Regarding our safety and security skills, if you would like to call it that? For LSA - Cafe/Club Car training, my class spent three and a half weeks in classroom training. Only half a day of that was spent on food prep. Three days were spent on POS/register/credit machine training. Maybe two days on accounting. One day on grooming. Pretty much the entire rest of the training was regarding safety and security (that's roughly seven or eight days).
I am CPR/AED certified, and even though it's good for two years, we are recertified yearly. I am trained in how to properly extinguish a fire, in addition to shutting off the blowers on various types of equipment, to keep smoke from circulating in the car. Know how to safely evacuate an Amfleet car? Yup. Acela? Yup. Gotta be trained to recognize safety hazards in evacuating trains. One end of the train could have a real bad fire, and to someone untrained in railroad safety, someone's first reaction may be to jump out one of the emergency exits. Good idea? Noooooooo. What if another train is coming? Have to evacuate to another car, while contacting CNOC to make sure all rail traffic and (possible) third rails are deactivated, prior to evacuation. Know how to build the emergency stairs, to evacuate an Acela? Yup. Yes it's true if we're using the stairs, the situation mustn't be that dire. Even so, you try telling that to a train of 300 passengers that only the conductor and assistant conductor know how to build out the two sets of stairs. Especially when one set is in the Club Car, and you've got two people that could be help expedite the evacuation.
Not to bring up the tragedy of 188, but the LSA (although injured) willingly volunteered to stay and help evacuate passengers. I can't imagine someone from an outside company being paid $8.50/hr willing to put their life on the line as willingly.
This barely scratches the surface of onboard staff training (including LSAs, Sleeper/Coach/Train attendants, Conductors, Engineers, even down to EnRoute cleaners on the NEC). Tunnel evacuations. Spotting potential security issues (unattended bags in odd places, or what to look for in potential terror threats). For obvious reasons i can't go much deeper than I already have, maybe Tom will go further in to detail if poked, as he's retired. But please don't question for a second if we are more than mere food servers.