Oversold trains. Is it common?
 

I took the 175 tonight and was ticketed from NYP to PHL. For personal schedule reasons, I hopped on at NWK instead and there were ZERO seats available.

I was pretty surprised to see this on a Thursday night (no holiday that I know of). Should I be surprised to see it oversold? Is this a common occurrence? Is there any "compensation" for riders that don't get a seat?

The conductor was trying working hard to find people who were getting off and matching them with people who were standing/on the floor. ^

(I was on an Acela from WAS to NYP last Friday at 3 pm and it was VERY close to capacity, but not quite.)

Well, Amtrak sells those as "reserved" seats, so it's not like unreserved trains (e.g. the Pacific Surfliner), where they don't guarantee you a seat. I don't know what Amtrak's official policy is, but you should definitely call CS to ask for compensation.

From WAS to NYP, trains 2124 and 2126 (6 and 7 pm Acela) have been full on Thursdays for several weeks running. I've arrived early for 2124 and found I had to take 2126, or arrived early for 2126 and found I had to take a regional, several times. I hope Amtrak opens an additional Acela service or adds a car to an existing service.

An additional train might be possible if Amtrak can clean them fast and get them turned around fast enough.

It is not possible however to add a car to an existing Acela Express train. First, there are no extra cars. So Amtrak would have to shorten one Acela train to make another longer. Second, unlike normal trains, to add or remove a car requires that the entire train go to the shop and spend several hours in the shop. Acela doesn't use traditional couplers, so cars can't be easily added or subtracted.

That would be nice, but there are no more "cars" to add (the trains are semi-permanent sets with no spare "cars"), and no more trains. And they broke the mold, too.

I was wondering about that. I knew from personal observation that they're not articulated, permanently-coupled trainsets like the Talgos are, but I didn't know if they operated as one set or could be coupled/uncoupled. So it is possible (though they'd never actually do it).

Re: wxguy: "they broke the mold"...? Were they worried about someone else stealing the Acela design...?!

Not only is it possible to change the consist length, Amtrak has actually operated a 5 car Acela trainset for several months. Normal length is six cars.

Back in October 2004 trainset #18 with power cars 2025 & 2023 suffered a derailment in New Haven. First Class car #3201 suffered some serious damage to the underframe and was removed from the consist for several months to fix the damage.

The trainset continued to operate for several months, if not a year or more (I honestly don't remember how long it was out of service), without a First Class car. From all reports that I've seen, they only ran that trainset between NY & Boston during that time with First Class blanked out from sale on the one round trip it made each weekday.

No, more like there were too many problems so it's unlikely that anyone will ever use that mold again. And then there was the lawsuit and counter suits between Amtrak and Bombardier (the manufacturor), finally settled out of court.

And then of course there is the proverbial question of where does Amtrak get the money?

I've had a couple of situations like this on reserved trains. Conductors sometimes will purposefully not punch/collect your ticket in order so that you can get a refund. I also once had the conductor triple punch my ticket in such a situation, which, believe it or not, is equal to a 50% credit of the value of the ticket on a future trip (I was skeptical, too).

If Amtrak was an airline they would have denied you boarding, given you a hotel voucher, and offered you a confirmed seat to Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon. Glad to hear the conductor was being proactive. ^

Also keep in mind the cars that were sent to the Pacific Northwest to cover the Talgos when they were sidelined. There were a couple trains canceled on the NEC due to the equipment swap. Most of those cars should be back or on the way back to their respective homes with the Talgos back in service.

how hard was it to get the 50% credit? I have never heard of this.

This has happened twice to me. Once the conductor triple-punched the ticket because of the seating situation (lack of seat with a reserved seat). Once a customer service agent in WAS did so due to major service issues on the train I had just gotten off of.
To "redeem" the credit, I just had to go to a ticket counter. I was really skeptical the first time (I thought they were just pulling my leg to get rid of me), but I turned in the ticket stub and the agent deducted the amount of 50% of the triple-punched ticket from my new ticket. This was 5-6 years ago, and I remember thinking "What a strange way to do things!"

Just another nice thing about Amtrak: you don't have to sit down and secure your seatbelt for takeoff and landing. (Otherwise, I'm sure some airlines would be selling 10% more tickets and just have the extra people sit in the aisle during the flight...)

In these oversold situations, there's always the cafe car...

No there wasn't any space there either. Totally packed also :)

I am sure they could do worse than that...take out all the seats and have standing room only.