Reserved Seating Question
 

I have a weird question about assigned seating on NE Regional Business Class and Acela Express:

Hypothetical situation: The train BOS-WAS has 2 seats (for simplicity) Person 1 books Seat A BOS-NYP and Person 2 books Seat B NYP-WAS. Will person C looking to book NHV-PHL find zero inventory?

I think so -- Amtrak is not set up to move passengers around in order to open up seats for partial sectors (or to do "more efficient" seat assignments)...

I think I agree with the poster above. I rode the Acela quiet ride car last week BOS-PHL and noticed that just about every seat was reserved when I made my reservation. However, in reality, less than half the seats were ever occupied, even after NYP.

Two further notes -- I always book window seats, and would be "annoyed" to say the least if Amtrak were to move me to an aisle seat in order to accommodate the hypothetical NHV-PHL passenger in post # 1.

I have wondered why the online seat map does not get updated en route -- as people get off, leaving vacant seats, the online seat map should show that the seats are now available. But that doesn't happen. On my last NYP-WAS trip, my car was full when we left NYP, but only had about 10 passengers left when we left BWI. Yet, the online seat map still showed a full car!