It seems on every coach Amtrak has a large restroom or two. I wonder if they could yank the restroom on at least one of the cars on a LD train and put something else in it’s space such as…
2 chair barbershop.
4-5 stool bar lounge.
Other ideas to enhance revenue?
Video game room?
Common sense and negative PR concerns aside, are there any regulatory issues with doing this?
Doing so would also reduce fleet flexibilty, in locomotive terms such cars would effectively become B-units.
Don’t ADA requirements specificy the dimensions for accessibility…and health codes specify the number of toilets required by capacity?
I can just imagine a barber shop doing enough of a business to justify the cost and instead of bar stools…standard seating would provide more capacity.
The barbershop seems like nostalgia for the old Broadway or 20th Century 70 years ago.
Bar? That should be in the snack/buffet car.
Billiard room? Oh wait, no.
A bar in the basement of a coach? CLub car already exists.
I like the large accessible bathroom on the coaches. In the tiny litte toilet closets otherwise, I have to open the door to bend over and grip my trousers to pull them up. The large room offers the possibility or a relatively comfortable …personal moment.
Perhaps the OP was being facetious?
No I was throwing some ideas out there. Another idea which I spotted on a Milwaukee Road Super Dome #53. Not all passenger cars need to have vestibule doors, that might also free up space for other uses possibly?
So in a single car operation - how does one board and leave a car without vestibule space for ingress and egress?
On that stretch of the Buckingham Branch Railroad that the Cardinal uses, with that bad track, getting a haircut would be a painful, bloody experience.
You still have the transit door through the diaphram, it’s just a larger step down to the ground.
Where does the ‘S’ word fit?
The whole intent of this exercise was to think of added services on a Passenger Train that could be provided without cutting back on coach seats. The idea of putting a bar in a coach car would be to save the expense of a seperate lounge car while still providing mixed drinks or beverages on demand.
As for the barbershop, you would only make more revenue with added seats if the train car ran at capacity. Since that is a rare occurance on most Amtrak trains, adding seats that would stay empty is probably not better at revenue than a barbershop would be. Also the added convience of hitting two birds with one stone might attract more riders. Approx 1 person per 20 min sitting for maybe $12-15 for a guys haircut, plus tip. Eliminating the non-rev space of the restroom, I still think that the barbershop is a win…though serving liquor and light salty snacks at your seat would probably be a bigger win.
I’ve cut my own hair with a electric clippers and for most of the haircut I can jump up and down while still cutting the hair without fear of cutting myself. Thats why most clipper sets provide the plastic guides. Yes there are very short times of precision and close cut where rough track would be an issue but in the cases of really rough track like that would you want the passengers on their feet and moving around the train to begin with? Probably not.
If that word is ‘sarcasm’ it fits nicely.
I will confess it got me thinking whether some sort of folding trap could be rigged off the blind end, that would give access out of a door right at the end of the car to a platform and stairs to at least the typical ‘trap level’ and perhaps to the ground. As this would almost certainly be ‘emergency-only’ this need not be particularly robust; only a couple of minutes with an Eli Gilderfluke sharp #2 pencil would show how to make it wheelchair-lift accessible.
Emergency egress from a vestibule door could easily be inflatable along the lines of an emergency slide; it would be a bit like a ‘whale tail’ curving to both sides with handles all the way down…
Sarcasm doesn’t fit in railroad world - SAFETY is the S word.
Safety and egress to ground through a vestibule door are not quite mutually exclusive but you’d have to work hard for them not to be so.
Shaving Cream?
Even as I was searching for the Benny Hill version!
I knew all those years listening to Dr. Demento would pay off!!