The SFD station building certainly has been a disgraceful disaster for a long time. I wonder what they will do about the fact that very frequently 98 and 92 stop there for mechanical, electrical, and a/c repairs? Seems like at least 25% of the time we stopped there for anything from a few minutes to nearly 45 minutes for repair work. Maybe they could just build a covered walkway from SFA over to that track and make SFA the actual station for it, since it's staffed and in good shape. Use two or three golf carts if necessary for bags and pax. Sitting at SFD on the Silver series trains you are very close to the SFA facilities and equipment, so I think it's close enough to work. SFD still has nearly 11,000 pax annually, which works out to about 30 pax per day. That's about the 15th heaviest pax volume of all the Florida stations, which I believe number around 29. SFD has over three times the pax count of Tallahassee (the State Capital), albeit TLH is only served 3x/wk each way from Sunset Limited. With SFD gone, the nearest stations would be Deland and WInter Park, both a good half hour away from SFD by car. SFD sees, on average, 5 trains per day, with 91, 92, 97, 98 all daily and either 01 or 02 six days per week. That's a lot of pax service to toss in the ash-can. I say use SFA and build a covered walkway. Then you've got a staffed station for it. The facilities and personnel are already there (at SFA), and it's close enough to be practicable. They would probably have to rearrange some things at SFA, but as a bonus they would have the entire SFD area as additional storage and so forth. Also, Silver Service and Sunset pax would be able to tour the Auto-Train facilities and you would probably get some cross-pollenization (future business for Auto-Train) from that.
For you Amtrak employees on the board, like OBS, maybe take some pix showing how close the two stations are and send them upstairs with a suggestion, maybe a rough drawing. It's quite possible that decision-makers on that issue don't realize just how adjacent those two facilities actually are. And how 11,000 pax use SFD every year, and it's worth some effort to save that business. This probably qualifies as thinking outside the box, but why not????.........