By Andrew Selden, Railway Age Magazine; July 6, 2018
What does a deflated balloon look like? That is becoming an apt metaphor for travel on an Amtrak interregional train. The regime of CEO Richard Anderson is eliminating services and amenities as fast as they can think up items to ditch.
These services and amenities include station agents, meals in a dining car, dining cars altogether (no real dining car service is now available on the City of New Orleans, Silver Star, Lakeshore Limited and Capitol Limited), checked baggage at most stations, newspapers in the sleepers, usable connections to other trains, on-board service staff positions, printed timetables, Superliner railcars (a slowly growing number of them are rotting away at Beech Grove, Amtrak’s central maintenance facility), and—in the case of the Southwest Chief—the entire train altogether, between somewhere in western Kansas and Albuquerque, in favor of a bus.
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