Paulus, I know you have a bizarre crusade against both sleeper class and food service.
I ask you to sit down and properly analyze the Lake Shore Limited, the train I care most about.
The vast majority of coach traffic on the LSL is going overnight to (or from) Chicago. And wants breakfast.
Recall that coach passengers account for 47% of the dining car patronage, though they pay an average of $10.30 per meal.
I believe they are getting breakfast in the dining car. I believe many coach passengers would not take the train if they couldn't get a decent breakfast. Which you can't get in the cafe car.
Would an upgraded cafe car which offered salads and healthy sandwiches work for lunch and dinner? Probably -- the Acela cafe car is better than the "national" cafe car. Would an even more upgraded cafe car which offered cereal and freshly-cooked eggs for breakfast work? Sure.
But *this isn't being done* -- instead we're seeing mindless cuts which WILL reduce ridership & revenue while keeping costs high.
The LSL currently pretty much breaks even on direct costs as far as we can tell. Lose the breakfast, lose the coach clientele, lose more money.
Roomettes on the Lake Shore Limited are sold out for 6 of the next 10 days. The cheapest available is $445. Bedroom prices go up to $1001 when they're not sold out completely (which they are 4 of the next 10 days). And prices on the LSL are only going up as the years go on, and I'm resigned to that fact already.
The sleepers on the LSL are a profit center and will become more profitable as time goes on.
If the LSL ever managed to reliably run on time, I have no idea how high the prices would go. Poor on-time-performance has been shown to suppress ridership by a factor of 50% or more, and to force prices down similarly.
The clientele in sleeper class on the LSL is much like the clientele in Acela First Class -- who also get their meals included with their ticket price, presumably as a marketing gimmick. This is the quality-sensitive portion of the market. Except the Acela meal quality and selection is, for no obvious reason, being kept much higher -- even with much cheaper tickets, and far more people getting "included" meals.
Clearly it isn't the food quality or selection which is the expensive part of the dining cars -- so why is Amtrak cutting the food quality and selection? This is just STUPID.
There are lots of things which could improve dining service, and they aren't being done.
One problem with the dining cars is that a bunch of people are being paid full time to serve slightly less than the whole room for about 11.5 hours a day, closing during the popular hours of 10-11:30 and 3-5. There's something fundamentally inefficient about those closures, especially when the dining car is packed.
The LSL is actually wasting the staff even more than that, paying them to provide only two meals. It costs the same amount in labor for staff to provide two meals or three... but you get a more revenue from serving three than from serving two.
It seems that there are three staff serving -- but there could be two if money-handling wasn't necessary. Hence the "cashless diner" proposal in the LSL PIP. Which isn't being implemented, because instead some idiot has decided to shrink the menu.
Another problem is the Heritage dining cars, which probably have ludicrously high direct costs for maintenance alone. It will be interesting to see whether costs improve when the Viewliner dining cars go into service, assuming Amtrak hasn't been taken over by dopes who intend to eliminate dining car service without replacing it with anything.
And that's the thing. There are theoretical viable alternatives to sit-down full-service dining. But if you're doing that, you implement the alternative *first*, then remove the dining car -- you don't just slash service, destroy your reputation, lose ridership, and lose revenue.
prices have gone up. The additional $90 should cover the two meals provided; really it should cover three.
