Amtrak Seat Check Question

[OlympianHiawatha]

On one trip on a Midwest Corridor train the Conductor simply placed full blank seat checks above the occupied seats and left them when the folks detrained. A few of those "fell" into my grip and are part of my displayed collection. I also have some where the Conductor flipped over to the blank side, wrote the city code and below that 2 for the number of pax in that bank of seats. And on the Heartland Flyer, at least 1 Conductor tears the check in half and writes the city code on it, picking it up just before destination; depending on load they generally put through pax in one Coach, locals in the other and use the third as needed.

 

[seat38a]

I do the same thing ever once in a while. I'd love to find a better way to preserve his stories.

Well, if you can get the source files, I can put it up on my hosting space. As a web app developer, I got plenty of space and bandwidth to spare.

 

[Ryan]

That's not the problem, that part is easy. Getting in touch with someone for permission is the tough part.

 

[neroden]

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Put it up.

 

[NorthShore]

I'm wondering whether some conductors and car attendants wouldn't mind keeping some of the color coded tags around, even after conversion to the new system, as the established ways still offer a ready way for fast vidual identification that the printouts might not, since all tags look the same at initial glance, before reading the station code.

 

[Slasharoo]

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Put it up.

I hate the expansion that this phrase has taken on the last few years. It's one thing to take the last cookie out of the jar without asking, but infringing on someone's privacy, quite another...maybe not a "One rule for all cases" phrase.

 

[Ryan]

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Put it up.

Not when it comes to other people's IP.
Does the site work for anyone else now? I reloaded it and now it says that the site's robots.txr says "NO YUO!!!!". Hopefully it isn't gone forever. Google's cache still has the site, but without pictures.

 

[PerRock]

Right now on Capitol Corridor they're mostly carrying portable printers that generate a printed seat check. It's complete with date of travel, the origin station, destination station, train number, and reservation number. Roadman took a photo of two of them printed back to back for two passengers:

Eventually this is going to be rolled out completely on Amtrak, or so I've been told. At that point I guess the codes that conductors use will go away. I would think they would also have the ability to print the car number and seat number for those on long distance trains with assigned seating.

Yeah, I too have heard that the plan is for this being rolled out system-wide. The system is pretty darn proven, and not just used with Amtrak. A full-service carwash here in Sacramento uses what looks to be the same exact system. An iPhone is used to take the order, or call up an account, and a belt-mounted printer identical to Amtrak's produces a barcode receipt you take up to the cashier.

In the case of Amtrak, you'll note that it contains a lot more data than just the station 3-letter code. It has the res number, and a barcode. As such, a conductor can (and I've witnessed them do it) walk down the isle and scan a suspicious tag to see if its valid. And in the case of the person involved, it wasn't (they'd kept their seat tag from an earlier ride and tried to reuse it.) That person had to either pay the fare to the conductor right there, or be seen off the train at the next stop and into law enforcement's hands. They paid up.

Over in England the conductors carry a device on them that can scan your ticket (they don't use E-Tickets, but all their tix have magnetic stripes), they can swipe a credit card to buy tickets, and they can print tickets.

I too cannot access that site anymore, So I don't know what was said on it (so I might just be repeating things). But in my experience a conductor will put two ticks on a seat check to indicate that both seats are going to the same location, basically saves paper & the need for them to write out another check.

Somewhere I have a handful of blank seat check slips I acquired on one of my journeys.

peter

 

[Alice]

I'm getting a different error message now. It was intermittent before, so maybe it'll go away when not so many people are trying to read it.

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.
See railroaddave.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

 

[neroden]

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Put it up.

Not when it comes to other people's IP.

Actually, that's *exactly* when it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. IP laws have gotten completely insane lately. It's much more important to preserve knowledge and make it available than to respect "IP".

The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine quite explicitly decided not to ask permission.

 

[neroden]

I'm getting a different error message now. It was intermittent before, so maybe it'll go away when not so many people are trying to read it.

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

See railroaddave.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

I've been seeing this with other things. Someone should figure out who "spi.domainsponsor.com" is because they appear to be deliberately sabotaging the Wayback Machine, by buying old domains and putting a new robots.txt up.