Distributing Delay Information

[John Bobinyec]

There are naturally a lot of complaints about passengers not being informed about what's going on when delays happen. I was just thinking of a system where information could be distributed to everyone.

Amtrak's central offices would get the information (and probably already do). Then someone would post it in detail on their website and mobile app. It would also be sent to the train crew's ticket scanning phones.

Amtrak could get it to work. They just need to make it happen.

jb

 

[Triley]

Problem is, if the delay is caused by/on a freight railroad, we don't even know when a problem is going to be corrected. So I don't see how well something like this would truly work. Plus trains may make up time en-route, or face many other issues such as missing their slot and having to follow a freight train or local commuter train, causing further delays once already delayed. Great idea in theory, but i think it would be much more difficult than you would think. At least with making it be accurate and detailed, anyway.

 

[Anderson]

I think the best you could do is program in the maximum amount of padding that exists (accounting for engineers who know how to make up time and so forth) and alert when a train falls more than X behind that for a given station (i.e. if the Meteor falls 5 hours behind at Charleston, I don't think it has any chance of being on time at Richmond).

 

[John Bobinyec]

Doesn't Amtrak have a 24/7 office in Wilmington? What's it called - CNOC? Anyway, I thought they monitor all trains across the country, which are off - NEC. They have to know what is going on with a particular train in order to get a new crew if one is needed, and other things. So - what do they do there, and what information do they have? Someone there has to be making the decision about when to post the dreaded "Service Disruption" on the website. If they know enough to do that, then they must have more information which could be presented to the public.

jb

 

[Guest]

Doesn't Amtrak have a 24/7 office in Wilmington? What's it called - CNOC? Anyway, I thought they monitor all trains across the country, which are off - NEC. They have to know what is going on with a particular train in order to get a new crew if one is needed, and other things. So - what do they do there, and what information do they have? Someone there has to be making the decision about when to post the dreaded "Service Disruption" on the website. If they know enough to do that, then they must have more information which could be presented to the public.

jb

Amtrak has a twitter account to send info out about disruptions. But usually they only tweet major service disruptions.

The ticket scanning phones do get info messaged when delays happen. Theoretically. However a lot of the devices don't get the messages as CNOC can't seem to put many of the crew phone numbers into their system. Also the messages themselves tend to be half assed.