transit54
Conductor
There's a document from September of 2009 on Amtrak's website that outlines some of their IT initiatives, among them eTicketing. One of the charts indicates that eTicketing was planned for roll out later this year, once conductor handheld devices were deployed.
Obviously some progress has been made on the project since the Auto Train recently received eTicketing. While that indicates that the necessary back end modifications have been made to ARROW, the much more difficult aspect of eTicketing is deploying the handheld devices for conductors (at least from my perspective).
Has anyone heard any further updates on the eTicketing program? Any possible dates for testing and/or deployment? Is this something that Amtrak isn't going to roll out until AmtrakConnect (their WiFi) is fully rolled out (as it would make some sense to have the devices communicate through the train-based wireless network)? Any other details? Obviously, there are a lot of challenges here.
As someone who works in IT and transportation and lives in a state completely devoid of any ticketing facilities, this is an area of great interest for me.
Obviously some progress has been made on the project since the Auto Train recently received eTicketing. While that indicates that the necessary back end modifications have been made to ARROW, the much more difficult aspect of eTicketing is deploying the handheld devices for conductors (at least from my perspective).
Has anyone heard any further updates on the eTicketing program? Any possible dates for testing and/or deployment? Is this something that Amtrak isn't going to roll out until AmtrakConnect (their WiFi) is fully rolled out (as it would make some sense to have the devices communicate through the train-based wireless network)? Any other details? Obviously, there are a lot of challenges here.
As someone who works in IT and transportation and lives in a state completely devoid of any ticketing facilities, this is an area of great interest for me.