System cleared up...almost

Shop deals on ebay
Advertise with us
shop deals on amazon
Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

jtoddander

Train Attendant
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
61
Yesterday's system issues with reservations etc seems to have been mostly resolved but service on Wolverine veteran Chicago and Detroit metro is still AWOL.

Early on Sat. I tried to make reservation from west coast to MI but kept getting funny messages. I called in and was first told that there was no service from west coast to my MI destination. Sternly told the rep that I had taken it before, then she did a little research and admitted I was right. She thought they were trying to update the schedule or something.

Agent suggested I call back later. I did or I tried....yesterday and everything was a mess.

As I said basic system seems to be up and running again but still no MI schedules are available
 
I was able to make an online reservation this morning, the only problem being that the first attempt timed out, which happens under normal circumstances too.
 
As of 3 pm system still not providing schedule info on MI trains....presumably other functions are still working.
 
Conductor for #3 says they probably did the "click one button to record all passengers have boarded" yesterday. I'll be checking AGR to see if my points post.
 
So still no word from Amtrak as to what went wrong? If so, that's no way to run a rr.
 
1010-johnny-airplane-00-400x300.jpg
 
The real reason is that the Amtrak systems run on the spare capacity of the Chicago Air Traffic control center in Aurora!!!

They took the AEM-7's nickname literally!!!
 
I think a legitimate question that they ought to answer is what are they doing to ensure that this will not happen again, and in the process of doing so will have to say at least a bit about what happened. Having ticketing systems work without fail is part a good "moving business". When it fails that is a failure of the "moving business", and they do owe an explanation to their customers, not to rail fans. However, if you are not interested in learning such, feel free to not read what they come out with if they do. :p . When United had IT failure issues they were pretty up front about what exactly happened and how they plan to avoid such again. I don't see why Amtrak needs to be more secretive than that.

Of course as an alternative they could also say that they are screwballs that they have no idea what happened and this is likely to happen again at any time, and we are sorry for the inconvenience. ;)
 
As a software engineer, I'm curious about the timing of the outage. Sunday morning the system was down per usual from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. Shortly after 6 the system came on-line again and all hell broke loose. Experience tells me that someone probably introduced the error during the normal system outage. The curious thing is why couldn't they back the change out after the trouble presented itself?

I don't s'pose we'll ever know.

jb
 
Last edited by a moderator:
jis said:
However, if you are not interested in learning such, feel free to not read what they come out with if they do. :p
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what gives you that idea. I'd love to hear what went wrong, and think that it would be a great thing for Amtrak to do.

But the claim that they owe us an explanation is a bit over entitled, IMO.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
They do owe their customers an explanation. And since most here are customers, I think they do owe an explanation to at least that subset of AU that are Amtrak customers. Just IMHO of course.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest posts

Back
Top