AutoTrain OTP

[BobWeaver]

I was looking at AutoTrain's on time performance earlier, and I noticed that a majority of its arrivals over the past week have been around an hour early southbound, and about 45 minutes early northbound. This is curious because as most of you know, Amtrak and CSX added the extra hour of trip time some time ago in order to cut down on delays and increase OTP. But now that the extra padding is in place, it always seems like #52/#53 run early, anywhere from 20 minutes to over 90 minutes. My question is why an extra hour? Before you go haywire with your keyboard, I do realize that OTP on Amtrak's premier train is of high importance since it serves as one of the proverbial flagships in the Amtrak system. But, do you think that extra hour is enough to turn away some potential passengers when they see that the total trip time is 17 hours 29 minutes versus let's say....16 hours 59 minutes if they took some padding off?

And are these early arrivals a sign of better / more infrastructure en route or the result of a better cooperating railroad?

 

[AmtrakWPK]

Probably less business lost from that, and more business gained from those happy passengers who got to their destination at least on time, if not early. Better that than lose future business from passengers who bought based on a shorter schedule which the train then did not meet, and those passengers then go out into the world and badmouth the !!#&*^$@#$^% Amtrak train that got them to their destination late.....

 

[battalion51]

WPK is right, it's always better to be early than to be late. Now with that said, you don't want to overpad to where you can't operate in a reasonable period of time. The schedule is fairly accurate during those summer months when the train is busy and CSX is running a lot more freight for the busy summer season.

 

[BobWeaver]

WPK is right, it's always better to be early than to be late. Now with that said, you don't want to overpad to where you can't operate in a reasonable period of time. The schedule is fairly accurate during those summer months when the train is busy and CSX is running a lot more freight for the busy summer season.

So if 52/53 are running consistently early through the busy summer months, will they run even earlier during winter?

 

[battalion51]

No what I was saying was that AT runs on time during the summer when traffic is heavier and heat orders are in effect. During the winter when business is lighter and heat orders aren't in effect the train will run early.