Passenger Trains > Reserved Seat Assignments -- Continued

Much has been said (and mindless excuses offered) about Amtrak not offering passengers the choice of individual reserved seat assignments.

Next week I will be in Portugal, and was impressed that on a planned intercity bus trip between Lisbon and Fatima, the bus company (Rede Expressos) not only sells tickets on line, but allows passengers to choose their exact seat from a seating diagram. The same is true for express trains operated by CP.

At a minimum, Amtrak should offer advance individual seat reservations on at least one car on each "all-reserved" train, even if it comes at a premium price. If I am going to ride the Coast Starlight, I want to have the assurance that I will have a window seat on the coast side, and not be at the whim of a crew member.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 11:00 by reindeerflame.

But here's the rub: with seat reservations, they won't be able to bully singles around like pass-riding, over-booked, interlopers. Where's the fun for them then ?

Choosing your "own" airline seat is now a matter of how much you are willing to pay. These "budget" seats have strict limits. Unless you hold certain levels of elite status, you can't get seat assignments until you arrive at the airport, or check in the night before. Or use the overhead bins, in theory. (They handle this by assigning you to group 5, where bags are almost always taken before you board.)

On United, next week, that difference was about $60 on a round trip btw West Palm and Newark. Given the price sensitivity of some Amtrak travelers, I doubt some would pay more for a specific seat.


{The benefit to the airline is they get the first listing on Kayak, Expedia, etc. Then they add a nickel here and a dime there to make their bucks.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 12:39 by Lackawanna484.

Last week I had a several day stop over in Prague, took the Railjet to Vienna. Seats can be reserved for an extra $5.00. You don't need a reservation but on full trains it is something quite nice to have.

Edit:

I'll add that the Siemens Viaggio Cars (Brightline Cars) have digital displays above every seat that display when and if each seat has a seat reservation. Also was really impressed with the dining car that served excellent food and beer on draft.

Cheers,
Nick



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 09:39 by NGotwalt.

Brightline will have assigned reserved seats for everyone for no extra charge. They will guide you to the specific door closest to your seat on the platform before your train arrives, so that you can just get on, take a few steps to your seat and sit down.

Amtrak would rather that you not ride the train. Passengers are just sooooo much trouble.
They want things to eat and like to have clean carpets, restrooms, etc.
So why make anything convenient??

Way back when the nasty private railroads were running the passenger trains (before they were
made worth taking again) many would make seat reservations even without the aid of computers.

When I was working for Amtrak I once asked one of the drones why they could not make seat reservations.
The answer was the complexity caused by the number of different coach configurations. This was still
when there were many heritage cars in operation. Those are all gone and still no reservations.

Lack of standardization was an excuse not a reason. That's why there is no such system today.

Heritage coaches had 44 or 48 seats, the ex-UP cars at the low end (with the neat little conductors desk and chair at the end), and the ex-Santa Fe ones with 48 seats. The cars were randomly mixed. The reservation system still had to have a finite inventory, probably assumed 46 seats per car, so they could have reserved up to 40 of them on window rows without problems.

Airlines can do specific reserved seating because the plane is loaded single-file (or 2-3 file if more jetways & doors) which allows fairly 'casual' loading speed for passengers. Each passenger can 'take their time' passing by many rows of seats to find their row, and stow their 2 small carryon's in a limited space. Also note there is only 1 airplane and only one row 1, one row 2, etc.

Let's pick a NEC train...the typical regional train these days is 8 cars - 6 coaches, 1 cafe, 1 business class. When they arrive at the station, 16 doors open simultaneously (2 per car) and passengers can board at any door. While 'seasoned' NEC riders generally choose the same boarding location and know that BC is the last car these days, there are those that barely know which direction the train is going until it arrives! As a regular BC passenger on the NEC, it's a rare trip that there's NO BC passengers walking through from the coaches. And on about 1/2 the trains I've ridden, there'll be someone in BC with a coach ticket that has to move. Given that LD trains RARELY have the car number correctly displayed in the 'little window' on EVERY car, and many LD passengers see only the painted-on car numbers, how on earth would a NEC passenger locate car 4102, row 6, seat D (train 141, 2nd car, r6, seat D) if the numbers aren't properly displayed. And if they boarded on the wrong car, they will be 'fighting traffic' to go from car to car trying to find car 4102. Note there's NO Amtrak staff on the platforms to direct car 4102 passengers to 'spot 2' on the platform for south (west) bound trains, and on tr 148 going the other direction, the 2nd car will be at spot 6! Even the regulars would get confused! Throw in a 'hot shot' engineer who overshoots/undershoots the correct stop point, thus cars are not aligned with their spot number.

Oh...almost forgot...what about the NEC passenger with a MONSTER rolling suitcase carryon? It will take some time for them to realize it won't fit in the overhead, and then have to 'discover' the 'open area' for such large suitcases. And then they happened to choose the wrong car number to sit in???? Good luck with THAT ONE!

Or, how about a LD train. As the Eastbound Lake Shore Ltd must necessarily separate Boston section passengers to the front coaches (or sleeper) and NY section passengers to the last 3-4 coaches (or sleepers), at stations with long platforms (TOL, CLE, ALB, (BUF, ROC, SDY too?), station staff can direct boarding passengers approximately where to stand. But at the short platform stations such as ELY where maybe 2 cars can be boarded, it's up to the conductors to tell passengers NOT to get on THIS car, and get on after the train has pulled forward several cars! And unless the conductor scans their ticket on the platform (streetcar-ing...my BIGGEST COMPLAINT on LD trains!), there will invariably be a family of 4 or 5 with a ton of luggage get on the wrong car, and have to bump into EVERYONE on their way to the right car!

