New Equipment

[Joel N. Weber II]

And the extra "comfort" for the top bunk passenger in a Viewliner because of the higher ceiling and the extra band of windows up there? What would it take to add both of these, into a modified Superliner design?
The convenience of the Viewliner's luggage storage cubby? What would it take to add an in-compartment storage area for luggage into a modified Superliner roomette?

Extra rows of windows on Superliner III sleepers might be doable, although it needs to be done in a way that keeps the design of the car adequately structurally sound.

The extra vertical space for the upper bunk and the cubby is a bit more challenging; you'd probably have to make a car that's taller than a standard Superliner, and then there's the question of whether most / all of Amtrak's routes have adequate clearance, and whether you can keep the center of gravity low enough to keep the car safe enough. Double stack container trains are a few feet higher than a Superliner (I think it's 20.5 feet vs roughly 17 feet), so depending on what fraction of the Superliner routes are double stack compatible, maybe there's room to make the next generation cars taller, but double stack freight does occasionally run into issues with high winds knocking things over.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Super Steel Schenectady!

God forbid.

After riding in both, I prefer the Superliner by far. The toilets in room are a mixed bag. And storage space for luggage, the Superliner has on the bottom floor.

 

[printman2000]

It was a prototype built by Amtrak. When Amtrak cut back the original Viewliner order from 100 to 50 sleepers, any chance of diners went right out the window. And that was probably a good thing, as the prototype was a disaster. The crews hated that car as things were not well laid out at all. And the repairs on it weren't very easy to perform either. The car, last I knew, is still on Amtrak property but it hasn't been used in years.

I bet the crews stuck with the diner-lite on the LSL would love to have it!

 

[Walt]

And storage space for luggage, the Superliner has on the bottom floor.

The roomettes on the bottom floor have in-room luggage storage?

 

[printman2000]

And storage space for luggage, the Superliner has on the bottom floor.

The roomettes on the bottom floor have in-room luggage storage?

No, he is talking about the luggage racks on the bottom floor of the Superliners. They are in the hallway, not in rooms.

 

[wayman]

It was a prototype built by Amtrak. When Amtrak cut back the original Viewliner order from 100 to 50 sleepers, any chance of diners went right out the window. And that was probably a good thing, as the prototype was a disaster. The crews hated that car as things were not well laid out at all. And the repairs on it weren't very easy to perform either. The car, last I knew, is still on Amtrak property but it hasn't been used in years.

I bet the crews stuck with the diner-lite on the LSL would love to have it!

Given that the car has non-functional air conditioning (as I gather from Wikipedia, and not fixable without custom parts nobody has the money for), I sort of doubt it.

 

[printman2000]

It was a prototype built by Amtrak. When Amtrak cut back the original Viewliner order from 100 to 50 sleepers, any chance of diners went right out the window. And that was probably a good thing, as the prototype was a disaster. The crews hated that car as things were not well laid out at all. And the repairs on it weren't very easy to perform either. The car, last I knew, is still on Amtrak property but it hasn't been used in years.

I bet the crews stuck with the diner-lite on the LSL would love to have it!

Given that the car has non-functional air conditioning (as I gather from Wikipedia, and not fixable without custom parts nobody has the money for), I sort of doubt it.

I meant they would take a badly laid out car over the diner-lite. That is assuming the car actually worked.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Given that the car has non-functional air conditioning (as I gather from Wikipedia, and not fixable without custom parts nobody has the money for), I sort of doubt it.

Where do you get that from? I can't find anything to that effect in the main Viewliner article.

There is mention of air conditioning problems on the Turboliner trainsets, but those are completely different.

 

[wayman]

Given that the car has non-functional air conditioning (as I gather from Wikipedia, and not fixable without custom parts nobody has the money for), I sort of doubt it.

Where do you get that from? I can't find anything to that effect in the main Viewliner article.

There is mention of air conditioning problems on the Turboliner trainsets, but those are completely different.

Sorry, I misremembered my source. It was this TrainWeb article.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Given that the car has non-functional air conditioning (as I gather from Wikipedia, and not fixable without custom parts nobody has the money for), I sort of doubt it.

My reading of the article was that it ought to be possible to convert it to a non-custom style of air conditioning given money.

I wonder what it would really cost to rip out all of the non-standard parts in the two prototype sleepers and replace them with the style of parts used in the 50 production cars, and how long it would take to recover the costs of doing that if the two cars were used for the Twilight Shoreliner. Or is there something about the shapes of the bodies that is different enough that that would be impossible?

