This Week at Amtrak 2005-12-12

  1. Come February, don’t get on certain Amtrak trains when you’re hungry. You likely won’t have your appetite appeased by what is being served - or, perhaps, what is not being served. Amtrak is preparing its dining car crews for serious cutbacks in February 2006 with the instigation of one of Amtrak’s worst concepts: “diner lite.”Diner lite will be instituted on the Crescent (still, despite every effort by Amtrak’s dining car department, one of the railroad’s best diners), one of the two Florida trains, the City of New Orleans, Texas Eagle, the Cardinal, and most likely one of the Western transcontinental trains (probably the Sunset Limited). This disaster-in-the-making program was first pulled from under a slimy rock earlier this year when Amtrak was in one of its “wannabe airline” disaster modes.

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