The Amtrak Website Has a "New Look."

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jis said:
Unfortunately Amtrak seems to be trying to do requirements gathering and the entire development project in terms of a giant bug report :D
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Kinda sounds like the people at my work. Getting complete requirements AND good data to work with is like pulling teeth. :p
 
I have a recent reservation that was modified by Amtrak to reflect a change in schedule. After they made the change, the changed itinerary appears fine on my Smartphone Amtrak App, but the itinerary content has disappeared from the Amtrak web site. Sigh. The original booking was done on the new Amtrak web site.

I just requested an email of the eTicket. Let's see what happens. When I made the original reservation no email was sent to me, and now even the content of the itinerary is blank. Needless to say, I am yet to be able to print any eTicket out.

Fortunately I have preserved the essentials of it on my Apple Wallet.

This whole thing is pretty disconcerting when compared to the few airline reservation web sites that I use often.
 
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I've been getting this since yesterday afternoon.

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ChuckL said:
I'm retired from IT after 30 plus years and this frankly has to be one of the worst software upgrades and migrations that I've seen. But I I'll be good and keep biting my tongue so I don't say what I've really wanted to say for the past couple of weeks.
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The worst migration I have ever been a part of in my lifetime was the change in Texas when the Electricity market was de-regulated in 2002, (except for those served by a company owned by a municipality or a utility cooperative.) If Texas were an independent nation, its electricity market would be the 11th largest in the world.

All orders for residential and commercial electric service, start service, and stop service, for about 85% of the state now went through a clearing house, who was then supposed to notify each local operator of power stations and power lines to start or stop or repair service.

Many hundreds of thousands of orders for stops and order for starts statewide, got delayed for months at the clearing house, due to programming glitches that somehow had not been foreseen in the pre-lauch "testing". One of the larger electric providers, poo pooed the problems by stating that over 98% of all service orders had been accomplished. Well, yeah, with 6 million customers statewide, that 2% of orders still mucked up in the "pipeline" was a LOT of customers calling in to sort out their problems. And that was 2% of all orders over many months... as old orders finally got fixed, new orders coming in were being delayed.

I know, because I worked in the telephone frontline customer service for a large electric provider.

Before de-regulation, there might have been 3 or 4 times a day when the call light turned yellow to indicate that there were customers holding. That usually cleared up after 10-15 minutes.

But, after the de-regualtion mess got into full swing, I would log into my phone pad in the morning, and the call light would be red, meaning there were many many customers already on hold. And the call light stayed red all day long, and was red when I logged off each day.

Eventually, after many months, the programmers contracted to come in and fix the mess got it fixed.

But you would have just expected more testing for a $24 Billion electric market. Texas, after all wasn't the first state to de-regulate their electric market...

I say all that, particularly, because before de-regulation the utility company operation was regulated by Govt. And Amtrak, is also Govt. regulated.
 
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It's still sloppy and confusing as all get out. The text for "required medical devices" and "bicycles and bicycle trailers" on the baggage policy page is swapped. The way it reads, only bicycles, bicycle trailers and folding bicycles qualify as medical devices. Personally, I think that's fine, but some people might have an issue with it
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.

On the plus side, the page lists long distance trains as having trainside checked bike service, while the dedicated bicycle page still does not. Even so, it's not clear about where roll up service is available or what, exactly, it is.
 
Getting the correct train status interactively is a bit tricky. For example, I checked the status of a train yesterday, the 25th. Today, the first time I wanted to check on a train, the date (26th) was already filled in. So I just sent off the request. It came back with YESTERDAY'S data. So evidently the pre-filled-in time is just for guidance. The first time you need to look up a train for that date, you need to click on the date.

jb
 
Using Firefox on a Mac, I just got to the Amtrak home page with no error. Since I didn't ask it to do anything, it did everything I asked.
 
I have had no problem getting to the site using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE or even Edge the last few days. Of course once you get there it is a crap shoot, but that is a separate rant.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum
 
Maglev said:
I was just looking to see if the new Cascades schedule was posted, and I found this description of the Cascades route:

Amtrak CascadesBoston - Vancouver, BC - Seattle - Tacoma - Portland - Salem - Eugene

Northwest Train Routes

Effective February 20, 2016

I wonder if that's Boston to Vancouver via Concord, NH and Montreal?
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This error has now been corrected.
 
PerRock said:
PaulM said:
I've been getting this since yesterday afternoon.

{Image Removed}

We are currently conducting site maintenance.
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Try clearing your cache. If I recall it's a [shift]+[F5] to get FF to refresh and not use cache. Either that or change your DNS.

peter
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Thanks for trying, but clearing cache, refreshing FF, and reinstalling it didn't work (notebook, Windows 10.

But it does work with Firefox on my Windows 7 desktop. So, hypothetically speaking, how does the same URL on one machine- operating system-browser combination retrieve a different web page than all other combinations. Incidentally, I'm googling Amtrak to get to https://www.amtrak.com/home/;so it's not like I'm entering a bad URL.
 
jis said:
Has anyone been successful in updating their Profile using the new website? I seem to be having singular level of non-success over the last week or so. All that I am trying to do is change a telephone number.
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I just tried and it worked fine for me. Using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
 
keelhauled said:
jis said:
Has anyone been successful in updating their Profile using the new website? I seem to be having singular level of non-success over the last week or so. All that I am trying to do is change a telephone number.
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I just tried and it worked fine for me. Using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
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Surprisingly, I was able to do it using Safari on an iPhone (not the mobile app). Just logged into amtrak.com using Safari.
So chalk that one up for a possible FF specific problem with the amtrak.com site.

Oh, and it also let me login using my email address as the id, and did not insist on my AGR number.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum
 
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jis said:
keelhauled said:
jis said:
Has anyone been successful in updating their Profile using the new website? I seem to be having singular level of non-success over the last week or so. All that I am trying to do is change a telephone number.
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I just tried and it worked fine for me. Using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
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Surprisingly, I was able to do it using Safari on an iPhone (not the mobile app). Just logged into amtrak.com using Safari.
So chalk that one up for a possible FF specific problem with the amtrak.com site.

Oh, and it also let me login using my email address as the id, and did not insist on my AGR number.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum
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Well, the Profile change that I thought I had succeeded with was a fake success indication from the web site, since the change did not go to the database. So no, it is not an FF problem. Same result from Chrome too. haven't tried IE or Edge. Maybe it only works from Microsoftware, who knows?
Also, apparently now they have a secret list of acceptable domains to which they will send emails. They will silently ignore other email addresses and leave you wondering what happened. At least I know they will send email to att.net.
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But they certainly silently fail to send email to several of my private domain addresses.

Really, Amtrak could not be quick enough in summarily firing whoever is doing their web site upgrade. But of course they won't. They thrive on the mysteries brought forth by incompetence it would seem.
 
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