I agree with your post 100%. What I have issues with and I think Richardson is trying to show in his articles is Gardner has very little regard for the passengers. Gardner basically being a life long bureaucrat doesn’t seem to care about any passenger experience outside the NEC. There’s no reason Amtrak can’t have a passenger friendly experience and operate daily service.
My admittedly limited experience on the NEC is that it features particularly surly OBS staff. Outside Acela First that is, which I rode once and which was excellent on that occasion.
Canada needs a statute establishing VIA, period. It was established by an Order In Council, the Canadian equivalent of an Executive Order. It has no statutory foundation at all, unlike Amtrak.
Hi Zephyr, I'm not trying to be ornery, just interested in the basis for your comment. What is it that VIA lacks in service because it is not founded in a statute that Amtrak has gained in service because it is? VIA does seem to be a better run operation even if it can't provide optimum frequencies.
As long as Amtrak is taxpayer-supported, efficiency and affordability have to be the priority. Once these criteria are satisfied, however, there is nothing to prevent Amtrak to offer higher-end service (i.e. sleeping cars) on these same trains, as long as the high-end service produces produces more revenue than expenses.
Exactly. Most of us on this site (me included) are self-described rail fans. Which means, I suppose, that we are looking for a quality travel experience rather than efficient, affordable transportation. Hence the entertaining and descriptive trip reports and comments comparing Amtrak and VIA on-board customer service.
If RPA manages to rise from its slumber on the LD front and actually start asking Amtrak a few tough questions beyond traditional dining, that would on the whole be a good thing. I hope this portends well. Questions need to be asked about the Mothball LD Fleet, and specifically what is the plan for bringing out the non-rev service cars and put them back into service.
As a more frequent NEC passenger, I don't think the cafe car staff (the only real OBS) are particularly "surly." On the other hand, for a 2 and a half hour ride to New York, you really don't need much in the way of OBS, most of the time, the only interaction with an Amtrak employee is having the conductor scan your ticket.
I've traveled on the NEC a reasonable amount, mostly on Regionals in coach. And compared with the Seattle based cafe attendants on the Cascades, which I ride a lot, they are a surly bunch. You don't interact that much on a 3 hour ride to Portland, either, but most of the cafe attendants make a mean Bloody Mary.
At least on the Winter Aurora Express which is purely an ARR operation with no other party like Princess involved, when I traveled by it several year back (Anchorage - Fairbanks - Anchorage) the food service was provided by a contract vendor. The food is pretty good but limited menu and the POS used is an iPhone with one of those Square doohickies to run credit cards through.
Very selectively they have service along the major routes of travel, of which ARR is one.
Yep, that is required under PRIIA, all runs under 750 miles (except the NEC
) must be fully paid for by another entity, largely states, but could be municipalities (some Indiana cities, notably Lafayette, kicked in for the Hoosier State before Indiana pulled the state's contribution out) or I think anything except Amtrak's Federal subsidy (Jeff Bezos? Bill Gates? Hear he is a bit of a railfan..).
