When the upgrades were originally made to the Empire Builder and the Coast Starlight they drew passengers. You don't build a system by cutting, cutting, cutting. Plus i still contend that turning away large amounts of sleeper passengers by not running enough sleepers is part of the reason that long distance numbers are not good. I know its not exactly Amtrak's fault but much of their thinking tends to prevent passenger increases rather than encouraging them.
Amtrak management has certainly had a bad and customer-hostile attitude, particularly regarding the most basic things like providing information. You know, people actually expect reliable, accurate information nowadays. Maybe this is the "information society". Anyway, it should cost Amtrak $0.00 to fix the information problems, but it seems that some of the time, management can't be bothered to get up off their arses and do it. There is no reason whatsoever why they should not know what's in the food in the dining cars, but they act like it's impossible to find out. Aramark knows -- they could try asking Aramark.
Amtrak is going to have to face the fact that gas prices will remain low pretty much permanently; gasoline cars are going to be replaced with electric cars, which are even cheaper to operate. Trains must compete on service quality.
This ought to be *really really easy*, since a train is *inherently* a lot more pleasant than driving yourself in a cramped car on bad roads through heavy congested traffic. Every area with congested traffic *should* see trains remain popular; in New Jersey, Amtrak is probably still more attractive than driving and people are just driving to save money. That's a situation which will not cause permanent losses in ridership. In areas with "open road" like Iowa, driving might really get cheap and convenient enough to eat into ridership a lot, however, and that's probably just a structural fact.
Any train is also much more pleasant than the current TSA-induced "DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SEAT" nightmare of the skies. And Amtrak can be quite expensive and still be cheaper than a plane flight from a *small town*, since the airlines are trying to abandon small towns and are jacking the prices way up.
While Amtrak certainly gets service quality right some of the time, however, Amtrak is somehow screwing service quality up pretty regularly.
Part of this is illegal sabotage by the freight railroads; nobody likes to arrive late, and the illegal dispatching is causing late arrivals. (I just witnessed *yet another example* on CSX of a freight being run ahead of Amtrak rather than held for Amtrak. CP is successfully running Amtrak on time consistently as of last month. Maybe the other railroads should try doing the same instead of breaking the law.)
But a large part of it is Amtrak's infamous service inconsistency. Service inconsistency is fine when the baseline is good and employees occasionally do something extra for you, but that's not what we're talking about here.
