As I said, Amtrak has been really aggressive this year in their inventory allocation and they have largely stopped allocating any inventory to the lower buckets at 11 months out as they used to. The number of months out has ceased to be a meaningful measure of anything when it comes to pricing.

I and other people at a board where we watch these things have seen individual days dropping on certain trains. There appear to be at least some drops for mid winter now. You would expect those to have had inventory allocated in lower buckets from the start, but Amtrak appears to have put most inventory at mid and higher buckets. They are only now coming down, and even that looks reluctant, being on a piecemeal basis, day by day, train by train.

You aren't imagining things, and low buckets are much, much harder to come by right now. But if Amtrak is successful in their more aggressive yield management strategy, that is, they are selling this rooms at higher price points and they are not going out empty, don't expect a change back. Hopefully, they will find out there isn't demand at these price levels and they will come back down as Amtrak adjusts to maximize the actual yield. But always remember, supply is severely constrained, 10 bedrooms at most for most Superliner trains (2 sleepers), many with just 5. Plus, with the withdrawal of transdorms from many trains, the supply of roomettes is more constrained since the crew must be accommodated in the regular sleepers. Again, with 2 sleepers, there are a maximum of 26 roomettes without counting any occupied by the OBS crew when there is no transdorm.

Frankly, many speculate that Amtrak is deliberately restricting already limited supply by running short consists and eliminating transdorms to keep prices high.