When I did my bucket trip in an upper berth on The Candian a few years ago the SCA sought me out, took me to the vestible and showed me how to pop the trap. Said he wanted a backup to help evacuate the car in the event of a wintertime derailment of our train.
Very interesting! I wonder if the attendant did that on his own, or is that standard practice on VIA?
This is standard practice on VIA.
Here is what I can tell you. Amfleet I cars and the Acela sets have Red lights over or near the doors. The Acela red lights will flash a few times when the doors are being keyed closed. All doors on Acela trains must be closed for the train to proceed. Reason is that when the doors close the train becomes pressurized similar to an Airliner. So when the doors close you hear a loud thud and when they open you hear a small amount of air escape. On the engineers console it will display that the doors are locked and secured.
If I were you I'd just ask. I've yet to come across a single Amtrak employee that wouldn't tell a customer (in no uncertain terms) when they were on break or otherwise busy or preoccupied.
The only reason I know how to operate the beds and such is because there were some SCA's who were MIA. Pinching your hand sucks but it's still better than trying to sleep on a chair because your SCA wasn't there to "deal with it." Eventually I got good enough at it that it no longer bothered me if the SCA ever showed up or not. Normally this would be where the discussion ends. The only problem is that even though some SCA's won't bother to show up others will get annoyed that you didn't wait for them to do it. As a customer it can be hard to know what to expect from one trip to the next.
If you ever want to keep me off the train for good this would be one way to do it. It's not that I don't believe in teaching and understand safety. In fact I love to watch disaster investigation videos and read NTSB reports to see what sort of things can happen and how such factors can be resolved or mitigated. The problem is that very little of actual relevance is learned by the air safety videos as currently implemented. Their fifth grade dialog and endless repetition only serves to punish intelligent people in a vain attempt to appeal to lazy idiots. If someone needs help understanding and operating the world's most simplistic seat belt system they should probably just stay on the plane. That information belongs in a pamphlet where people worth saving will read it and remember it.
Are you saying that Acela is to Aircraft as MS-DOS is to Mainframe?
Thank you again for saying what you said, Tom. I had to bite my tongue last night when I originally read his post. I really hate blanket statements.
To be perfectly honest nearly everything I look forward to about the Amtrak experience comes from the fact that it scratches my passenger rail itch. If Amtrak were an airline or bus line or cruise line I would never ride them, and I doubt most of the forum's membership would either. I've ridden Amtrak enough times to have fairly low expectations, so these days most of my negativity about Amtrak service levels comes not from my own interactions but from what I see between Amtrak and other passengers who are less familiar with the experience. The way some Amtrak staff expect new or infrequent riders to know that particular crew's unwritten made-up rules before boarding and snap or even shout at them when they do something wrong. The way they talk back to passengers and guilt trip them for even minor requests.
I reread my post and went back to put "some" in front of the comments about SCAs. That seems reasonable and more accurate to me. I didn't change the part about Amtrak staff culture considering employee breaks to be sacred events because I think any change would only make it less accurate. I don't ride the NEC regularly so, as with the Auto Train I cannot comment on that specifically.
What ever will you do when the inevitable happens and you have a bad experience on an airplane flight, regardless the carrier?
Amtrak sleeper, airline coach.
Makes a lot of sense, and is reminiscent of the way airline personnel enlist people sitting in exit rows to assist in the event of an evacuation. The difference of course is that those passengers are physically blocking the exits in a way that a train passenger is not. But I do like the idea to do this on a long-distance train, too. It wouldn't make a lot of sense on corridor trains since people are getting on and off frequently.
They show a safety video on the Amtrak Cascades. This is made possible by the fact that there are video monitors in every car, unlike most other Amtrak rolling stock. IME, the video is shown southbound upon departing Tacoma, and northbound departing Vancouver, WA. This would reach the vast majority of passengers on the SEA-PDX leg of the Cascades.
This is standard practice on VIA Corridor trains also.
