Article in today's Boston Globe about a trip on the
Ocean. Generally very positive. I think there is a paywall if you are not a Globe subscriber, but there are a limited number of free articles for non-subs.
They bemoan the absence of a dome observation car. I didn't comment because I wasn't positive of the reason, but I think they removed the loop in Halifax, so they can't physically turn the train around. I'm pretty sure I read that here. This means they just separate the engines in Halifax, run them past the train on a parallel track and re-couple them to the other end. The former observation car had a curved back and was designed to run at the end of the train, not the beginning, so they just removed it completely. The Canadian runs with multiple observation cars (according to videos people have posted here), and the ones in the middle of the train would work perfectly well in this situation. Do they not have enough spares so they could replace the observation car on the Ocean with one of these? Or is it an Amtrak-style "the spread-sheet (based on spurious assumptions like passengers don't really care about the quality of the service) says the ridership will put up with anything" penny-wise management decisions. Why did they decide to eliminate the turning loop in the first place?
The article talks a lot about the food. It would fit right in here at Amtrak Unlimited, where all Comment Threads ultimately settle down to discussing the food! (When I was searching for this thread, I found two that were related to the Via Ocean, one - this one - for general Ocean discussion and one specifically devoted to Ocean menus. All the other posts on this, the second page of this comment thread, discuss menus. Oh, well, I can't deny food is important!)
