The cafe attendant is on duty from 6:00 AM to Midnight, with short breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But otherwise they are on their feet and on the go all day long. In addition to their actual duties of selling, inventorying, heating up food, they already have to take care of dumping the garbage along the way, clean the restroom (which is why some take the unacceptable practice of locking the room and pretending like the bathroom is out of order), and picking up the general garbage left behind by inconsiderate passengers who think that mommy or a maid are coming to clean up after them.Agree that OBS staff is USUALLY not to blame for conditions such as the OP reported, but it some small measure, if OBS crews did a better job of cleaning en route, the "appalling" conditions would be lessened somewhat.
Expecting the attendant to also start looking into every nook and cranny and clean same is just too much, I'm sorry. Especially since that is not what they were hired to do in the first place. They were hired to sell food and merchandise to the passengers. That is their primary job, with safety being their secondary job.
No, the problem lies with the cleaning crews in the stations and yards. They aren't doing their jobs properly, and yes as Larry suggested, they also aren't being supervised properly. Of course that opens up Pandora's Box too, as many people already think that Amtrak has too many managers, although that situation has been corrected somewhat over the last 8 years or so. And in defense of the yard/station crews, there are times when it simply isn't possible to properly clean. When the Empire Builder arrives into Portland on time, they have a little less than 7 hours to clean that train and get it ready for that afternoon's departure. Six hours is considered the minimum time by Amtrak to properly clean a train.
So if the westbound is 3 hours late that morning, there isn't time for a proper cleaning. The crews have to do the best that they can under rushed circumstances.
The problem remains though, that some crews just seem to clean like they always have limited time, and just don't do their jobs right, even when they do have the proper amount of time.