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[quote user="Harrie"] Hey, Samantha...I regularly take the Texas Eagle to Chicago and beyond (via the Hiawatha) and I've never caught the Lounge Car unattended.  (My last round trip - Houston/Chicago was the week of July 14 this year and the train was packed which was good to see...).[/quote]Thanks for the feedback.  Amtrak had announced in the spring that it was going to assign the newly reconfigured dinning cars to the Eagle, ala the City of New Orleans, and drop the lounge car.  Then it announced that it would continue running the lounge car on the Eagle, but that it would not be staffed to save on labor costs.  Apparently they changed their mind.  Did your train have one of the reconfigured cars (I believe half the car is devoted to sit down dinning and half is devoted to a lounge) or was it the full length dinner?Ridership on the Eagle was up 7.3 per cent from October 1, 2007 through May 31, 2008 compared to the previous like period.  May 2008 ridership was up 27 per cent over May 2007.  I suspect most of the increase was coach riders between St. Louis and Chicago.   Sleeping car patrons increased by 2.4 per cent for the October 1 - May 31 period compared to the same period in 2007.Unfortunately, the increase in the cost of operating the Eagle has outpaced the increase riders and revenues, resulting in an increase in the loss per passenger mile from 19.4 cents a passenger mile in 2007 to 24.2 cents a passenger mile to date in 2008.  And the load factor still hovers around 48 per cent, which is well below Amtrak's system average.
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