Passenger Trains > Amtrak's Track A Train ?

Whats wrong with Amtrak's Track A Train? It's only showing train activity on the western third of the nation. I wonder why. I hope they will fix this soon.

http://asm.transitdocs.com/ = Works perfectly.

Track-A-Train has been broken for weeks. 

What I don't know is whether Amtrak has reallocated its resources so that it isn't being fixed. 
The company's estimated budget shortfall, first predicted at $100 million for the fiscal year,
has ballooned since then and departments across the company are being pressured to cut,
cut, cut.  Departments other than the Northeast Corridor, that is; Bureaucrat Boardman's
expectation is that OFF-CORRIDOR cuts will amount to 70% of the cost savings needed to
rebalance the budget, in effect bailing out the "profitable" Northeast Corridor, which by AMTRAK'S
OWN OFFICIAL ESTIMATES costs $2.00 for every $1.20 in revenue.

Ironically, Track-A-Train isn't working for the Northeast Corridor, but when you have trains at
trolley car-like frequencies (relative to the rest of the country), it doesn't matter as much.

I'd follow the advice above: use the Transitdocs Amtrak Location Map.  It's faster-loading
and even when Track-A-Train was working, Transitdocs was less buggy. 

here's my choice:

http://dixielandsoftware.net/Amtrak/status/StatusMaps/

Click on the train symbol and station times page comes up for that train. Then click on the blue dot at the top of that page and you will get map. When you click on train symbol, it will show the speed/direction.

It has never worked right from the get-go, at least not in the "real-world" of slow internet, pop-up blockers, older operating systems that are not necessarily the latest version, malware detection software, and multiple platforms.
Generally at my location, some Apple Safari platforms seem to work pretty well about 80% of the time, microsoft works about half the time, and Android not at all.
Seems to have a lot to do with the condition of the internet at any given time.  Since the map appears in a pop-up window on microsoft, it also tends to tickle a lot of add-on software which has to be disabled to allow pop-ups.
If you are inside the Washington beltway on 200meg service, in a state of the art server farm, you are probably OK.
And that, of course, are where the people are who are paid to monitor and de-bug these things.

My opinion is that despite the major cuts to the operating budget of trains, the information ttech budget at Amtrak is always increasing.  It has gotten to the point now that over 1/4 of the entire Amtrak budget goes to IT (telephone call centers, internet and tel-co providers, "web designers and of course now PTC of questionable value)." 
There are always a couple hundred million dollars a year to invest in facebook and other wi-fi ventures that may or may not help in attracting customers to broken down trains.  Traditional advertising, or route development seed money, nope.  New cars and locomotives, not much unless you are inside the DC beltway and commute on the NEC.  Oh yes, we can now monitor the health of our failing locomotives, and we will know within 60 seconds when the Texas Eagle craps out in Arkasas.  But it will still take us 8 hours to arrange to get the busses on site. 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/16 13:23 by NewRiverGeorge.

I have not experienced significant problems with T-A-T, although I'm not on it all that frequently.

Could this be a browser compability issue?  If Amtrak's IT crowd is not monitoring closely, an internal change in the browser can affect useability.  We're in the website development business, and fight that problem constantly.

Browser problems certainly a likely part of it.
Slow internet also a factor...track a train appears to have a very short trigger time.  If the browser does not fully load for some reason, the data stream shuts off.
Some really strange things occur when the site only partially loads.  For instance, a train that is nearing the end of its run will load, but one that just started out within the last couple of hours of inquiry may not.
Trains that you know where out there the last time you checked mysteriously disappear.
Or as others have noticed, a part of the country will load, but not other regions.
Unfortunately there is no real way for a casual user to know if they have loaded the complete screen, or only part of it.