Volume 3 Number 11
- Call it what you like. Some will call it bait and switch, some the ‘ole switcheroo, some will call it a shell game, and others will call it smoke and mirrors. It’s your choice. What we’re talking about is Amtrak’s addition of 64 managers to train and manage the newly reduced dining car staffs on long distance trains. Yes, this new program, which attempts to validate its existence by saying that 60% of the alleged losses in Amtrak dining cars are due to personnel costs, and where over 100 onboard personnel have been furloughed so there will be less employees in the dining car and lower costs, has added 64 managers to make sure things run smoothly.Okay, let’s take a fresh look at this. Dining cars, prior to the disaster known as Diner Lite, ran with crews of anywhere from five to nine employees, depending on the train. These people were managed by the existing management staff. So, due to the demands of micro-managing by Congress, dining car staffs have been slashed, mostly to save money and demonstrate to Congress Amtrak can attempt to be fiscally responsible. At least 100 employees from crew bases all over the country have lost their jobs. There are now rigid seating regimens in dining cars so the new, tiny-sized staffs can handle all of the passengers who require meals to stay alive. Chefs, which once had one to three assistants, now work alone, and are also dishwashers. Lead Service Attendants, which used to handle the duties of host and money manager, now also work as waiters and bus boys. Dining cars originally designed to seat 72 passengers and have a wait staff of six, now have a wait staff of one. This required 64 new managers? On whose payroll? Are these managers charged to food and beverage budgets, or some other budget that Congress is not peering over its collective reading glasses at for every decimal point? Does this mean that those lower on the dining car food chain have lost their wait staff jobs, while others in the company at a favorable managerial level have retained their jobs, but with questionable new responsibilities? Inquiring minds want to know, especially those of former Amtrak employees now on the street looking for a new job, and passengers forced to eat what some have already called the indigestible Diner Lite bill of fare.
- Here’s an example of what Amtrak apologists and cultists are fighting tooth and nail to preserve and protect. It’s a mystery to any rational thinking person why this type of event causes no more than a shrug of the shoulders for that group, with a non-apologetic “things happen” comment. This type of event is not acceptable for Amtrak, any airline, or bus company.This story comes from KGPE CBS TV47 in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The students were traveling from Sacramento to their home in Corcoran, California, on San Joaquin corridor train No. 704, covering a distance of 254 miles in Central California.
“Fifth graders experience Amtrak delay
“Posted: 2/24/2006 6:43:17 PM
“A field trip turned into an overnight ordeal for some valley fifth graders.
“31 students and eight chaperones from Corcoran Elementary were stuck near Denair overnight. They were stranded inside an Amtrak train.
“Friday morning, Mrs. Escobedo’s 5th grade classroom at Mark Twain Elementary was empty after a class field trip turned into a nightmare.
“On the way home from a tour of the state capital students and their chaperones were stranded inside a train car in a remote part of Stanislaus County.
“Amtrak turned off the engines and without ventilation or fresh water, students started getting sick. Worried parents waited at the Corcoran train station throughout the night.
“Students used cell phones to let their parents know about the delay.
“As the hours passed, parents called Amtrak begging for answers.
“School principal Mike Anderson was first told by Amtrak the delay would be short.
“Several hours later, he started calling bus companies to try and get the students picked up.
“Eventually he got a district bus driver on the road. But students were already on their way back.
“Students finally arrived at eight in the morning; nearly 12 hours off schedule.
“The company released a statement saying they will refund the students’ money.”
Corcoran is an unmanned Amtrak station. While the parents of the stranded students waited at the station all night for the train to arrive, there was no Amtrak ticket agent there to help or provide information.
Now, here’s what happened, much of which could have been eliminated easily, had anyone at Amtrak cared enough about this train: The initial cause of the delay was vandalism. Somebody stacked heavy metal tie plates on both rails at approximately mile post 79 on the Union Pacific owned and operated tracks, approximately five railroad miles west of Stockton. San Joaquin Train 704 of Thursday struck the tie plates, and the engine sustained broken air hoses and a punctured fuel tank, rendering it inoperable. No one on board the train was hurt, as is typical in this type of incident, and the students had been on the train less than an hour after boarding in Sacramento.
The fuel leak was confined and emergency repairs made to the air hoses; after a delay of three hours and five minutes, the train proceeded to a downtown Stockton unmanned commuter station (ACE station) where it waited pending further arrangements for the passengers. This would have put the train into the Stockton station about 8:45 P.M., still 170 miles from Corcoran.
Meanwhile, San Joaquin Train 715 was coming west, bound for Oakland with two units and an extra set of San Joaquin cars in its consist. At Stockton (on BNSF tracks, different from the tracks Train No. 704 was using) the extra locomotive and set of cars was cut off; that equipment, now the rescue train for the students, proceeded to Stockton (ACE Station) which is on UP. After one hour and 51 minutes, with the passengers transferred, that new equipment departed Stockton (ACE Station) as a stub substitute Train 704 to Corcoran and ultimately to the train’s terminal, Bakersfield.
At Turlock (on the railroad map, but Denair on the road map, as noted in the broadcast story) and close to midnight, the operating crew’s Hours of Service expired. By law, the engineer and conductor could not move the train because their length of time they were allowed to work under federal regulations had expired. The train then sat for six hours and five minutes waiting for a relief crew to come and lawfully operate the train to Corcoran and Bakersfield.
Let’s look at a couple of critical factors here. People are paid at Amtrak specifically to keep up with how long crews can legally operate a train, and be responsible for having replacement crews at the ready, as well as make arrangement to get crews to a predetermined meeting point. This obviously did not happen.
