New Coach Seating Procedure: Long Distance Trains on NEC

[como]

Foreign railroads have been making seat reservations for years, and Amtrak has been doing it for Acela Express first class for over a year, and things work fine.

Come to think of it, Amtrak, and all the private railroads before that managed to reserve sleeping car space in a way that accounted for space that's used by different people for different parts of the trip. The private railroads managed to do that before there were computers. With computers, I can't see doing this as being anything but a trivial exercise. If they could do it with for sleepers 100 years ago, surely they can do it for coach today, and this has nothing to do with Amtrak emulating airline procedures.

I'm old enough to remember several family trips between Denver and Chicago on the Denver Zephyr with coach tickets with reserved seats. Our tickets would include a car number and seat number. My wife and I were in coach last night from Ottumwa to Denver. There was a crew change in Ottumwa and the conductor scanned tickets inside the station. What was interesting was that the conductor had written out slips with the names of the passengers, the destination and number of seats and was handing out the slips after scanning the tickets. He gave everyone a slip with that information and told us which car to board. The coach attendant seemed to have similar information. All the information needed to assign seats at the time they are purchased seems readily available.

 

[cocojacoby]

Unless you like rear-facing seats, you pretty much have to call VIA for most corridor bookings. They're working towards a "Euro-style" fixed seating configuration on those trains, so no longer physically rotate the seats to direction-of-travel. When booking online the rear-facing are always filled first and there are a few other idiosyncrasies that sometimes split couples or families travelling together. It's usually no problem to sort out with a human being, although as with any customer service there will be exceptions requiring a second call.

Absolutely hate this rear facing seat trend.

 

[Palmland]

I am riding train 90 today to RVR. Since this is technically an LD train I wanted to see if the seating procedure is different than in the past. It was, in a couple ways.

In the past passengers boarding at Florence waited in the station for the train to arrive. The conductor then came to the station where he then scanned tickets. You were then told to go trainside and wait for your seat assignment. After waiting there you were handed a slip of paper with your seat assignment.

Today, one of the station agents lined us up before the train arrived. As it was arriving, he led us to the platform and instructed us which direction to go to board for business or coach. About 25 were boarding. This particular agent had been a bit of a curmudgeon in the past but has apparently gone to charm school. Couldn’t have been more friendly with all the passengers.

When I got to my coach there was no delay boarding and the attendant helped those with bags. It was open seating except for those designated for 2 together or for disabled.The Amfleet II coach was clean and refurbished. The seat outlet did not work but the very pleasant and efficient attendant got the conductor to locate the seat where the circuit breaker was located. He moved it enough to get access and got it to work (all seats on my side had been without power).

Big improvement. We did leave 6 minutes late due to boarding a disabled passenger.

However, I later talked with the conductor about it and he said sometimes, if the train will be crowded, he will still give assignments so he can insure parties of two or more can stay together. That tells me the only way consistency can be achieved and help eliminate boarding delays would be if the passenger selects his own seat assignment when booking on line.

 

[crescent-zephyr]

I haven’t seen the refurbished amfleet II’s yet, they look pretty nice. The spot of color adds a lot compared to the all gray on the Amfleet I.

Thanks for the report, good to know how things are going.