Passenger Trains > Amtrak Holiday Traffic - Thanksgiving 1994

This is a 3-Part video of some of the trains I shot after Thanksgiving 1994.  Video was taken at Perryville, MD and Ivy City (Washington, DC) along the NEC.  Amtrak borrowed equipment from MARC and NJT to meet demand during the busiest travel period of the year.

(PART 1)

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(PART 2)

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(PART 3)

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And thank you for that!  Good show!  One thing I noticed was that most of the NEC trains were two cars shorter than what's running today.

I'll second what sums007 said: Thanks for that.  Wonderful videos from 1994, a time when the catenary hadn't been completed to Boston, when about 50 AEM-7s and a handful of E-60s ruled the railroad between Washington, New York and New Haven.  And, by extension, the Harrisburg Line was running with diesels.  

It was also a time when Metroliners were the premium service.  All of those 6-car trains that you see, the ones with two Amfleet food cars, were Metroliners.  Sometimes the Club car was on the head-end, sometimes it was on the rear, and there was always a dinette in the middle.  I counted a whole lot of Metroliners in these 3 videos.

Other than the 6-car Metroliners, the "regular" Amfleet trains on holidays were larger than today's trains.  I saw trains with 7 (smaller), 8, 10 and even 14 Amfleet cars (first train in 3rd video).  The long-distance trains were longer, too.  There are scenes of Train 20, the Crescent, with 15 cars, and Train 82, the Silver Star, with 16 cars (I think it was still Train 82 in 1994).  And both of them cut a mail car at Washington.  Also, Train 20 shows the lounge car, sleeper, slumbercoach and coaches on the rear end that were cut and added at Atlanta, improving the train's equipment utilization and capacity over its peak segments.  

I believe the 3-car trains with diesels are Atlantic City trains.  From what I've heard, they were lightly utilized from the start, and Amtrak pared back the service over the years of its operation, although it did try an innovative through ticketing arrangement with Midway Airlines at Philadelphia, and actually extended some Atlantic City trains over the SEPTA line to the Philadelphia Airport.  It was a very sharp effort, but it didn't work, since Atlantic City really hasn't been much of a draw since the 50's, but I give Amtrak a lot of credit for trying it.  At some point, Amtrak got out of the Atlantic City business entirely, leaving New Jersey Transit to limp along with its politically required offerings.

Wonderful, wonderful images of a time just before Tom Downs came on, before he embraced the Mercer Management model of getting rid of all the "oddball" equipment, such as Heritage equipment, and of standardizing consist sizes and letting the airline-style revenue-management people try to maximize revenue in peak periods and lower fares to fill the seats in off-peak periods.  

Thanks so much for taking and posting these videos.  They're wonderful to see.  And I also enjoy seeing the AEM-7s in the handsome Phase 3 red-white-and-blue paint scheme.  David Gunn did a lot of good things for Amtrak, but his dull, battleship-gray paint scheme for the AEM-7s wasn't one of them.

You are correct, the three-car diesel powered trains were Atlantic City Express.  They went all the way to/from Richmond.