Passenger Trains > A little more clarity from Amtrak re: service reductions

Here's a 2 paragraph excerpt from a Trains Magazine on-line article of Friday 1/14/22 that speaks to why Amtrak is reducing service and its view that demand has also reduced:

"...Amtrak said that while nearly 97% of employees are fully vaccinated, “several hundred of our on-board service personnel, conductors, engineers, and mechanical crews continue to be impacted by COVID infections or exposures …  These Covid-related absences, when combined with the general skilled workforce shortage Amtrak and other transportation companies are facing, have reduced our ability to consistently deliver our current schedules and impacted the pace of hiring and training efforts.”

Trains News Wire has asked Amtrak for more information and is analyzing the impact on connections through the reservation system, since the company has not indicated which trains are cancelled on each route each week. The company said it is working to rebook passengers on remaining frequencies and ensure that all routes maintain frequencies sufficient to meet demand. “Given the recent roughly 25% reduction in customer demand now occurring because of the Omicron variant and typical season travel patterns, we expect minimal impacts to overall ridership because of these temporary changes,” Amtrak said in Friday’s release....”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/22 05:41 by JPB.

Any word on changes to dining car services. I hope they aren't going back to un-enhanced dining. I hate even thinking about the possibility. 

Amtrak has an inability to maximize revenues during peak periods to help them get through the slow travel times!

mp51w Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Amtrak has an inability to maximize revenues
> during peak periods to help them get through the
> slow travel times!

But Amtrak's only philosophy appears to be to minimize losses, not mazimize revenue:-(

Yeah and that's a sad thing these days!

WP17 Wrote:

> But Amtrak's only philosophy appears to be to
> minimize losses, not mazimize revenue :-(
===================================

Change that to "minimize COSTS" without an eye to revenue.

WP17 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> mp51w Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Amtrak has an inability to maximize revenues
> > during peak periods to help them get through
> the
> > slow travel times!
>
> But Amtrak's only philosophy appears to be to
> minimize losses, not mazimize revenue:-(

In Amtrak's mind, every LD train they run just looses more money. Money losing state trains don't count because they are reimbursed in full.

            Many corporations today brag about the extremely high percentage of employees that have been vaccinated, numbers in the 97 to 99% area. They conveniently leave out a huge part of the true information that the 99% vaccinated are after they canned the other 25% to 40% of the work force they had. They caused their own shortage of employees in order to get the gold plated % number. Not about taking care of business, its about looking good.

I guess saving lives has nothing at all to do with it.

I don’t support forced vaccination but when it comes to those who are not medically unable to get vaxed (or the very young) I do support restricting their access to society where they place everyone at risk.

If it was only about themselves, sure go for it; if they succumb we improve average IQ of the herd. But it is not only about themselves.

Things have peaked in places and will soon in others. But the fact remains that most (not all but most) of the Covid ICU beds and morgue slabs are the unvaxed. And you gotta wonder about the vaxed victims, how many got it from an unvaxed, no mask, or no distancing idiot.

dcfbalcoS1 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>             Many corporations today brag
> about the extremely high percentage of employees
> that have been vaccinated, numbers in the 97 to
> 99% area. They conveniently leave out a huge part
> of the true information that the 99% vaccinated
> are after they canned the other 25% to 40% of the
> work force they had. They caused their own
> shortage of employees in order to get the gold
> plated % number. Not about taking care of
> business, its about looking good.

Negative.  If they'd canned 25% to 40% of their work force they'd be 100% vaccinated.  In most cases, 25% to 40% of employees refuse to get vaccinated until the company sends out pink slips, then most of those run out at the last second and get vaccinated because they realize they need to keep their jobs more than they need to not be vaccinated.  In most cases only around 5% of employees wind up getting fired by the time employers actually pull the trigger (example;  NYPD had roughly 10,000 employees out of about 35,000 total refuse to vaccinate.  The unions threatened to strike, sued NYC, the courts upheld the mandate.  By the time the mandate went into effect only 34 officers were let go).  So that 97%-99% you're hearing refers to employees vaccinated before their employers' deadline.

Now, there could be an argument heard about the 25%-30% of employees who had to get vaccinated against their wishess, what everybody's rights are and aren't, but Trainorders really isn't the place to have this particular discussion and it's likely to get this thread locked.  Besides, Amtrak's vaccine mandate has been suspended, so it is not impacting staffing and thus any talk about vaccine mandates are not relevant to this discussion at all.

So stick to the discussion about railroad operations and keep the politics out of it so that we can actually have a discussion about the relevant operational impacts of these service cuts without irrelevant arguments and threads getting locked.