This was not a long distance train, with a single frequency on a long route (although that, too would not have been a good excuse). This was a corridor train, that has six trains in each direction everyday, for a total of 12 trains over that trackage. No one could find a spare crew that was legally rested and available for work? Nobody had a contingency plan in place for this type of problem? How high up in the corporate food chain, above the operations center, was someone notified when this train was running longer than six hours late, and at what level were decisions made about the fate of this train? If not, why not? Did anyone make a decision on this to take some sort of action, or were events just allowed to play themselves out?
Someone close to the situation in California reports that the students and others on the train were fed complimentary food. This is a point in Amtrak’s favor. Probably, many of the fifth graders thought it was something of an adventure; however, would you want to be stranded for 12 extra hours in a California Car coach that’s 10 feet wide and 85 feet long with 31 fifth graders? Too, these were short distance corridor cars, not ones with seats designed for long distance travel. How bad did it get inside that train? If the television station’s story is correct, and the head end power was shut down, there would have been no lights, no working restrooms, and no air movement.
Here is what one California wag with knowledge of the situation had to add:
“Nobody will admit culpability by Amtrak personnel in not monitoring the crew situation, or shortages of personnel on the extra board. At many Amtrak crew bases across the country (though I don’t know if this situation exists on the almighty Northeast Corridor), the extra board roster is ZERO.
“Jobs at Portland [Oregon] are now being blanked because of inadequate staffing on the conductor’s extra board. Just a few months ago a man who had worked as an assistant conductor out of Los Angeles on the Sunset, transferred to Salt Lake City. That crew base was so short that within two weeks of a rather rapid qualification on the route, he was working Winnemucca-Salt Lake City and Salt Lake City-Grand Junction … BY HIMSELF as the lone conductor. He was the lone conductor when the California Zephyr struck a truck near Green River, Utah and derailed its lead unit.
“In any case, the train involved here, #704, departed its origin at Sacramento on time at 4:25 P.M.. … it’s quite apparent that the train sustained no other major delays enroute [before the original train hit the vandalized trackage].”
This proves, again, why there has - for the sake of the future of passenger rail in this country - to be major policy and personnel changes at Amtrak. Too many things of this nature have been allowed to occur, time and time again. Amtrak and Union Pacific, too, may have been victimized by vandals on the UP tracks; it’s the cost of doing business. Amtrak’s main concern should have been the comfort and safety of its passengers, which it failed, yet again, as it has done continuously. Was everyone asleep at CNOC, the national operations center in Wilmington, Delaware while all of this was occurring? Or, is this just another example of the bigotry of the Northeast Corridor mentality, that since it happened west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or south of Washington, D.C., that it’s really unimportant in the Amtrak scheme of things?
Here is a question that must be asked, and it must be honestly answered. Unless you are a die-hard Amtrak apologist and cultist that really doesn’t care what Amtrak does as long as you’re allowed to ride a train, would you, as things stand right now, willingly board an Amtrak train and be dependant on it to get you to your destination in a reasonable manner? Would you put a young or elderly family member on a train and expect them to be treated with the requirements that go with their age? Could you, in good conscience, recommend Amtrak to someone else as a reliable way to travel? Those are only questions each individual can answer for themselves, in their own good conscience. From the “reasonable man” standpoint that is taught in law classrooms, the answer would have to be “no.” We all deserve better, for what we are paying out of the federal treasury each year in free federal monies. Most of these problems are just due to employee incompetence, or ingrained corporate policy, that just doesn’t care what happens. This isn’t about money, it’s about competent staff management, or lack thereof.
- On a much less dysfunctional note, there is good news for actual potential Amtrak revenues instead of a continuing increase in the flow of free federal monies. Amtrak has instituted a number of train consist changes, all of them adding equipment to too small consists. Here is what Amtrak announced in its computer reservations system:The Sunset Limited will add a full sleeping car back into the consist (it previously ran with two full sleeping cars before the cutbacks due to Hurricane Katrina) in March between Los Angeles and New Orleans (still no word on when the train will return east of New Orleans; CSX is finishing up track repairs from Hurricane Katrina destruction there, now). The train currently runs with only roomette and special needs bedroom accommodations in the transition sleeper, formerly known as the crew dormitory.
The Empire Builder will add a sleeping car between Chicago and Seattle in mid-March.
The Crescent adds a second sleeping car between New York City and New Orleans, beginning March 1st.
Due to heavy demand, the Auto Train between suburban Washington, D.C. and suburban Orlando, Florida will continue to operate with six sleeping cars through mid-May.
Trains in the Midwest Corridor which have been operating with Superliner equipment (which is more reliable in Winter than single level Horizon cars), will switch back to Horizon equipment during March, restoring business class service to these corridor trains.
Also, the Heartland Flyer between Fort Worth, Texas and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma will carry an extra coach during the month of March.
More equipment means more seats and berths available for sale, which means more revenue generated by Amtrak. This is good.
- Amtrak has announced that Yankee Holidays, a well-known private tour operator, has been named Amtrak’s national tour operator, and will manage and operate the nationwide Amtrak Vacations brand. Amtrak and Yankee Holidays are currently developing a full complement of packages and a working program, which will be sold to consumers through travel agents, tour operators, and Amtrak starting on April 3rd.This is a welcome return of a full vacation package option for Amtrak travelers. Many travelers like the “one stop shopping” concept of being able to obtain transportation, hotels, rental cars, and other add-ons through one simple booking. This strengthens the appeal of long distance and corridor travel for leisure travel (and some business travelers, too seeking reputable destination accommodations in addition to rail travel).
Amtrak’s previous Amtrak Vacations vendor went out of business over a year ago.