There are many signs though that current management is actually trying to think outside the box and to do creative things within Amtrak. Great strides have been made of late in improving how quickly the cafe cars open after leaving the originating station, and towards staying open longer as the train approaches the terminating station.
Is that important to a lot of people??? More important than having clean, functioning restrooms? Not trying to be sarcastic but if 'great strides' have been made in cafe access times, why haven't any 'great strides been made in the restroom maintenance arena? That's a rhetorical question; I already know your position on that.
I honestly don't know just how many complaints Amtrak has received about late opening cafes, or for that matter dirty bathrooms I'm not privy to that info, although I'm sure that the number was high for both. It’s gone way down now for the cafe. I do know that over the years I've seen many complaints about a train leaving DC and the cafe not opening till Baltimore or later, and then shutting down at Trenton for inventory purposes and not reopening till the train was approaching Stamford.
And from a revenue point of view, one can't sell things if the cafe isn't open. So this was at least a reasonably serious problem, and one that didn't require hiring a whole new staff or increasing expenses. It just required better management, better training, better controls on inventory, and probably replacing a few bad apples.
I'm not suggesting that this is more important than clean restrooms, just that this was something serious that could be fixed far more easily. I also have no idea what priority Amtrak management has assigned to any of the many problems that they have that need fixing.
Finally, this is not my position. You came and spoke about a problem, I gave you an answer based upon what I see and read about Amtrak. It doesn’t mean that I agree or disagree with Amtrak or you. I understand that this is a very important issue to you and I respect that, but that doesn’t mean that Amtrak has a dozen other issues/problems that it considers to be a far higher priority than this one. Things like 60 year old dining cars that they can get parts for anymore, crew dorms that they can’t get parts for, baggage cars that are falling apart, the 30+ year old coaches that run on the corridor and will soon need replacement.
All of this has to be factored into the equation by Amtrak management. You are only focusing on the bathroom issue. And again I’m not saying that it’s not an important issue. It is! But if it’s a choice between having the wheels fall of a car that has clean bathrooms vs. dirty and keeping the wheels on, I know where I’d go. Someone at Amtrak has to decide on the priorities of things and we don’t know the whole big picture. We are both sitting here looking in the window.
I hope for your sake, my sake, and every other Amtrak passenger that Amtrak can eventually target this issue and the sooner the better. But not if it means that the wheels are going to fall off the train.
New things are being tried within the dining car area, even though they are things that I don't think are totally correct.
Read your comments in that regard on your 2006 trip log. What would you recommend they do instead of what they tried? You appear to be a veteran rail traveler. Last time I ate on Amtrak was once in 1991 on the Silver Star to Winter Haven FL. Previous to that, the last overnight train ride I was on was the B&O National Limited from Baltimore (Camden Sta) to St. Louis in 1960, then on the B&O Capital Limited from Chicago back to Baltimore on the return. (Took the Wabash Bluebird from St L to Chi).
Personally if Amtrak had the right equipment or the money to get it, I would recommend that they do what they did with the Empire Builder. Since that train's make over, its ridership and revenue has gone way up and stayed up.
Since they don't have the equipment for that, I think that I would have tried a more minimized approach to what they did do. I would have gone with the new meals, but I wouldn't have cut the staffing or the amenities. As I showed in a topic pinned at the top of the Amtrak forum, by cutting the staff Amtrak more than cut in half the number of passengers that can be served in the dining car. That means that on a full train, they now rake in less than half the revenue that they used to pull in. The correct answer would have been to properly monitor staffing, such that trains that are full, have a full compliment of workers in the dining car. Trains that are running half full or less should have a reduced staff.
Instead we have what I saw last summer on the Zephyr, where the only way that the dining car could accommodate providing meals for all sleeping car passengers (and their meals are included, they have to be offered a meal), was to seat people for dinner at 9:45 PM. They didn't start eating until it was past 10 PM. Coach passengers never got into the dining car at all. And this was a sold out train!
I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't other alternatives that could have been tried too, but I would need to get much deeper into how things are run in order to see if there are other things that could be done. Instead I'm just a passenger looking in from the outside and observing things.
... Yes, you're right they probably could boost ridership if things were better on board. Only problem, is that Amtrak doesn't have the capacity to handle a seriously boosted ridership. Things are stretched pretty thin right now in many places.
What, specifically, is currently limiting increased ridership? Station capacity? Lack of functioning equipment? Commercial RR's not granting enough schedule time over their trackage? Inability to keep the rest rooms clean?
Just kidding, that last one.
Lack of equipment is the primary problem. Amtrak just barely has enough equipment right now to meet peak demand periods, like the summer months and the holidays. In fact during the Thanksgiving holiday, they don't have enough equipment to meet the demand. So they actually borrow commuter trains from New Jersey Transit and MARC and run those trains as extras that have no cafe at all and seats that aren't nearly as comfortable as a regular Amtrak train. And even those Extras usually sell out or come close.
Even if they get past that problem, then there is the issue of the commercial RR's not granting access for additional trains in many areas. Some do allow it, like BNSF in the Northwest. But the simple reality is that ridership would probably permit Amtrak to run most long distance routes with two trains per day on each route, staggered by some 10 to 12 hours apart.
And yes, I'm quite sure that dirty restrooms are holding back the numbers too. I have no doubt of that. Yours is not the first complaint that I've seen on this topic. There have been many complaints over the years, mainly by coach passengers as those cars get the most traffic and other than long distance trains, don't have an attendant.