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Last week I took the 10:00 a.m. Acela from New York to Washington.  The ride was enjoyable.  It was also pricey. We were about 15 minutes late leaving New York because one of the automated doors would not close.  An Amtrak maintenance guy had to be called to fix it.  It could not have been too much of a problem, i.e. he fixed it in less than five minutes, but I had to chuckle a bit about automation.  It is great until it is not. Having departed from Penn Station, New York, thousands of times, I don't recall ever having a stuck manual door.   I made the mistake of not grabbing a seat in the quite car, although they were pretty well taken by the time I was able to board the train.  Thus, I got the opportunity to listen to numerous people in my car shout into their cell phones, especially between New York and Philadelphia.  Mercifully, most of them got off at 30th Street Station.   The train appeared to have a pretty good load factor from New York to Philadelphia.  However, south of Philly the load factor was much thinner. My car rode relatively rough.  I was a bit surprised.  Several days before travelling from New York to Washington I had taken the Pennsylvanian from Pittsburgh to New York.  It clips along at near Acela speeds between Philadelphia and New York.  I was in business class; the car rode much better than the Acela coach that I was in. Had I taken the 10:35 a.m. Northeast Regional Train to Washington, it would have taken me 38 minutes longer to get there than was the case on the Acela.  The Acela fare was $162.  The fare on the regional would have been $49 in coach or $88 had I chosen business class.  The incremental minutes gained on the Acela were pricey.  The cost between the Acela and coach on the regional train would have been $2.97 per minute or $1.95 per minute for the difference between the Acela and business class on a regional train. This was my second trip on the Acela.  It is a nice experience, but it is not worth the incremental fare difference.  From now on I plan to use business class on the regional trains.  Or if I am on one of my austerity binges, I'll take coach class.
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