Much has been written about lack of traditional dining returning.
At present Amtrak cannot provide proper on board dinning service due to lack of on board staff. Why the short staff? More staff means more sleeper space taken for the additional OBS staff that cannot then be sold to the public. Now maybe the LSL getting 3 NYP - CHI sleepers will allow more OBS staff on that train? Still it is loss of sleeper revenue. What is one solution?
Of course, getting all sleepers back into service is important. But in the long run that still makes possible room space unable to sell. Instead of retiring Amfleet cars in the future start converting them to dorm cars. Right now Bear or other locations could take some mildly wrecked Amfleets now stored that are going to need new interiors anyway and make them Dorm cars.
Amtrak could get with union(s) for a quick design. Then Amtrak can get many car LD trains and properly serve all passengers. As well have limited 24/7 service. They would also work on Superliner consist trains as well. Does VIA have a separate dorm car(s) on the Canadian?
Wasn't this precisely what all those high-dollar bag-dorms ordered along with the new diners were supposed to provide?
I suspect that the only 'practical' answer is to arrange service so that all shifts of the whole crew have to be carried end-to-end. This would seem obvious as an 'amplification' of the cost of dual crews for run-through operation... particularly bad if leveraged as wages and working 'requirements and conditions' involve more costs.
Of course you then run into the problem of crews regularly coming on and off duty at places that are textbook definitions of 'flyover country', and issues of how to handle chronically late trains or disabled equipment... etc.
The underlying point is still valid. (Although I have to confess that I'm strongly biased in favor of Amfleet, and have been for nearly half a decade...) Not only could a 're-interiored' Amfleet car be given a substantial number of appropriately-private sleeping accommodation, they could include appropriate kitchen and lounge space, where crews could spread out paperwork or other 'business' away from public lounge or diner space. This might be a very tough sell to Congress, though, as there's less than zero marginal revenue, and considerable construction and maintenance cost, for a whole additional vehicle to be towed. Not to be cynical, or political, but I'd expect the likely 'answer' to be to continue allowing existing crew to keep suffering, and to dominate passengers, as they now do.
Something that might be looked into would be some sort of Government subsidization of jobs, perhaps for improving toward 'full employment' of underprivileged groups, that would get its budget from a source outside Amtrak. Then you could tolerate much more 'engaged to be waiting' and get valuable virtue-signaling too.
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