Amtrak, a Beginner's Guide

Wherein I get a few things off my chest

If time spent doing something is at all correlated with skill, then I am one of the best Amtrak passengers now living. In my thirty-[redacted] years, I must have taken at least 1,000 of their trains.

You might be tempted to think that implies I’m a fan of the company, but no. They go out of their way to make that impossible. I take the train because it has some natural advantages. Relative to flying, it’s cheaper, less susceptible to weather / random delays, the stations are in more convenient locations than airports, and I can show up five minutes before departure time. Relative to driving… well I’d rather spend time in Attica than doing 15 mph on I-95, plus reading a book and napping are both counterindicated with operating a vehicle. Amtrak, however, go out of their way to negate these, in ways large and small.

Now, I am sympathetic to some of the railroad’s excuses. Their infrastructure is old, and the fact that the US spends something like $20 million a yard to do environmental review for track is not entirely their fault. The issue is that they tend to hide behind these things. It’s true, for instance, that they’re stuck with stupid station layouts in some cities; but, this is used as a red herring for when they make silly operations decisions about how to operate in the old stations (and if Moynihan is any guide, they make silly operations decisions in brand new stations too).

In the way of keeping this diatribe reasoned critique somewhat organized, let’s go item by item.

The Stations

An Amtrak station is often a microcosm for the railroad’s overall problems, encapsulating poor choices during construction and ongoing operations. They are sometimes stuck with station layouts from decisions a century ago (although Moynihan is brand new and an example of a terrible design) but the day-to-day cock-ups are just baffling.

By far, the most consistently stupid thing about station operations is boarding the trains. Amtrak even had an inspector general report in 2016 with 45 pages of “here’s why you suck at loading your trains,” which they must’ve chucked in a shredder. I don’t even know why it took 45 pages when it should have just been two items: 1) Trains are not airplanes so you don’t have to board them with one line through one door. 2) Find someone in the company who has taken a train in Europe and ask him how those degenerate French people board trains. The correct way to board a train is to let people wait on the platform, not in a holding pen in the station. When the train arrives, the people on the train get off, then the passengers on the platform board immediately. You can do that because a train is not an airplane! This is how foreign railroads manage it. This is how American subways work, and, I’m pretty sure, subways are trains. This is even how the little shuttle trains at airports work.

Now, I take the train between consistently between New York and Washington, DC, so I’m going to focus on specific issues I encounter at a few stations. From what I can tell though, many of these have analogues in other places (as in when I’ve occasionally taken the train to Boston).

New York Penn Station … Moynihan Station … Penn Station Moynihan Train Hall… Oooooh, a hall like where concerts are played!

This station is just the worst. Partly that’s because they destroyed the old one and built a terrible replacement on its corpse in the 60s. But a big part of why it’s bad is Amtrak today. Amtrak owns and operates the station, and platforms are shared with the LIRR, and NJ Transit. Despite the fact that all the trains use the same platforms, Amtrak seems obsessed with divvying up space in the station rather than making everyone play nice. There’s one door if you’re trying to get to an Amtrak train, a different door if it’s an LIRR train, and yet another door if it’s an NJ Transit train. The sensible thing would be to let any passenger use any door to the platform and speed up the painfully slow boarding process because, dare I repeat, trains are not airplanes and don’t need separate gates.

This problem is most obvious in the Moynihan portion of the station. On the top level, there is the Amtrak concourse with a single one-person-wide escalator down to the platform. One level below, there is a subterranean LIRR concourse, from which you may walk down a staircase onto the same platforms. There should be staircases from the Amtrak level to the LIRR one. That way, passengers could choose to walk directly down two flights of stairs instead of waiting in a stupidly long line to take the escalator. You can technically do this if you walk out of your way around the concourse, but it's not encouraged so only people who take the train a lot know about it. Oh also, Amtrak has another boarding hall in the Penn Station portion of Penn Station (i.e., the east side) where they play the same stupid two levels but all the stairs go to the same platforms game with NJ Transit. The idea behind spending billions to give them Moynihan was that they would give up this separate waiting room to simplify operations for the other railroads, but then they just didn’t.

