Newbie in TX

[fordt]

Made a few trips by train as a kid including one memorable one thru communist East Berlin to get into West Berlin and recently got back into it with an Albuquerque to Flagstaff journey to the Grand Canyon with friends from Santa Fe. Ridden most all the big steam trains and am planning an anniversary trip next February on the Coast Starlight S-N in a bedroom! Couldn’t talk the spouse to taking the trip from SA to LA to start it off! Now to get in the threads and figure out what a bucket is!

 

[Bob Dylan]

Made a few trips by train as a kid including one memorable one thru communist East Berlin to get into West Berlin and recently got back into it with an Albuquerque to Flagstaff journey to the Grand Canyon with friends from Santa Fe. Ridden most all the big steam trains and am planning an anniversary trip next February on the Coast Starlight S-N in a bedroom! Couldn’t talk the spouse to taking the trip from SA to LA to start it off! Now to get in the threads and figure out what a bucket is!

Always good to have a another Texan join the Forum! Welcome!!!

 

[pennyk]

Welcome to Amtrak Unlimited.

 

[joelkfla]

Now to get in the threads and figure out what a bucket is!

They're simply fare levels for sleepers. Each route has 5 or 6 buckets for each type of sleeper room, and of course within the buckets the fare varies by length of trip.

Amtrak calls them buckets because they'll allocate a certain number of rooms at each fare level, so they'll say there are 2 rooms in the low bucket, 4 rooms in the 2nd lowest, etc. Rooms are sold from the lowest available bucket until all the rooms in that bucket have been sold, and then the next room comes from the next higher available bucket.

The fares in the buckets are fixed (until Amtrak decides to increase them), but Amtrak regularly moves available rooms between buckets based on supply & demand (yield management.)

We have a member who tracks the bucket fares between end points on each route, and his latest chart is here (as of this writing.) The fares on the chart are for a single rider at full fare. A 2nd passenger sharing the room pays only approximate coach fare, not the sleeper fare.