timetables updated -- literally every other railroad in the US, and nearly every other railroad in the world, manages to do it. It's just part of doing business, and can can certainly be done. As I pointed out, *they have to provide this information to the conductors*, so they have it in a complete, tabular format already.

 

[neroden]

Oh cool! Then what is the hullabaloo about. It should be relatively simple to scare up something that generates a displayable and printable version of a table with appropriate fields extracted and collated and then made to look like a timetable using facilities available in the JSON/XML platform. This makes it doubly weird.

I currently think that Amtrak's last round of idiotic "buyouts" of non-union employees lost all their competent IT people, and quite likely all their competent marketing people. That's my current working theory. Pity they didn't buy out Gardner, though.

 

[daybeers]

Also never understood how you can run a passenger railroad without more station information, such as about local transit connections and parking. It’s always just “short-term” or “long-term” parking available. It’s really not that hard to maintain how many spaces there are and how much it costs or just to link to the town’s page on it for example if they operate it.

 

[AmtrakBlue]

There are currently 25 IT positions open at Amtrak. I think some of y'all need to apply.

https://careers.amtrak.com/go/Information-Technology/8337000

 

[fdaley]

Wish I could find this again, but another Amtrak employee was posting in social media about getting rid of PDF timetables. He said they were very time consuming and since they are constantly changing its very difficult to keep up with, but it's now better because we can just type in the city pair.

Of course we all know every city pair isn't entered into Arrow, so when someone that knows nothing about Amtrak is looking to travel from some small town to another small town, it'll just return service not available, even though it is.

This seems so funny to me. I mean, it's very time consuming running a railroad too. If we could all just travel virtually, we wouldn't need to worry about having schedules and keeping them up to date.

 

[jis]

Someone claiming in this day and age that maintaining a database for the timetable to too time consuming to be do it is merely expressing the high level of incompetence involved I am afraid.

It is sort of like a Restaurant saying that it is too time consuming to keep track of food inventory.... Oh wait Amtrak does have that problem too I suppose

 

[railiner]

There are currently 25 IT positions open at Amtrak. I think some of y'all need to apply.

https://careers.amtrak.com/go/Information-Technology/8337000

IT positions are always open at Amtrak...there must be a reason for that 'revolving door'. Or is it that way for other businesses as well?

 

[railiner]

*they have to provide this information to the conductors*, so they have it in a complete, tabular format already.

And they certainly have to provide it to their host railroads as well...

 

[acelafan]

Reading this thread, and that Facebook thread, is extremely aggravating.

Does someone really have to hand-hold their IT department and teach them how to pull info from a database and reformat into table form? If they are currently overworked updating timetables as claimed in that FB thread then obviously they need to modernize their processes.

The PDFs don't even have to be as "pretty" as they are now - just list the train #, days it runs, stations and times. They obviously have the information; it's just a matter of making it available to passengers.

I knew printed timetables were not likely to ever be seen again, but now all timetables? Jeeeesh.