The website has the filters and that is what most people seem to use these days.
That's completely worthless crap and you can quote me on that!
I wonder how much longer the printed system schedule will continue to exist.
I don't care whether it's physically printed -- I can print a PDF at home. As long as I can click on the link and get a nice readable timetable (which I just did), I'm fine.
But a clear timetable book must continue to be created, even if it's "print for yourself".
"Reservation searches on the website" are worthless crap if you're trying to figure out possible routings and possible schedules. No travel agent would consider it acceptable, as it takes hundreds of hours more work. Travel agents still go to the trouble of getting timetables for airlines, which are hard to get these days.
If Amtrak ever fails to provide timetables, eventually someone will have to design something along the lines of Amsnag, only even less friendly to Amtrak's reservations system workload, to hammer the reservations system daily with thousands of test bookings in order to deduce the schedules and print them. Nobody wants that, do they?
VIA Rail Canada has come very close to not providing acceptable timetables, and I think it's gross incompetence on their part. But even they still do provide timetables; they're just very badly designed timetables which are very hard to find on the website.
By contrast, most commuter rail operators provide *gorgeous* printed timetables which are everything you could desire for trip planning.
Think about how many people drive around with printed maps from Google Maps. Sure, they're not buying preprinted maps, but they need a printable map and they are printing it out. Turn-by-turn directions are NO SUBSTITUTE.
The situation with "reservation searches" vs. timetables really the same sort of thing. The reservation search is *not* a substitute for the timetable. The advantage to "print on demand" is that you can print only the pages you're actually interested in, but you still need a comprehensive timetable.
Using the timetable, I can design a complex itinerary with multiple layovers with ease. Trying to do it with searches in the reservation system is a complete nightmare, to the point of "To hell with it, I'll just drive". Because of this, VIA Rail actually lost business from me a couple of times before I found their timetables.