Back in Moynihan, where the staircases should be, they built a waiting room. This is pretty (in fact Moynihan ispretty) and architectural critics liked it. But, it’s slotted between the station and the tracks so it’s just an obstacle. It’s also small and the only place with seating in the station. They have people sit around at the front of the waiting room to stop you if you don’t have an Amtrak ticket, because… I dunno, they’d rather you go to hell than Long Island. I think the seating decisions were to keep homeless people out on the theory that it’s easier to make some guy in an Amtrak vest check 10,000 tickets a day than say, “you can’t bring a shopping cart in here, sir… also how on earth did you come across a shopping cart in Manhattan?” three times a day. The net effect is that you have dozens of passengers sitting on the floor. Philadelphia’s station gets to have benches.

Upstairs there’s a lounge for anyone dumb enough to buy a first class Acela ticket. That it exists demonstrates Amtrak really doesn’t understand that it’s not an airline. You don’t buy a ticket for the fastest train available so you can show up to the station an hour early.

The arrival/departure boards are the best example of how Amtrak is indifferent to making Penn Station more efficient. There are giant screens in Moynihan, where you might expect to see platform numbers for incoming trains. Instead, they seem reserved for advertising, but that they haven’t sold ads yet. So it’s just empty, displaying some dreck like, “Moynihan Station in case you forgot where you were” or whatever. The status boards are all off to the sides, or around a corner, and way too small to read at a distance. Moreover, the train status information isn’t integrated. It would have to be simple to put Amtrak, the LIRR, and NJ Transit on the same board, so you didn’t have to wander around from wall to wall to find your particular railroad, but no.

Finally, the boarding issue is particularly stupid in NYC. The official line for why everyone has to wait above the platform, let the train come into the station, then go single file down to the platform is that Penn Station is old and the platforms are narrow. This is also why Amtrak insists on something like ten-minute dwell times in Penn Station.

Why ten?

Well has to be more than the two used in Germany with wider platforms, and ten is more than two.

Why not five then?

um…

Okay, so what’s the solution?

Give us $17 billion to expand the tracks at Penn Station. We’ll be digging up three city blocks in midtown for (probably) eons to do it. Your kids will be pensioners before it’s done, muahahaha!

That’s the only possible solution? What about through-running whereby more trains pass through Penn Station instead of originating and terminating there? That should make it so they don’t have to sit in the station so long, which will allow you to expand capacity without excavating a giant pit in the middle of Manhattan.

No! You, with your solutions. Give us $17 billion.

Hmm… probably not going to happen. Also $17 billion for new platforms?! You know the French are building an entire 140 mile high speed line for a little less than $10 billion?

Why don’t you just move to France then?

They don’t like me there either.

The “narrow platforms at Penn Station” line is also annoying because they throw it around constantly to explain why service sucks. But then, if platform space is worth a chest full of gold doubloons a square inch, why do they add as much clutter as possible? Why does each platform have a passenger elevator and a freight elevator instead of just one elevator? Why is the freight elevator in the middle of the platform and framed in with something like three feet of cinder blocks? Why is the east side escalator framed in with cinderblocks so it can be narrow but also take up a lot of space? Why is there some foldable ramp (labeled Acela but I’ve never seen it used) in the middle of the platform? Couldn’t that be stored elsewhere and brought down in the freight elevator when you need it? Why are there wayfinding signs bolted to the floors instead of hanging from the ceiling? Why are there garbage cans on the platforms? Can’t the giant fire extinguishers be bolted to the backs of the staircases instead of in the middle of the only free platform space?

