Bill Haithcoat said:
I think that might work. But then, you said you thought they did that in Acela first class when it was first introduced and then dropped it---not sure about that. Does anybody know? After all they make quite a thing over advertising "reserved seats".-in that type of "first class" equipment. It seems kind of bad that those of us in that class still have to rush for that favorite seats just like the coach passengers.
They did indeed assign First Class seats early on when Acela was first launched. I was even able to actually select my seat from the on line site on several of my journeys. It was part of a test program that would have eventually lead to assigning seats even in Business Class on the Acela. In fact the train was even built with special equipment to work with this project.
On a normal rail car there is a rail above a seat where the conductor places the seat check, the Acela's have none. Instead above every seat in both first and business class there is an electronic device with lights that shows the row and seat number. Had the project been successful, when the conductor took your ticket, instead of punching it like they do today, he would have scanned the ticket into a PDA like device.
That would have caused the light above your seat to light, indicating that someone was sitting there to other passengers and telling the conductor that he had already collected that ticket. The light would automatically go out when the train reached the passengers destination.
The idea was that this made life easier for everyone, it indicated that the ticket had been collected, it indicated that the seat was occupied, it allowed stations further up the track to sell the seats of no shows, and it was supposed to cut out the chaff that one finds on the floor of a typical train from all of those punched tickets and seat checks.
The test program in First Class failed for several reasons, only some of which can be blamed on Amtrak. Reason one, Amtrak as usual ran out of money to finish the project. So the software if it still exists is full of bugs that never got worked out, because they had to stop paying for the R & D on the software.
Reason two, the conductors and their union balked at the ticketing devices. This was before PDA's really came into their own, so the device that Amtrak had was rather large and bulky. Carrying one around for several hours would have been a bit of a chore and I can't blame them on this concern. The conductors were of course also worried that this would cause a reduction in the number of jobs available, so they fought it for that reason too.
Reason three, the First Class passengers balked at assigned seating. There were some, like me who liked the idea, but many others who were used to just picking any seat that they wanted on the Metroliners, refused to seat in there assigned seats. And I do mean refused, I saw several passengers tell and attendant that they were not going to move to their assigned seat.
Some attendants early on tried to enforce the assigned seating, but many others fearing the loss of their tips didn't even bother to try. Most conductors also didn't seem to care, probably because they wanted the project to fail because of the reasons I mentioned above. The one time that I did see a conductor enforce the assigned seats, he actually had to threaten kicking one man off the train, before the guy would move to his assigned seat.
So after maybe four or five months of assigned seating in First Class and with the equipment not yet ready for use, and the lack of funding the project was abandoned or at least put on a very distant back burner. Today of course with the advances in software and the size of the PDA, this is an idea that probably should be resurrected and brought to fruition. However, with Amtrak many other far more important needs for the limited funding that they have, I doubt that we will see this projected getting dusted off and implemented.
