This can't wait for the Trip Report.
Is there such a thing as an "Amtrak Special Agent?"
This morning (11-9-08) I was boarding Surfliner 775 at SAN when I was accosted at the car door by a seedy little guy with a beard and vaguely reptilian features. He flashed a Passport (why?), then a funny-looking document that indicated he was Amtrak Special Agent Pat. Thinking he was a loony, I said "Cool! My name's Patrick too," and turned to board. He stopped me, and said he had some questions. He was serious. "Oh GREAT," I thought, expecting a hassle about line jumping. I was ready to point out that although I was among the first to board, and not from the line, I had in fact been waiting at the station longer than anybody in the line. As usual, I had been hanging out for pictures of any action (nothing except light rail and station shots until 566 - my 775 - arrived 12 minutes late).
You can imagine the choice reply I muttered under my breath as I finally climbed the stairs, and despite the worst efforts of Amtrak Special Agent Pat, managed to find a window seat in the coach/cafe car.
In retrospect it was interesting, in these tough economic times, to encounter somebody who DESERVES to be unemployed.
To whom do I complain? Don't care if it does any good, I wanna tell somebody at Amtrak how reprehensible this sort of harassment is, especially to someone who has been - and remains, despite this kind of treatment at the hands of idiot hirelings - an avid supporter and customer of Amtrak since its inception.
Patrick;
I am sincerely sorry this happened to you. Let me explain something about RR'ing that you may or may not know. When there is a "budget crunch" the first two departments that our Class 1 hit was maintenance of way and the "special" agents. My first encounter with one was when I was spotting a carload of beer in downtown New Orleans. I heard a rustling in the weeds and threw some ballast to see if it was a wharf rat. Well up stands our special agent in Viet Cong black pajamas packing a sawed off shotgun~ I thought I was back in Nam! He told me he was staking out the beer car and not to let my switch lantern go out or he wouldn't hesitate to blow me away. I went and cut off the engine and went back to the yard office. The yardmaster's response to my howling? "Oh, he's a nut that threw off of the New Orleans force and we got stuck with him." The job pays next to nothing for a law enforcemnt officer and they literally have hundreds of miles to cover. I've seen them jump onto moving trains to drag hobos off. That same beer car goof ball had a hobo handcuffed to a telegraph pole in the yard one night. The mosquitoes were eating the poor guy up. It took four hours for the local parish cops to come pick him up for "trespassing." I've never been able to hold much of an intelligent conversation with many of them except the haz-mat special agents who have some schooling behind them.
I'm not condoning this agent's actions~ just giving you a background as to yes, they do exist, and yes, most of them qualify for a Looney Tunes cartoon.
let me add that the NS special agents have a well deserved reputation of being particularly nasty, stay off NS property, they have taken to arresting fishermen that cross a lightly used branch line to access a public riverfront when there is no road or underpass for example.
and they do arrest for tresspass and they usually make it stick, heard of a fisherman with a $200 fish, the cost of the fine.
was recently in SAN for the big "APTA convention and everyone in all the parts of the transit system were bending over backwards, I was allowed into the shop all sorts of things that would never happen, I commented to an operator if it was always like this, when she stopped laughing she said they had made it clear that the system was not going to have any incidents during the convention, that pretty much anything short of a hijacking was going to be overlooked.
the guy must need to get his quota back up to look good
Bob