Philadelphia Penn Station

Surprisingly, given its location in Pennsylvania, this station is actually quite functional. There is ample space and seating. The platforms are huge so, in theory, you could just let people amble down to them at their leisure once the tracks are announced for an incoming train. In practice, they still line everyone up to go down single file. I guess the employees just get bored and like having people wrapped around a station like that snake game on an old Nokia phone. At least they do this before the train comes in, so trains move through the station quickly. They also have benches so you can have a seat when (not if) your train is delayed. If Amtrak doesn’t want to improve by looking at a good railroad and copying it, they could at least do better by copying Philly. This station used to have one of those clickety-clack arrival/departure boards (properly a “split flap” board; I looked it up). This was lovely and you could actually read it. So of course they got rid of it and replaced it with a digital one. The new one is an improvement on those at other stations but the resolution kind of sucks (plus white text on light blue backgrounds isn’t the most readable) so it manages to be worse that the sign it replaced.

Newark Delaware

This isn’t a major station so I don’t expect it to be really nice. But, it’s notable because you have to walk across the outer train tracks to board the train, which just… seriously? The experience of hitching a train like an Okie fleeing the dustbowl in a boxcar.

Washington DC Union Station

They want $9 billion to renovate this one. For that princely sum we’d get wider platforms, longer platforms, and a bunch of aesthetic upgrades, parking, and other things that have nothing to do with trains. For that absurd amount of money they should be able to turn it into a through station, but that’s not even in the cards. Also, the platforms are already plenty wide if they would just abstain from driving a half dozen airport golf cart things down them every time a train arrives and people are trying to get out.

The current version of the station is ugly, but the layout is terrible more because of how it’s operated than how it’s built. As built, it’s easy to arrive then walk straight from your train to the subway. As operated, they put some stupid metal gate between the platforms so you have to go out of your way to enter the station, go around the rope lines they have up, then walk to the subway. It’s doubly annoying that the gate blocks off the easternmost tracks, which are where they have the Acela arrive, the exact train you take if you care about speed. For departures, they still have some aversion to letting people wait on the platform, so they build little holding pens out of tensabarriers. These take up gobs of space, which makes walking around the station feel claustrophobic even though you could fit a herd of elephants in the corridor. Of course there are additional obstacles about the terminal. The dumbest of these are ol’ timely looking arches that look like you’re supposed to walk through them on your way to the train. They look like some ticky-tacky detail from a carnival attraction with a name like “1890s land”. In fact, they are actually old; they were doorframes from the original station that they inexplicably left in place in the name of historic preservation. So that section of the station is hideous but it has old doorless doorframes preserved as sculptures. Good job everyone!

Another detail that affects boarding is that they have gates and tracks. So instructions are in the form of, “board through gate H, track 18”. It doesn’t matter though what gate you use. The tracks are the same. So there’s no difference between gate H track 18 and gate F track 18. I guess it’s more for keeping people corralled in the station, which isn’t necessary. They should just let you mill around until the train is announced then go to the platform.

A final detail: it’s idiotic that the second busiest Amtrak station in the country still has some platforms that are too low for the trains. If you ever take a Northeast Regional train, odds are you’ll arrive at one of these at some point. Instead of walking out onto a raised platform, you have to go down the carriage stairs onto ground level. This takes forever because 1) people pack comically large suitcases and 2) the conductors don’t open all the doors! I don’t know why they won’t open the doors aside from the fact no one at Amtrak values your time even a little. I’m sympathetic that this could be a difficult detail to fix. It probably is tricky to build new raised platforms in an active station. But, it ought to be something they have a better plan for than “give us $9 billion and 20 years and we’ll do it”.

The Trains

The company operates several types of kit. I’ve experience primarily with the Acela, the Northeast Regional, and long-distance trains passing through the Northeast Regional corridor. I have also taken routes such as Boston to Portland ME, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and Chicago to Cleveland; doing this is usually a mistake. Presumably the west coast has Amtrak too. I don’t know about it.

