Therefore, I feel their mission is to move the people. If you aren't moving people, find out why. What can you do to bring people to your product? I'd love nothing more to cut fares but Congress will never allow it. So, marketing must do what they can to entice people to ride.
Run more coaches and more sleepers. Run faster. Stock enough food and a large enough variety of food, and a sufficiently well-documented list of ingredients, to ensure that people don't have to carry coolers of food on board. (Coolers of food are fine if the train's half-empty, but problematic if you have the large ridership you want.)
I am more or less fine with the cafe food on the Downeaster (and presumably on the Acela though I haven't tried it). The national cafe menu isn't good enough.
And I'm fine with cafe-style service -- *until* it starts turning into lines snaking out to the vestibule, at which point it becomes essential to find another service method.Empire Service usually runs with only 2-4 cars full, and the cafe is fine with that. On really busy days, they fill 7 cars and the cafe is
NOT OK; the lines are stretching into the next car and it's completely overwhelmed.
Amtrak needs to have a method of food service provision
which can cope with high volumes, because *high volumes are what trains are for*. At-seat ordering and delivery of cafe food might be highly effective, but I'm pretty sure it would require increasing the number of coach attendants, and publishing and documenting the meal-break hours which they get, since they couldn't get meal breaks when the passengers are getting meals.
Amtrak needs to be prepared to deal with high volumes of passengers, because that's what a successful train service has.
The cafes can't handle high volumes.