FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Following Amtrak’s announcement in March concerning charter trips and passenger cars, the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society made the decision to delay ticket sales for The Joliet Rocket in order to reassess and rec...
http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2018/04/11-nickel-plate-road-765-operator-to-offer-joliet-rocket-tickets-in-may
Brian Schmidt, Editor, Classic Trains magazine
Did anyone see this ( Amtrak decision) coming at all. I don't think so. This could become quite difficult.
I have a bone to pick with people that would put up a subject line like "[Fort Wayne] to offer 'Joliet Rocket' tickets in May" as of today, many days after the announced Amtrak ban on charter moves.
The plain English interpretation, let alone the rhetorical interpretation, of that language would be that some arrangement was reached that would allow the tickets to be sold in May. This of course gets those of us not sufficiently experienced in the clickthrough-generating ways of the Newswire people to click on the item with excitement about how the issue was resolved. Only to find, of course, that nothing is new except our being fooled again.
Something the Newswire has yet to report on is the 'clarification' apparently issued by Gardner about how PV and charter moves are being considered going forward. From a very recent post in a thread on RyPN:
Gardner was also asked why Amtrak suddenly decided to forego revenue earned by private cars and special trains. “Our policy,” he said, “…is to simply constrict the number of routes we operate over and the type of services we run” so that any additional revenue comes “with a minimum amount of disruption and distraction away from our core business.” Some past charter moves, he said, “involved us running one-off routes off of our core network onto various host railroads, and frankly, exposing the company to new operating challenges and safety risks.” Amtrak’s goal, he said, is only to offer these services on its current routes “where we can use equipment that we are confident in and the requirements on our end are manageable, not a distraction, and do not divert our core staff from the job of becoming fully PTC implemented, focusing on improving on-time performance, and providing great customer service.”
To which Kelly Lynch, a person relevant to this thread topic, noted that most steam excursions intentionally involve operations away from revenue Amtrak trains, or heavily-trafficked freight mainlines ... and therefore this policy shift is expected to have significant chilling effect on steam excursions going forward.
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