The Acela

Amtrak calls these high speed, which isn’t true. However, they are the best level of service available. They will take you from DC to NYC in three hours. It used to be 2 hours 50 minutes but inexplicably got slower at some point. An actual high speed train would take you from DC to Boston in not much longer. The trains themselves are much better than the regional trains because they debuted this century (barely) rather than in the 1970s. They look like high speed trains from other countries but are vastly heavier because they are engineered to withstand a collision with a freight train. This is necessary because, despite the northeast regional corridor being the only place in the US that’s almost entirely passenger trains (and mostly owned by Amtrak), no one even has a plan to separate passenger and freight operations on the route.

The experience on Acela is better because the trains are somewhat faster and less decrepit inside, Amtrak seems to prioritize them so they aren’t delayed as often, and they have assigned seating. The assigned seats are such an improvement it’s mind boggling Amtrak doesn’t do this for other trains. People can travel and sit together without lining up to board 30 minutes early, and new passengers don’t have to perambulate around a crowded train searching for an empty seat.

It's supposed to be an express service so I do not understand why they stop at the Baltimore airport and in Metropark NJ (a station in an unincorporated community with a population of 20,000). I’m assuming that (very slow) track improvements decreased the travel time on the route and Amtrak responded with, “gee willikers, no one’s gonna wanna get to where they’re going faster. We gotta do something. Let’s pretend Metropark is a big place.” Before the pandemic, they tested out an express train from DC to NYC with no other stops. This actually did save like 20+ minutes and was nice, so of course they killed it off.

I mentioned the rolling stock is newer. This is true, but it isn’t new. It’s way past the service life. You’ll notice that the locomotives have dents and cracks in some of the fiberglass pieces, the power outlets sometimes don’t work, and the chairs will recline suddenly without prompting on occasion. They started building replacements¹ in 2017. These are sitting on a siding outside the Philadelphia station to taunt you as you go by. We’re constantly told they’ll be soon entering service. The line now is “spring 2025”. I see migrating birds and flowers blooming in Central Park, but I’m not holding my breath.

The ticket prices for the Acela are sometimes reasonable (something like $130 to go from NYC to DC) and sometimes absurd ($320 for the same route). It makes no sense to charge over $300 one way since a passenger could get a cheaper round trip flight. So they’re either leaving money on the table by not selling seats, or they should be adding capacity. Instead, they’ve cut the number of Acela runs because they can’t get the new trainsets into service. Moreover, each train includes a first class car, which should be replaced with a regular car to increase overall seating. The first class tickets are routinely over $500; I imagine these seats are only filled by people using upgrade coupons since you’d have to be out of your mind to pay that much. Oh, and first class entitles you to some coffee and a meal on par with the worst coach class airplane lunch you’ve ever had. There’s also a dining car, which should be replaced with another passenger car as well (the food is horrendous anyway, unless you think nothing says “traveling in style” like a microwaved sausage biscuit in a plastic wrapper).

The Northeast Regional

These will get you between DC and NYC in something like 3 hours 30 minutes, except for some that are nearly 4 hours because they make a station stop every 30 yards.² The trainsets are Amfleet I cars, which date to the 1970s, though they’re based on a design from the 60s. The company that built them went bankrupt some time ago. They’re just horrible. At some point they gave up on replacing them in a reasonable amount of time and had the chairs reupholstered from cloth to (I’m assuming fake) leather. This made them less comfortable. They’re typically freezing in the summer when the passengers are in light clothing and roasting in in the winter when the passengers are in sweaters (also the temperature controls are allegedly on the outside of the cars so there’s no turning down the heat when it’s 15° outside but 90° in the car).

The coaches are rickety as all hell. You hear constant rattling as they lumber along. The power outlets at the seats often (like a quarter of the time) don’t work. The windows are small because way back in the 60s they wanted them to look like airplanes… of course. The doors between cars close automatically, which I guess is nice while the train is in motion; it’s annoying though when you’re in line to get off the train in a station and the door keeps trying to cut you in half.

