New Viewliner II Baggage / Dorm Cars

I have yet to see how many rooms are in the new baggage/dorm cars. How many do they sleep?

I would guess 6-8. Six is about the max I've seen for decent beds in a train car compartment, if you're really squeezing them in, you could get 8. Mind you the rooms in the Bag/Dorm are for staff, not passengers , so they can pile in a few more in a dorm then in a normal room.

That all being said, this is presuming that the Dorm is separate rooms (makes sense, M-F, etc) if it's one (or two) big rooms, then the number would go up. They could also just use standard roomettes, essentially we don't know. All we can do is make guesses. I think I can be safe in saying that it'll be 4 or more.

RailPlan, the folks making the interiors, don't show anything about the dorms on their website: http://www.railplan.com/caf---amtrak-viewliner-ii.html

peter

Larry Kidd said:

I have yet to see how many rooms are in the new baggage/dorm cars. How many do they sleep?

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IIRC, the bag-dorm cars will have 9 roomettes. (Been a while since the bag-dorm configuration was last discussed). There will only be 10 bag-dorm cars in the fleet, so it is likely that bag-dorms will be used only on the Cardinal and LSL. On the LSL, the on-board staff will occupy all the available roomettes. The Cardinal has a smaller OBS, so the Cardinal is likely to make a couple of the bag-dorm roomettes available for revenue sale.

So the baggage/dorms should sleep 18?

Larry Kidd said:

So the baggage/dorms should sleep 18?

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Nope, all OBS receive their own room per Union contract, no sharing!

Do they really need 9 rooms? The SCA each have their own room in the car itself, Are the Coach attendants suppose to remain in the coaches for safety, etc.? So basically it is the Food Service staff that needs the rooms?

Nope, every OBS Crew member has their own room and are guaranteed a certain amount of sleep each night.

During the SCAs and TAs downtime, the Conductors monitor the Train. ( the Conductors Main Responsibility is the Safety of the people aboard and the Safe Operation of the Train. )

Are these the standard Viewliner II roomettes? Could they sleep two, even if current union rules don't allow two.

Are there Viewliner II toilet rooms? A Viewliner I/II shower?

Yes to all of your questions.

Even without union rules, room sharing is impractical with mixed gender crews.

So, they are basically just Viewliner II sleeper cars, with the bedrooms (A,B,H) replaced with open baggage space?

Cho Cho Charlie said:

So, they are basically just Viewliner II sleeper cars, with the bedrooms (A,B,H) replaced with open baggage space?

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Along with two roomettes...

Do they have the coffee stand at one end? I've travelled in Trans/Dorm on SL trains, but VL Bag dorm is new so I'm curious. Wonder if they'll put a bike rack in the smaller baggage space.

Ryan said:

Yes to all of your questions.

Even without union rules, room sharing is impractical with mixed gender crews.

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Or even with a same gender crew depending on ones sexual orientation perhaps, which seems to be the major determining factor regarding room sharing?

Absolutely.