The reason Amtrak's national and NE Twitter items are never realtime is what ? Not paying their membership dues to Musk ? Amtrak IT department and servers asleep at the switch ?
Amtrak Alerts and Notices
- Thread starter jis
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I suspect a little from column A and a little from column B. The posts are identical to the notices on Amtrak.com, so they are probably using an API to post them to X/Twitter. But the API has been a mess since Musk took over.
Musk probably added pay toilets to X HQ. You can't even view direct links with full comments after the switch if not logged in. No thanks.
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On this issue I really couldn’t care less if Amtrak dumps Twitter/X altogether. Musk in his quest to be a political influencer and mess with the apis has created this situation. Amtrak does need to find another way to get the alerts out there in an easy manner for customers but I’d have no issues if it wasn’t on this platform.
They never should have been in bed with Twitter to start with. Develop their own system. Musk coming along should have been the trigger especially with 75% of the staff sent packing. But Amtrak is an outfit that won't even hire an IT summer intern to produce pdf public timetables.
Meanwhile, Southern California's Metrolink alerts/status updates continue to appear on X.
jis
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I wonder if this will continue after Musk decides to impose a subscription charge for posting. Worse still if he imposes one for reading in order to keep those pesky little snooping bots at bay
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west point
Engineer
I am puzzled. At one time on the Amtrak service notices and alerts there was an additional 2 boxes that had national alerts and Northeast alerts. boxes were to right of station advisories. They were identical to the twitter postings so used them instead until they disappeared from this link. What happened to those?
https://www.amtrak.com/alert.html
https://www.amtrak.com/alert.html
Those two tabs vanished about amonth ago.
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They were identical because they were links to the Twitter posts.
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They seem to be moving toward internal and proprietary means of sending the alerts that they were pushing through twitter before. If you have a reservation linked to your cell phone or Amtrak app they’re basically sending these out through push notifications through the Amtrak app and Text messages. Additionally the Amtrak alerts for any train can be seen by looking up train status - currently on the full website only. They don’t yet show up on train status on the app. Additionally there’s now a page where you can subscribe to Amtrak alerts for specific trains via email and text message when you don’t have a reservation.
Not acceptable.
I don't want a subscription to get emails and texts, but want to see them only when I choose to.
Most transit rail systems have systemwide alerts navigable from their home page accessible by anyone and not by querying a specific train.
I don't want a subscription to get emails and texts, but want to see them only when I choose to.
Most transit rail systems have systemwide alerts navigable from their home page accessible by anyone and not by querying a specific train.
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While Amtrak should find a platform/method to do what you suggest / I have no issue with Amtrak moving away from a platform if the primary motivation of that platform is to score points with ideological do nothing political hacks. While I have respect for some of Mr. musk’s accomplishments I have little patience for his and others desire for recognition for some of the ideological purity do nothings
Amtrak Status Maps - Delays
Amtrak Status Maps is now recording the delay information that Amtrak posts via the "Train Status" tab on its website. The delay information (if any) can be gotten by clicking on a train symbol on a map or by selecting the record for an archived train.
jb
Amtrak Status Maps is now recording the delay information that Amtrak posts via the "Train Status" tab on its website. The delay information (if any) can be gotten by clicking on a train symbol on a map or by selecting the record for an archived train.
jb
fairviewroad
Engineer
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I noticed this the other day and found it very useful. Kudos to whoever made that happen.
Bostontoallpoints
Service Attendant
Amtrak alerts and Amtrak Northeast are both active on twitter or X
trimetbusfan
OBS Chief
However they do not post alerts about every train anymore. 'Minor' delays will only be found using the train status page.
It says at the top that they only post alerts that affect 2 or more trains. 98 is almost 3 hours late, and nothing on Twitter. It does show an alert on the Train Status on the website.
trimetbusfan
OBS Chief
Not sure what you mean by ‘at the top’.
Btw, I’ve found that the ‘dixielandsoftware’ page seems to archive the delay info.
https://dixielandsoftware.net/cgi-bin/gettrain.pl?seltrain=98&selyear=2024&selmonth=06&selday=14
At the top of their Twitter feed:
Yeah, I found that on Dixieland Software after I saw @John Bobinyec post about it above. Seems to be the only place you can reliably find reasons for delays now.
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dadonatrain
Service Attendant
I don’t look at Amtrak alerts much, but occasionally I do, if they seem to be having more trouble than usual staying on time. I like to know what’s going on and why. Just now, 10:30 pm EDT July 19, I checked the asm.transitdoc map and it was really red! Seemed like pblms everywhere! So I checked alerts to see why, and it looked as if Amtrak had gone dark. Silence. Nothing at all less than 48 hours old. Is it this global IT outage? Or is it just Amtrak doesn't have the time or the resources or the inclination to tell us what’s up? Not a big issue, obviously. I’m just curious about opinions on why or how Amtrak decides to “alert” us to anything at all anytime. Seems to me like their official position on telling what’s up is “not so much”.
Are you talking about the Twitter account, Amtrakalerts? If so, yeah I have noticed it's pretty bad at providing updates. Now, I usually go to transitdocs.com and click on a train. If you click on the information button (an i) right next to the train name (shown below), it will take you to a different screen. Then if you scroll down on that screen, and click "view on statusmaps.com", and then scroll down on thatpage, it will show all the alerts Amtrak has sent out to the passengers booked on that train which is usually more reliably updated (although not always).
dadonatrain
Service Attendant
Thank you! I did not know that. I’ll try it
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