The Huey Long bridge is an easy one. I like to take pictures from the lower level of the lounge car at the table just forward of the bathroom. You can always end of train because all the cars are open. The Crescent is a different story. They have been shutting down the last two cars between Atlanta and New Orleans since the mail contract was lost (they would cut the two coaches off and tacked them back on at night to #20 with the loaded mail cars.) If you are a good diplomat you may be able to coach the conductor into letting you get to the rear of the train. I have seen a couple of conductors get pretty nasty to some pax about wanting to go to the rear "just to take pix."
Well as of late, just before the recent consist change, instead of closing the end coaches on the Crescent they have been seating all ATL-NOL in the rear of the train. ATL-NOL passengers are now seated as close to the last coach as possible, with the NOL passengers in the last coach. I'm not particularly sure of how things are handled for seating south of ATL to result in everyone ending up in the end and coaches progressively emptying from front of the train to the back as the train gets closer to NOL. I presume at NYP they look at the number of passengers exiting at each stop and determine how many seats are needed to accommodate the passengers for each station and break up the 26 discharge stations between the 4 coaches, so there are roughly 6 stops per car. Of course as seats turn over throughout the trip this system gets skewed to a point. One reason I decided this was the seating plan was when i noticed ,over the course of a few trips, the conductor started loading from the first coach in the NE and by NOL he/she had migrated from that first coach to the last coach over the course of a trip. I assume this was done to be a courtesy for coach passengers from the NE who would like to sleep with as little disturbance as possible. Once the train reached Lake Ponchartrain, the diner, the cafe, and the first 3 coaches were completely empty. The crews from the cafe, diner, and the attendants from the empty coaches had started gathering trash in the empty cars starting with the diner and working toward the end putting all the trash in the kitchen to put out at the large door in the side of the diner. When they got to the coaches they also collected the headrest covers and pillows, reset the seats, tray tables, calf rests, and foot rests. The reason I could see all of this was that they had gone through the entire train opening the doors between the cars and flipping the switch to keep them open. I'm not sure if that's any kind of violation, but it gave a very interesting perspective for the passengers in the NOL coach to be able to see down the inside of the train through 5 cars. Now I'm not sure if the clean-up process I saw happens on every trip into NOL or just when there is a conductor or OBS chief who wants to give the clean-up crew a head start. I'm not particularly sure when a OBS staff's job ends and the turn-around staff's starts so I'm not sure who's normally responsible for this.
Also I wanted to note that the train arrived a full 45minutes early into NOL. That also brings me to ask, what do the crews do when a train arrives significantly early? Do they go home or to their overnight accomodations, or do they stick around and help turn the train, or does it just make up for the late-arrivals?
I know I've gone off-topic with this post, but this seems to happen a lot here. I guess this topic really has more to do with what Amtrak's policies are and whether they are followed or not, so i guess in a way all this fits.
Writing this has given me the frame of mind to finally write a trip report for my 2 most recent train adventures into NOL, so look for those soon. And I once again apologize for this long-winded slightly off-topic post.
