NEC riders complaints are similar to LD riders

[Willbridge]

I usually take sleepers due to my traveling partner's needs, but when I travel alone, I go coach. When I go coach from Albuquerque (I know it's not the NER), almost every time I am assigned a seat by Amtrak station or train staff and every time that I have been assigned a seat, it has always been occupied by someone else and sometimes by people who were also assigned seats, but whose assigned seats were also taken by somebody else. But I grant you that things might be different if the customers were forced to assign themselves seats when buying the ticket.

This used to happen before Amtrak. I've seen it. A few years ago it happened to me on Deutsche Bahn, when a German woman insisted that I had taken the seat that she had reserved. When the conductor showed up, it turned out that she was one car off.

DB and others try to prevent this problem by displaying the reservation at the seat, which I had checked before the train departed. She was sure that my foreign accent meant that I didn't know what I was doing, so when I suggested that she check the information display she didn't see a need to do that.

Advance selection by passengers would still need to have well-trained staff dealing with problems.