Lets just say this though:
V1 Sleeper Fleet - 50 Cars
V2 Sleeper Fleet - 25 Cars
Total of 75 Viewliner Sleepers in inventory
Even with a supersized Silver Star (cause it includes the three sleepers of the Meteor), current requirements are as follows:
Lake Shore Limited - 9
Cardinal - 2
Crescent - 8
Star/Meteor - 20
Total of 39 Viewliner Sleepers needed daily
Total of 36 Viewliners are not being used
Now, I say that lightly because Amtrak has to reserve for bad-ordered cars, shopped cars, etc. But typically this has only been 25% of the sleepers needed daily, or in present terms, 10 cars. So if 39 are required for daily service, Amtrak has 10 Viewliner sleepers in reserve. For a while one Viewliner 1 had been in wreck-repair status, but that has seemingly come off the wreck-repair list.
All in all Amtrak has not increased capacity on any of its train lines that carry Viewliner Sleepers since the Viewliner II’s have been received/deployed. Why, how come, what’s going on?
Current assignments could be handled with just the Viewliner I Sleeper Fleet. When it was just the Viewliner I Sleepers, they had 50 in inventory, 10 are in “reserve” status, and 39 were kept active, a 25% reserve applied. The math has always worked. It’s been like this since David Gunn’s administration. Prior in Warrington’s regime - he put everything on the road and I think just prayed every day.
The ONLY thing one could say is that the overnight sleeper service on the NEC was restored, but that only required 2 Viewliner Sleepers, and quite easy to swap them for the reserves if needed, as nearly all the reserves are kept in NYC or Hialeah, FL (Miami). So the 39 went to 41 active Viewliner Sleepers deployed in service for a brief period.
This whole term of “mothballed” cars is a new term brought on by Anderson‘s regime and COVID to save costs. Amtrak lets inspections or repairs lapse on a given Viewliner sleeper and it gets “stored” (mothballed), as opposed to fixing it and leaving it in the fleet for rotation.
But lets be clear, there are presently 36 Viewliner sleeper (combo of V1 and V2) in inventory that are not assigned to daily service (75 minus 39 = 36).
Full potential, after applying a 25% reserve (15 cars), is to have 60 Viewliners in daily service. But of 75 Viewliners in total inventory, Amtrak has only have 39 in active duty. That means 21 Viewliner Sleepers are idle or moth-balled. That’s a lot of sleepers to be mothballed (and not all are V1’s).
The demand is there for sleeper car space. So why isn’t Amtrak adding Viewliner sleepers to its single level LD fleet? Main and only reason I have heard of is - lack of labor (or lack of sleeper car attendants). Plus they need labor to get any Viewliner they let go idle or mothballed serviced so it can go back into the active fleet status.
