Amtrak Weather Forecasting Operations

[Thunder Road]

Hi everybody!

(Hi Doctor Nick!)

I'm a meteorology major, but also a railfan, and so I was wondering...does Amtrak have its own weather forecast operations? Or does it rely on the National Weather Service, since the NWS is also government-run? Or does Amtrak receive weather briefings from whichever freight line it's on (like, from BNSF while a particular train is on BNSF track, or CSX for CSX track, etc...)?

I'm curious because that would be a neat job, if it exists, combining weather with railfanning.

 

[PRR 60]

I have no idea what Amtrak does, but typically industries that have weather-affected operations use private weather services to provide forecasts that are specific to the work. In my old line of work (electric power), we had a forecasting service that would look at the tree and wire impact of coming storms so we could schedule in-house and contractor crews for restoration. They would provide a coded forecast for each county, with the codes related to impact and restoration effort. The power dispatch folks would use a service that would correlate the forecast with expected power demand to allow the scheduling of generation buys and transmission flow. These specialized types of forecasts are not something you can get from the NWS or The Weather Channel.

My bet is that Amtrak does something similar: that they have a forecasting service that they use for the NEC operations. I also suspect the the freight railroads do the same, and that Amtrak relies on those forecasts for their needs off the NEC. In the olden days, in-house forecasting was pretty common, particularly with airlines. Today, like so many other tasks, these types of services are usually outsourced to contractors.

 

[Trogdor]

It's a combination of using services like the NWS, and getting info from host railroads. No internal meterology department.