Before complaining too much about the cost of doing the rennovations, keep in mind that if 12 roomettes sold for $200 a night and 3 bedrooms for $400 a night, that's $3600 per night per sleeper car in revenue, or over a million dollars a year in revenue. Yes, there are some costs for the sleeper attendant, the cleaning crew, and the electricity (both to run the loads inside the car, and to carry it along the BOS-WAS route) and some diesel fuel if it goes all the way to NPN. But it's a little hard for me to imagine that they wouldn't be able to more than recover the costs over the course of five years or so if that much revenue is available. And it's hard for me to imagine that they'd have trouble finding people willing to pay those prices; two people traveling together would find the cost of a roomette pretty competitive with a last minute booking for Acela Business Class at the prices I'm suggesting here, which may mean those roomettes would sell for a lot more.

Or if compartments can be sold at those prices on 50 more sleepers on various routes, maybe Amtrak is being penny wise and pound foolish in not getting another 50 production Viewliner Sleepers built. But as you build more cars, the revenue you add for each car goes down, because you end up lowering sleeper fares to make them affordable to more passengers to fill the compartments.

 

[wayman]

But as you build more cars, the revenue you add for each car goes down, because you end up lowering sleeper fares to make them affordable to more passengers to fill the compartments.

Not necessarily.... Because Amtrak uses bucket pricing based solely on the number of remaining available accommodations, we can't accurately assess the additional demand. And even if it's true that while you can reliable fill all the high-buckets in a single Viewliner, you wind up with a few empty high-bucket roomettes on Viewliner, Amtrak could alter the bucket structure to try to take this into account and maintain revenue-per-car. Maybe you can fill 2 roomettes at $100, 4 at $200, 4 at $300, and 2 at $400 reliably ($3000/Viewliner), but you find you only fill 4/$100, 8/$200, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (with 2 empty high-bucket roomettes) running two Viewliners ($2600/Viewliner). If you instead change the bucket prices and distribution around, you might find that you can reliably get 6/$150, 8/$250, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (which brings you back to $3050/Viewliner--$100 extra revenue to put towards the increased fuel costs of running with the extra weight). It would require a lot of math and experimentation, but I imagine it's doable.

And I imagine, if Amtrak could get the budgeting folks to think like this, those 50 new Viewliners (or even the 2 for 66/67) would be a very sound investment.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Not necessarily.... Because Amtrak uses bucket pricing based solely on the number of remaining available accommodations, we can't accurately assess the additional demand. And even if it's true that while you can reliable fill all the high-buckets in a single Viewliner, you wind up with a few empty high-bucket roomettes on Viewliner, Amtrak could alter the bucket structure to try to take this into account and maintain revenue-per-car. Maybe you can fill 2 roomettes at $100, 4 at $200, 4 at $300, and 2 at $400 reliably ($3000/Viewliner), but you find you only fill 4/$100, 8/$200, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (with 2 empty high-bucket roomettes) running two Viewliners ($2600/Viewliner). If you instead change the bucket prices and distribution around, you might find that you can reliably get 6/$150, 8/$250, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (which brings you back to $3050/Viewliner--$100 extra revenue to put towards the increased fuel costs of running with the extra weight). It would require a lot of math and experimentation, but I imagine it's doable.
And I imagine, if Amtrak could get the budgeting folks to think like this, those 50 new Viewliners (or even the 2 for 66/67) would be a very sound investment.

If Amtrak is in the habit of setting the prices with a goal of having the last roomettes sell near the last minute, but making sure all of the roomettes get sold, and they continue to be able to do that with equal effectiveness after getting another 50 Viewliner Sleepers, I would imagine that where they add sleeper cars to trains that already have them, the number of people willing to pay high prices at the last minute will not change, and so they will have to sell all of the added roomettes at the low bucket price. Yes, the lower bucket roomettes will be distributed across all of the cars on each trainset, but the gain in revenue Amtrak gets by adding that car to that train is going to be equal to the new low bucket revenue.

One problem with my million dollars a year is that I forgot to add in the seat charges to that. 83 (current WAS to BOS low bucket fare) times 365 (days per year) times 15 (assuming that every compartment has a single traveler) is about $454,000/year. Some compartments may do shorter runs; then again, some people may go south of WAS; and 20-25 is probably a better estimate of the number of people who will actually ride in that car and pay the seat fare. So I think if all the roomettes were sold at $200 for BOS to WAS and the bedrooms at $400, the real revenue would come pretty close to $2 million a year per car when you include both the accomodation charges and the seat charges. And again, I think when you look at what people will pay for Acela First Class high bucket tickets, that's probably a better predictor of what a roomette can go for if there's only one Viewliner running on the Twilight Shoreliner in each direction.

