High sleeper fares on the Crescent: why?

[neroden]

Current reports are that a lot of problems are due to catastrophic shortages of car maintenance workers, due to management (Gardner) being absurdly incompetent during the early days of the pandemic and actually furloughing or allowing early retirement for workers. They're trying to hire up now but it takes time to train maintenance workers.

They're working around it with things like moving maintenance for some trains from Chicago to St. Louis (where they apparently have more maintenance workers) but this is not a quick problem to solve.