In my anecdotal experience, these are much more subject to delays than the Acela (though the Acela can and does get delayed). I usually expect a regional NYC to DC train to be at least 10 minutes late. No one even comments on these sorts of short-ish delays; I don’t even know if Amtrak counts them. Once I had a flight to Maine cancelled due to rain. I ran to Penn Station to catch a train leaving in 15 minutes, except once I got there it was delayed and delayed until it was something like an hour and a half behind. I figured I’d miss my transfer in Boston, but lo, that train was also so delayed that I actually had to wait for it too. Status updates for a delayed train are pretty useless as well. I’ve been in a station waiting for a delayed train after the scheduled departure time while the Amtrak app lists it as on schedule.

The simplest, cheapest, and quickest way to vastly improve the experience would be to implement assigned seating. Boarding takes forever while people look for seats. Families make a mad dash trying to find chairs together. On crowded trains, when people board at a small station, they have to walk around searching for an open chair (it’s also all but impossible to tell if a chair is open or if the occupant went to the café or something; a lot of conductors don’t even use the paper slips anymore). It would also be a simple way to crack down on fare evasion. This would also be a much better way to assign people to the correct car when they’re getting out at a station where only a few doors can open.

The replacements for these horrendous trains, dubbed the Airo, are due in 2026. If you believe they will actually arrive that year I have a cryptocurrency to sell you. We’ll be lucky if they make this decade. The locomotives will be dual mode diesel-electric because we’ve basically just given up on electrifying track at a reasonable cost. These will be better than changing out the engine on trains arriving into DC from the north (electrified) and continuing south (not electrified), but most of the northeast regional is on the electrified DC to Boston track. So, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to build a bunch of custom, heavy, expensive dual-mode locomotives because of the most marginal routes (seems it would make more sense to use cheap/reliable/lighter/easier-to-maintain/already existing engines for the majority of trains going between DC and Boston, then purchase a few of the custom finicky ones for trains going to the Adirondacks or wherever).

Others

The cars for other routes are Amfleet Something or Other (I don’t feel like looking it up). They’re worse than the regional ones. I mostly end up taking these by accident, as in I book a ticket from NYC to DC and it happens to be on some stupid train going from the North Pole to Miami in 3 months and 5 days. With the northeast corridor track as crowded as it is, these should not exist. If you’re crazy enough to take a train from Massachusetts to Florida instead of flying, you should have to transfer in DC.

The boarding procedures for these are so absurd that someone should be forced into retirement over it. Penn Station is at capacity we’re told. I don’t see how it helps to have people queue in single file, go down to the platform, have a conductor shout, “where ya going?” then direct you to a car where you line up single file again while a different conductor assigns you to a seat using a notepad. The process ties up a platform for an absurd amount of time (also it’s just annoying being marshaled around like a 3^rd grader on a field trip).

I once took a train from Chicago to Cleveland since it happened to perfectly line up with when I planned to sleep… in theory anyway, in practice it was delayed. This sort of route should also not exist. It’s maddening to pay stupidly high fares on a functional, if frustrating, line (Acela from DC to NYC say) then see the money basically shoveled into a pit to maintain service like this. The trains run over freight right of way, so they are constantly delayed due to freight traffic.³ The tracks also aren’t built for speed so there’s almost no route in the middle of the country where it isn’t better (and cheaper) to fly. Running a better northeast corridor should be the main priority; once that’s done, focus on connections (maybe eventually a Philadelphia to Pittsburg train wouldn’t suck). It’s just foolish to waste money and effort on areas with low potential ridership; Amtrak needs to prioritize. When they put forward strategic plans with routes extending into Wyoming, they just seem delusional.