The depressing realization is that this means that I probably don't personally care whether the prototypes ever get rebuilt to be more standard and put on the Twilight Shoreliner, because roomettes with a single Viewliner Sleeper on the Twilight Shoreliner would probably fill up with a $600 accomodation charge one way BOS to WAS, which is more than I would want to pay. With a $600 accomodation charge and 2 x $83 seat fare, that would be $766; two high bucket Acela First Class tickets, BOS to WAS, are $680.

And $766 per roomette times 15 roomettes (let's pretend that the extra charges for bedrooms cancel out the people traveling in a compartment by themselves, just to make the math easy) times 365 days a year is over $4 million. At that rate, if Amtrak can figure out how to make the Viewliner Sleeper prototypes into reliable, standard enough cars for $2 million a car, they can probably do the conversion profitably even if they were planning to do something really dumb like scrap the car as soon as it had been in service for a year.

 

[wayman]

Maybe you can fill 2 roomettes at $100, 4 at $200, 4 at $300, and 2 at $400 reliably ($3000/Viewliner), but you find you only fill 4/$100, 8/$200, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (with 2 empty high-bucket roomettes) running two Viewliners ($2600/Viewliner). If you instead change the bucket prices and distribution around, you might find that you can reliably get 6/$150, 8/$250, 8/$300, and 2/$400 (which brings you back to $3050/Viewliner--$100 extra revenue to put towards the increased fuel costs of running with the extra weight). It would require a lot of math and experimentation, but I imagine it's doable.

... I would imagine that where they add sleeper cars to trains that already have them, the number of people willing to pay high prices at the last minute will not change, and so they will have to sell all of the added roomettes at the low bucket price. Yes, the lower bucket roomettes will be distributed across all of the cars on each trainset, but the gain in revenue Amtrak gets by adding that car to that train is going to be equal to the new low bucket revenue.

Exactly. In the two different hypothetical bucket distributions I gave above, Amtrak is selling exactly the same number of highest- and second-highest-bucket seats at exactly the same prices. They don't need more last-minute high-price customers, even adding an extra car, if they construct a new set of buckets that shifts unsold higher-bucket seats to lower-bucket seats but ALSO raises the price of the lower-bucket seats a bit. Yes, you're raising some prices, but I think the market would bear that: I think there will always be more than enough people who would pay $100 who would also pay $150, or people who would pay $200 who would also pay $250.

 

[AlanB]

It was a prototype built by Amtrak. When Amtrak cut back the original Viewliner order from 100 to 50 sleepers, any chance of diners went right out the window. And that was probably a good thing, as the prototype was a disaster. The crews hated that car as things were not well laid out at all. And the repairs on it weren't very easy to perform either. The car, last I knew, is still on Amtrak property but it hasn't been used in years.

I bet the crews stuck with the diner-lite on the LSL would love to have it!

Hmm, I'm not so sure of that. The crews really hated that prototype. Buried some where on this forum is a list of some of the complaints, but I no longer remember them. The layout however was very poor. As an example, this may not have been true but I'm trying to illustrate the types of problems they had, a waiter needing a glass of OJ for a passenger needed to walk past the chef trying to cook the French Toast on the grill, just to get to the OJ. The bottom line however was that the layout was so bad that it took a lot of extra work, just to turn out meals. And that was back before SDS and the huge staffing cuts to the dining cars.

It would not be possible to turn out timely meals with the current crew sizes and that dining car's layout and problems.

And that's before we consider the non-standard parts and the issues created by that, as well as the fact that there is only one car. One car doesn't really help much at all with the shortage of Heritage diners and you now need to train crews and repair workers on the car. It's simply not worth it!

Finally of course, there is the issue that last I knew this car #8400, along with sleeper #2300/62090 have been turned into mockups of what the "new" Viewliner cars should look like if Amtrak ever gets the funding to buy some. This of course means that many needed components have now been ripped out and replaced with phonies to indicate where things should be placed in any future designs. I'm not even sure that either of these cars have the ability to even move on their own wheels anymore. Neither has turned a wheel in years since 1998.

Only 2301/62091 to my knowledge has even the remotest chance of being usable in service anymore. It was for a while acting as a crew dorm until it reached the point where the trucks would need replacing in order for it to pass an FRA inspection. At that time Amtrak decided that it was worth the effort to keep it running given the AC problems and the cost of new trucks and the car was pulled from service in 2002 and moth balled in Beech Grove.

 

[printman2000]

Okay, okay. My point was that the diner-lite car being used is horrible and an operational, poorly laid out dining car would be better. The very small space they are forced to use is bad and the fact that passengers are constantly walking past the food preparation area is just gross.

Assuming the Viewliner Diner was in perfect working order, would the crews rather use it or a diner-lite car? I suspect the former. Both cars have major issues they have to get past.

Anyway, I really was not talking about the actual operability of the Viewliner dining car.