Originally Posted by NYCommuter

For prepaid meals- if you could just pay for dining car meals (say, a set $15 or whatever) when buying your ticket, perhaps that could be stamped on your ticket; dining car staff wouldn't have to mess with payment on board; and perhaps some people wouldn't end up eating anyway. Wouldn't that be a win-win for Amtrak?
I don't really understand the point of this. Either you make prepayment for food mandatory, or it just confuses the issue for the dining car staff by having some people pay cash and others use vouchers. If it's mandatory to choose and pay for your food in advance (presumably, at least a day in advance so the food can be loaded on the train like it is on a plane), I can tell you that there would be a lot of furious passengers who got hungry mid-trip and then discovered that they couldn't buy food on the train. (I would be one of them.) And surely the costs of setting up and administering the system of pre-loading customized food for every passenger would more than offset the revenue benefit of the few people who order their food and then don't pick it up. Amtrak would still have to pay for the cost of that food, right? So all they would gain is the few bucks' difference between the food cost and the price to the passenger.
For Penn Station, if an Amtrak staff member could meet a traveler at the 7th Avenue entrance and guide the person through the station, that would be great. I didn't know that redcaps would do that; when my out-of-town relatives come through Penn Station, since there is no map online, I have to go there to meet them and nagivate the station with them. Surely some people would pay for that type of service; American Airlines offers it.
Or people could just read the signs in the station telling them where to go. Or ask other travelers, like a few people did with me when I was standing at Penn last week.