I guess the Downeaster is kind of an exception in some ways but an example of an inability to prioritize in others. It travels between Boston and Portland Maine in a kind of reasonable amount of time. But, it’s still a missed opportunity since it comes and goes from a separate Boston station than other Amtrak trains. The logic of an add on to the trunk of the regional corridor is that you add several routes (e.g., connecting Norfolk VA to DC gives you Norfolk to DC travelers but also Norfolk to Baltimore travelers). This doesn’t work for the Downeaster. To go from Portland to Providence RI, you’d have to take the Downeaster to Boston North Station, then the subway to a different station, then a different Amtrak train to Providence. And, best I can tell, the schedules aren’t synced up, so you’d have to wait in between.

Operations

In some ways, Amtrak is saddled with operational headaches not of their own making: old tracks, NIMBYs, and idiotic proceduralism required for building anything. In others, they just can’t stop stepping on rakes. A lot of their operational screw-ups probably relate to both of these things.

First up, the delays and cancellation at this railroad are just not acceptable. Trains get delayed when it’s hot; they get delayed when it’s cold; they get delayed when it rains; they get delayed when it snows. Sometimes they get delayed when a drawbridge is stuck open. My favorite was a delay “due to the late release of equipment from the train yard”, which is basically, “we didn’t do our homework and we’re not sorry.” Earlier this year, they tried the “extremely cold temperatures” excuse for a 15° day. That is cold, admittedly. But, is pretty normal for NYC (well, less so with climate change but still not extreme). Train schedules are more reliable than airplanes (and much easier to just take a later one than with a cancelled flight) but it’s an advantage Amtrak seems to be trying to squander. The attitude is more “Well, what’re you gonna do? Delays happen.” than “Oh, that’s awful, how do we improve this? (without assuming we can have two decades and $20 billion)”

It would also help if they could get their conductors and station staff more organized (this is a management failure). I’ve already mentioned a bunch of ridiculous boarding practices. But, boarding an Amtrak train always seems ridiculous in a different way. There’s no consistency. In Philadelphia, sometimes they let you wait on the platform, sometimes they snake a line around the terminal. In DC, sometimes they open the gate and want you to board early; other times it’s another giant single-file line that extends so far through the station no one can figure out what train it’s for. In NY Penn Station they’ll start calling out to get you to line up before putting the track announcement on the status board. Why? Why is it a secret for a little while?! Ticket agents also never have any useful information. When they have a cascade of delays and you’re trying to rebook, no one can give any answer to “which train is leaving first?” or “which train will get me there soonest?”

As far as customer service goes, mostly it’s fine. For the most part I have sympathy for conductors having to deal with idiot (or out-and-out rude) passengers. But, there does seem to be a fair amount of latitude for how crazy you can be as a conductor. One guy on morning Acela trains used to go around yelling at people for crossing their legs. He once got really annoyed and started huffing, “you can’t cross your legs on Delta, why should you be able to here?!” In fact, you can because a train is not an airplane. A fair number of the conductors got really frustrated when Acela moved to assigned seating (they were wrong; the passengers who couldn’t match up the number on their tickets with the one on the seat were morons). Also, when someone boards the train with a ticket for a different train or a different day, why can’t the conductors change the reservation for them? I’ve observed this multiple times. Conductors who try to be helpful have to call the same customer support number the rest of us do. Why is there no mechanism for them to issue a revised ticket themselves? Or at least why don’t they get their own support line?

I don’t entirely understand how Amtrak ticket pricing works. It’s usually much cheaper if you buy in advance. I think the prices just go up as you get closer to the departure date, especially for Acela. Maybe there’s some reason for it or maybe they’re just blindly doing what airlines do again. It seems that it fritters away a potential competitive advantage: It should be easy to hop on a regional train with minimal planning, so you don’t need to set up your weekend trip five months ahead of time. Sometimes I’ve used points (which I accumulate because I take so many trains) to get an Acela ticket that’s priced at $300+ because it’s convenient. Then when I’m on the train it’s half empty, which, again, just seems like they’re leaving money on the table by not selling seats.

