Today my wife and I were sitting at an outdoor dining spot overlooking the depot in Red Wing , MN about noon when the eastbound Empire Builder rolled in for a stop (albeit about 3 hours late). After it discharged/picked up passengers, it departed. Then about ten minutes later here it comes again- this time backing into the station. It stopped, one of the coach doors opened, the conductor or cabin attendant took out the yellow boarding stool, and a lady with two bags stepped off the train. After two toots of the horn, the train was off again to Winona. I thought that it was highly unusual that Amtrak would actually back the train into the station in view of the fact that this section of the road is owned by CP Rail and is quite busy with freight traffic.
Might I assume that if the lady had missed her stop the conductor would have said "too bad, the next stop is Winona- you can get off there"?
Somebody running that train, either aboard or at the dispatcher's office or somehwere along the line knows the meaning of the word service. Or else she was such a pain the the kiester it was the best thing for all around to get her off the train even if it meant a back up move!
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I recall that a friend of mine saw the same thing happen in Charleston, SC when the northbound Silver Meteor pulled out on time, but stopped and backed up to the station to let an elderly lady off. Apparantly,
customer service still means something.
Real customer service would be getting the passenger off the first time. Long distance trains have coach attendants. They should know where their passengers are supposed to get off.
It's bad enough there are separate sets of employees for train operations (conductor and trainmen) and customer service (car attendants and food service). It's worse when one has to do the other's job.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Word is that every seat on the Empire Builder is sold during the summer and keeping track of those folks is a real job. From one of the EB conductors:I" when one person gets off, one and a half persons get on" . I am not sure that the EB has a coach attendant in each car any longer. That used to be the case but with the cutbacks over the years it is no longer true. The conductor's manifest tells how many are getting off and on at each station, but that is an educated guess at best and they try their best to get the word out.
A bus won't do that, in fact they might not even stop in the first place. I recall once in Denver when my car was in the shop using buses to go grocery shopping and I accidentally got on an express bus. Normal buses stopped right across the street from my apartment but express buses skip every other stop, and the bus driver wouldn't even stop for a second to let me off but made me sit for about half a mile and then walk half a mile back the other way, with breaking plastic bags full of eggs etc. All he had to do was stop (and not in busy traffic either) but wouldn't. One more point for Amtrak long distance.
Well, there are charters and rules and publicly displayed schedules. So a bus, or even a train, may not be able to stop even if the driver or crew wanted to. Sometimes there are company spys, for lack of a better term, who will test employees against rules, Sometimes it could be someone from a commission or oversight organization. Or could be the driver of the bus once did break the rules and was somehow punished. As for outside commissions or oversight people....banks are very careful to adhere to the publicized hours, for instance. A competitor or someone from the commission could cite a bank for opening or closing earlier than posted, or stay open by allowing customers in to do business after posted hours. So, your bus driver may have seemed insenstive, but that's his job...and his job at stake, too.
The elderly lady might not have heard her stop called or may have been napping. It might not have been a familiar area. How could have the crew put her off at the next station which was not her ticketed stop and where she had no ride waiting. She might have been confused, and this could have had a bad ending. Amtrak did the right thing.
Operationally -
Amtrak must not have had any following traffic. Once the found out about the situation, they had to stop and notify the Train Dispatcher and then ask for permission to back up. Do Western Amtrak trains routinely have a whistling back up hose attached to the rear car? If so once the train began backing up the Conductor would control the movement, sounding the whistle and stopping for road crossings in accordance with the rules concerning crossing over road crossings with a working headlight. If there was no whistling back up hose, the Conductor would control movement by radio and would still have to stop and flag all road crossings. Once the wayward passenger was unloaded then the Train Dispatcher would have to be contacted and advised that the train was ready to proceed in the proper direction.
Trains on Main Track(s) must have permission of the Train Dispatcher to do anything other than accept signal indication or Track Warrant authority for the authorized move. If there was a following freight train already in the track segment Amtrak occupied, it is highly unlikely the Train Dispatcher would have authorized the reverse move for Amtrak. These rules are not about customer service, they are about train safety.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
If the train was back in the station within ten minutes, I doubt it got more than a mile before stopping and backing up. Acceleration and deceleration and stop, communicate and get dispatcher's permission etc,, actual move backwards to station stop...that's about 10 minutes, maybe even 15 or 20.
I will, somewhat embarrassingly, admit that Amtrak has done something like that for me. On my very first trip even.
