CMK10

I'm sorry to report that the dining car removal is now permanent:

https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/Conte...=1251627987391

JoeBas

"Amtrak will continue to explore ways to provide food and beverage service at lower cost. "

Primarily by, you know... not.

dilanesp

This is a pretty big confirmation that a lot of the things that outside groups like NARP and railfans say about Amtrak's costs and the source of its operating losses is dead wrong.

Obviously, Amtrak wouldn't make this permanent if it wasn't saving them money. To me, it's almost a repeat of the history of the end of the pre-Amtrak era, where a number of railroads saved money by eliminating full service diners.

serpens

Not at all obvious to me. If Amtrak has bogus accounting procedures, then there could be a bogus savings. It seems at least as likely that someone is trying to placate the likes of Mica by eliminating dining service on a route, without regard to actual costs or savings.

nerd

It sounds like you have information on how things changed on the revenue side?

dilanesp

Bogus accounting procedures affect how you report profits and losses to the outside world.

But nobody uses bogus accounting procedures when actually making business decisions. You use the real numbers, because you need to know what really makes and loses the business money.

I'm really not convinced that Amtrak uses bogus numbers to begin with. It's far, far more likely that advocacy groups, who have a pretty big ideological axe they are grinding, are going to use bogus numbers than Amtrak. But nonetheless, even if Amtrak, say, uses bogus numbers to keep members of Congress happy, they aren't going to use those same numbers in deciding whether to take a diner off the Silver Star. If doing that sort of thing increases their losses, at a time when they are fighting for every dollar of subsidy, they'd just never do it. No business executive deliberately takes steps that put the business in a worse position.

So we have to assume that either this had no effect on the bottom line or improved it. (And Occam's razor would suggest it improved it, given everything that IS known about the costs of Amtrak's dining car operations.)

My prediction is that this is the wave of the future, and it's probably a good thing to the extent that it puts the long distance routes on a more solid economic footing. But it's not good for AGR members who travel in long distance sleepers.

GrayAnderson

If Amtrak can make the cafe thing work well, a beefed-up cafe CAN work for some of the one-night overnight trains (the longer Western trains are another story, however). That being said, Amtrak did not handle the Star situation terribly well (simply using the National Cafe Menu and then the NEC menu don't quite cut it).

CMK10

Perhaps, but the idea that sleeper passengers have to go line up in the Cafe Car to pay for overpriced, microwaved food that frequently runs out, is really disappointing.

KDCAflyer

I won't be taking LD sleeper trips anymore, that's for sure. Now that AGR has been heavily devalued, I can't afford to take those sorts of trips anyway.

I'm not sure why they bothered to order all those dining cars if they're not going to use them anyway. Maybe Amtrak outside of corridor service really does deserve to die.