I also get the impression people at the company don’t give much thought to planning for when things go wrong. I was once on a regional train someone jumped in front of. That was sad and I feel really bad for whoever it was, full stop.⁴ I just felt an abrupt deceleration and smelled brake dust. Then, we sat there for three hours. The only announcement was about a “police investigation”. I only learned what it was because SEPTA listed a reason for delays online. As a railroad, you’re supposed to have a plan for tragedies like that ahead of time. You don’t just leave a disabled train in the middle of the track for three hours on the busiest stretch of railroad in the country. Another time, the same thing happened outside of DC. I was on a different Acela train at the time, which just stopped in Maryland with no word on when or if it would move. The conductors were basically like, “good luck”. I had to take a cab. The point here is not that I was inconvenienced. The point is that Amtrak didn’t seem to have more than an ad hoc plan for getting the trains running again and hadn’t even bothered to write up a standard announcement for such events. I imagine you want to handle such situations with a measure of respect and decorum; a lack of preparedness communicates the opposite.

Infrastructure

Amtrak isn’t entirely responsible for the fact we spend way too much on substandard infrastructure, and they’re not necessarily the worst. The MTA’s favorite pastime is lighting money on fire after all. However, they certainly do a lot of silly things. It gives the impression that they have this idea that there are an overwhelming number of projects and all of them need money. So they just throw as much money as they can at whatever they can. This leads to a lot of substandard results.

They spend way too much to modernize catenary wires. The catenaries for the northeast corridor are very old and do need replacing. I’ll just note that their own inspector general found gross mismanagement here, which seems like a management problem to me.

For other projects it seems like they just don’t think ahead. The stuck open drawbridge I alluded to earlier is actually a swingbridge that’s being replaced. I’ve seen them building the new one as I go by. However, another long term goal is to get four tracks instead of two between NY Penn Station and Newark NJ. I don’t understand why they’re only building a two track bridge; they’re undertaking this huge project without increasing capacity while they’re at it. The idea is to get more funding later for the additional tracks, but later you’ll have to do more environmental review, have work crews set up again only to repeat the same tasks, etc. Essentially, they give up any economies of scale they may have been able to achieve and make the overall project cost as much as possible.

A series of bridges in Connecticut are being replaced for astronomical sums that it seems no one can explain.

… for a few examples.

I don’t know what the solution is here, maybe better in-house engineering expertise. But, they don’t even seem to recognize they have a problem. They should care about this more. They should explain why these projects cost so much and why they make the decisions they do. If it’s not their fault, at least explaining it would let policy makers address the real problems. As it is, it just comes off as indifference.

I’m going to stop now. I’m tired.

P.S., I forgot to even mention the website and app. Why can’t these at least work well? Both are slow (the most recent version of the app takes forever to load a ticket, exactly what you want when a conductor is hovering over you). The website should immediately prioritize bookings on the northeast corridor (since we account for most of their customers) instead of all the banner ads for the California Zephyr or whatever. And why, when you book tickets for multiple people, does Amtrak only issue one ticket instead of one for each person? In trains without assigned seating this is doubly annoying because parties get split up and the conductor has to try and figure out who’s sitting where and which person has a groups’ ticket.

1. One hype point for the new Acela trains is that they have USB ports. I’m willing to bet that that they’ll be USB-a not USB-c and, thus, obsolete when they debut.

2. The “stopping every 30 yards” quip is from Mark Twain. I couldn’t think of anything even 1/10th as good so I stole his.

3. The US has an enviable freight rail network. There’s a good case to be made that making freight railroads handle low volume passenger trains on their routes just isn’t worth the cost in terms of efficiency. It would be better for all involved to just levy some tax then let Amtrak use the money to improve rail service in places where it actually makes sense.

4. I do not mean to make light of this. The rest of this post in tongue-in-cheek but not this paragraph.