And on ANY of the trains, NEC or LD, add an extra car or two for holiday travel, etc, and all your platform spot numbers won't be at the correct car!

Simply put, there's enough confusion separating coach from BC or sleeper passengers at every stop. On the NEC, intermediate stops are usually 4-5 minutes, 2-3 on the Acela. Requiring all passengers to be standing at the right platform spot without supervision is an impossibility. So is getting all the car line numbers accurately displayed on every car, every train!

Nobody said to do this on the NEC. But it can be done on the Lake Shore Ltd, and any LD other train. They ought to be told approximately where to stand on the platform anyway since they seat by destination. Amtrak can also cut a hole in the vinyl interior panel, and access the consist roll sign again, which are now inoperative on Amfleet-2.

VIA Rail does it on many of its Corridor trains.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 12:40 by joemvcnj.

The only reason Amtrak is not doing this is because it's a third-world operation. A passenger's ticket would have a car and seat number, like anywhere else in the civilized world. People with excessively large baggage would leave it in the aisle, or would not be allowed to board, like anywhere else in the civilized world. Even Portuguese buses, it seems, have only one aisle.

One of the reasons why Amtrak is a bit of a disaster is that is declines to improve itself.

Most railroads also don't use seatchecks or hatchecks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 13:39 by reindeerflame.

reindeerflame Wrote:
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> The only reason Amtrak is not doing this is
> because it's a third-world operation.

Wait! Some third world railways actually do assigned seat reservation for numbers of passenger per day that is larger than Amtrak's ridership for an entire month or more. Amtrak's current reservation system would simply crash and burn if it had to handle the number of tickets and reservations that has to be handled per hour.

Maybe there is something called fourth-world operation? LOL!

Many European stations have large numbers / letters overhead to tell where the boarding positions are. Your ticket says car 1234, boarding position C.

Walk to boarding position C, and the door opens there.

Some Amtrak stations have similar overheads, I know Newark NJ has them on platform 3. It makes boarding a lot easier. The "Georgia coach" boards here, the "Virginia coach" boards up there at B, etc.

Back in the 80s, in my salad days as a student traveler, British Rail and Ferrovie dello Stato (Italian State Railways) managed to do assigned seating. And they charged extra for it. That was thirty years ago when computerized booking was still in its infancy. Yet, even now, it's still in the Too Hard pile at Amtrak.

reindeerflame Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The only reason Amtrak is not doing this is
> because it's a third-world operation. A
> passenger's ticket would have a car and seat
> number, like anywhere else in the civilized world.
> People with excessively large baggage would leave
> it in the aisle, or would not be allowed to board,
> like anywhere else in the civilized world. Even
> Portuguese buses, it seems, have only one aisle.
>
> One of the reasons why Amtrak is a bit of a
> disaster is that is declines to improve itself.
>
> Most railroads also don't use seatchecks or
> hatchecks.

Paul Wilson
Arlington, VA

The nation's best airline, Southwest, does not assign seats. TO... the place to cherry pick and complain about everything Amtrak.

I think they could assign maybe 1 coach as assigned seating,and make it standard that, for example, the first coach in the train is for those who have reserved a specific seat. Otherwise it'd be a mess, especially at unstaffed stations in the middle of the night. Right now at some stations it is hard enough to figure out where on the platform sleeper passengers go and where coach passengers do, can't imagine trying to get people to their assigned coach.

Some trains assign seats (or used to), I rode 19 a few years ago and upon boarding my son and I were told which seats to go to. So one would think if the crew can put you in a specific seat then you could reserve a specific seat yourself. I figured it was done so they kept track of what passengers were getting off where, it seemed they had grouped people by destination.

Acela 1st class is reserved seating.

1976 Wrote:
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> The nation's best airline, Southwest, does not
> assign seats. TO... the place to cherry pick and
> complain about everything Amtrak.

Curiously, Southwest's network closely resembles Amtrak's. A flight will make a series of stops, and will board / debark passengers along the way. Four and five stops along the way isn't unusual. In my experience, people get up, change seats, regroup, etc during those brief stops. Trying to keep track of where people are (versus where the computer says they should be) would be unproductive. In a traditional air hub, most people get off the plane at the hub, and change to another plane.

Eliminating the hub and spoke fortress strategy of major airlines creates some advantages, and some disadvantages. Just like Amtrak's system offers advantages and disadvantages. Although its 1950s era computer system is probably a big part of the problem.

Cole42 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> (SNIP)
>
> Some trains assign seats (or used to), I rode 19 a
> few years ago and upon boarding my son and I were
> told which seats to go to. So one would think if
> the crew can put you in a specific seat then you
> could reserve a specific seat yourself. I figured
> it was done so they kept track of what passengers
> were getting off where, it seemed they had grouped
> people by destination.

Amtrak, or its crews, assign passengers to the Georgia coach, the Carolinas coach, etc on the Crescent and on the Silver Service trains. I've seen and heard them do that at Newark.

It makes a lot of sense to have a mostly open coach, devoid of Virginia passengers, as you load at Rocky Mount, Selma, etc. And, a lot easier to toss people off the train at Jesup in the middle of the night if you know where they all are.

1976 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The nation's best airline, Southwest, does not
> assign seats. TO... the place to cherry pick and
> complain about everything Amtrak.

What is Southwest's maximum flight time, 5 hours perhaps?

That in no way compares to one or two nights in an Amtrak coach.

There are a lot of things I'd like to see improve on Amtrak. For me, this one is far down the list.