It's different at each station.
This is one thing that really bothers me about Amtrak. It's oftentimes wildly different from one station to another, usually without any sort of clear signage or directions about what to do.Some stations you can just walk down to the track. Some you have to line up and be escorted. Some you can walk yourself, but must show the right document first to prove that you have a right to be there. I totally understand that the layout of some stations dictates doing things a certain way, and the operational realities of a station like Chicago are of course completely different from an unstaffed station in the middle of nowhere. But, a little more standardization wouldn't hurt, and in the absence of that, would a few clearly worded signs in some key places kill anyone? On top of all that is the sense that the local station staff is just making up their own rules and procedures at any given time. All together, it just makes things really intimidating for a novice rider.
Example: I left out of LA Union Station on Sunday night. I had previously only arrived at that station, never departed, so I didn't know how they handle departures. For the Sunset Limited, there's a booth set up (almost right in the middle of the walkway to the waiting area) saying coach Sunset Limited/Texas Eagle passengers check in here. Well, I didn't know what that meant. I've got an e-ticket, so is this just something leftover for paper ticket holders, or are they actually punching or scanning tickets here? Is this where people are printing tickets or picking them up if they don't already have them? So, I walked up and asked an Amtrak agent standing nearby what the line was for and whether I needed to be in it. She practically barked back that "The line's to get your boarding pass. Are you in coach?" I nod. "Then you better be in this line."
Well, that was certainly less than pleasant. I still wasn't clear what the line was for, but I definitely wasn't going to ask her again. I had no idea what she meant by "boarding pass". I have an e-ticket. They scan it on board. Why do I need a boarding pass? I have little kids, and at this point it's after 9 pm and they should really be sitting down and starting to wind down, but I didn't want to risk going up to the booth without them and being told I couldn't get my "boarding pass" because my whole party wasn't there. I wasn't about to ask the first lady for clarification, so I just made them wait in line with me for twenty minutes, at a great inconvenience to the other passengers in line who had to put up with their fighting and whining and crying after a long day. When I finally got to the booth, I was told they were giving out seat assignments. Oh! That makes much more sense! I've never been on a train starting at it's point of origin. Of course on a full train that originates in this station, it makes perfect sense that you'd want your seating all squared away before departing! So, what the lady at the booth was giving out was seat checks with a seat and car number on them, not anything like a boarding pass since I didn't need to show them to anyone again, just put them above my seat. And no, my whole party didn't need to be there. (Now the lady did make a big deal about how lucky we were that she had set aside a group of 4 together just in case she might need them, and we were so lucky that she still had them so we could sit together. Never mind that Amtrak knows they already sold tickets to a party of four, and e-ticketing lets them know immediately that we're still confirmed on that train and, yes, we had made our connecting train into LAX).
The whole thing seemed like a bit of a circus to me, and I would chalk it up to me just being intolerant of disorganization, except that I lost count of the number of people wandering around and asking other people in line what they were supposed to do. "Is this the line for the train to Tucson?", "Do I need to be in this line if I'm trying to go to Texas?", "What's this line for?", "I already have a ticket, do I need to get in this line?", "Is this the line to board the train? I thought it wasn't here yet", and so on. We tried our best to help people in a nicer fashion than the Amtrak line grouch, but since we didn't really know what we were doing their ourselves, we just encouraged people to get in line and find out.
So, obviously there's a lot of confusion about the process. We all know that there are some people for whom no amount of signs will help, and dumb questions will still happen. However, most people can be self-directing with the right amount of information put in the right place. And, I know the first lady we talked to was grouchy because we were probably the 100th party that asked her the same dumb question, but doesn't that tell you something? If everybody has the same question, doesn't that seem that the answer must not be very clear? And unless that can be fixed, those agents should be less rude and have some compassion for those who are confused by their employer's inability to figure it out.
Anyway, sorry for my rant, but the question just triggered some little PTSD that I must still have from the whole experience.
Point being, if we can't get people to respect their lives (or of others) and follow signs like the above, how are we going to expect them to stay out of the sleeper cars?
