Bikes on New Amtrak Baggage Cars are still required to be boxed

[Sam Weiss]

Despite new bagage cars with bike racks my local Amtrak Agent in Rochester NY is still requiring me to box my bike despite having news cars with bike racks on the Lake Shore can u help me?

 

[Aaron]

Despite new bagage cars with bike racks my local Amtrak Agent in Rochester NY is still requiring me to box my bike despite having news cars with bike racks on the Lake Shore can u help me?

Just guesses on my part, but it could be that until there are enough new baggage cars in the system, they can't guarantee that one particular train will have a new car for every single run, so it's easier to not change policy until they can be confident of being able to accommodate things under the new policy.

Another possibility is that they don't have a way to guarantee space available for the bike until they get online bike reservations set up, which could be waiting for all the baggage cars to go online.

 

[Ryan]

Hi Sam,

We can't help you directly, because we're just a bunch of people that ride Amtrak like you.

That said, Aaron's reasoning is probably dead on - unfortunately, it's likely going to be a systemwide rollout of roll-on-off bikes (no pun intended), which means all of the new baggage cars have to be placed in service.

The good news is that more than half of them have been delivered, so hopefully this is something that we'll see this year.

 

[the_traveler]

Just to let you know, we are not Amtrak. We can only let you know what we think may be the problem.

That being said, I think Aaron is correct. And just because "today's" LSL may have the new baggage car, "tomorrow's" train may not until enough cars are in service.