I was in college and decided to go home for a long weekend. Rather than drive, I was going to take the Three Rivers (this years ago, so I might have the names wrong on the trains) from Altoona to Pittsburgh. So a train comes, and I get on it.
Turns out that the Pennsylvanian had arrived, by chance, at the schedule time for the Three Rivers. Oh, and I got my east and west messed up in my head. So I was eastbound on the Pennsylvanian when I wanted to be wesbound on the Three Rivers. They'd announced the name of the train and "Philadelphia and New York" right after I got on so...at least I didn't panic. I quickly informed the conductor of what had happened and inquired if I'd be able remain on the train as far as Huntingdon, where I could get a friend to make the drive down from State College to pick me up. He indicated that that would probably be acceptable.
A few minutes later, he comes and collects me. We're standing in the doorway of the train, which was open by the way and quite the ride. He tells me that they held the Three Rivers at Tyrone and would be swapping me there. So not only did they hold another train, but my train made an unscheduled stop for me.
I've been very appreciative of Amtrak's train crews for, well, my entire traveling life now.
In the spring of 1960 I rode the Wichita - Denver through sleeper on the MP mixed train to Herendon(?) and the Colorado Eagle, ticketed with stop-over in Colorado Springs, with trip to be resumed in the evening on the joint DRG&W-AT&SF train to Denver, then overnight at the Brown Palace, and the CZ to Salt Lake the next day. The porter forgot to wake me up in time to get dressed to get off the train in Colorado Springs. I woke up just in time to see us about to pull out of Colorado Springs Station. I got dressed very quickly (in the roomette), searched for the conductor, who was only one or two cars away (the sleeper was ont the rear of the train), and al he could do was to arrange an unscheduled stop a Palmer Lake. He said: "Go to the tower, and the towerman will call you a taxi." I was in luck, and the towerman was about to go off duty, and his replacement arrived, and the towerman drove me to the Colorado Springs Station. Before leaving the tower, he also called the Broadmore Hotel, my client, to tell them what happened, so their van driver would remain at the station (or return to it) to be there when I arrived. Going to Wichita, for work on the First Methodist Church there, I had had my very first dome car experience (other than inspecting GM's "Train of Tomorrow") in the Texas Zephyr.
While reading the above posts, two incidents came to mind.
The first one occurred in 1965, when I was ridung the City of New Orleans from Jackson to Brookhaven. When we arrived in Brookhaven, I learned that a passenger for Hazlehurst had been unable to get off because the porter for her car had gone to sleep. It did not occur to anyone to put her on #8 to return her to Hazlehurst. I offered to take her up (I lived in Wesson, which is between Brook and hazlehurst)--and she took me up on the offer.
The second incident came about in 2007, when my wife and I were going from Toronto to Vancouver on the Canadian. Late the first evening out from Toronto, in the "middle of nowhere," the train stopped and backed up. There are several places in that part of Canada where, if advance arrangements are made, the train will stop to pick passengers up or let them off, and the engineer and conductor apparently had forgotten to make the stop until the dispatcher called them. Had the train not picked the party up, it would have been two or three days before a train going in their direction would have come by.
Johnny
it's been almost 40 years. My wife, and 2 year old daughter and i rode the City of New Orleans from Bloomington to NO for Christmas. I don't know why we ran late - two hours in Bloomington, and it got worse overnight. At Memphis, they cut off the diner and sleepers to meet the northbound City. So, we moved to coach. You can imagine a 2 year old in a coach on Christmas Eve. At Jackson, I got off and called Delta. They had three seats on a plane to NO. I talked to the stationmaster. he refunded my tickets in cash, and had his assistant take us to the airport. We were in NO three hours later. I picked up our checked baggage and returned to my parents place, meeting Santa in the doorway. Amtrak did good. Christmas would have been a disaster with another six hours on the City. The northbound return went smoothly.
Reading this reminds me of trip with two friends on City of St. Louis. We were leaving St. Louis and could not understand why none of our family members were waving at us. When we returned home, we found out why. A man had boarded saying he wanted to go to Mexico. Our N&W train did stop in Mexico, MO. Then someone must have questioned him in more detail and our family heard the conductor say "oh, you want Old Mexico". He pushed him out the door as the train started to move, telling him to see MoPac, that was their train. Not very polite, but it got the job done. Sounds like Amtrak is a little nicer about this sort of incident.
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