Simply not the case. Look at Amtrak’s parlor car operations on the coast star light and their Acela first class operation .
Amtrak has no problem Running six to seven sleepers on its auto train and two to three sleepers on its silver silvers
Amtrak suffers from many typical managers in corporate America. Those kinds think the best way to improve revenues is to cut service rather build it thru offering additional services
airlines don’t have any issues filling their first class sections. thier is already a built in market for sleeper service in the northeast to Florida market and plenty of pesky first class passengers looking for perks.
I may seem naive for not having seen this before – but isn’t this one way Amtrak can get rid of the whole mess … the inefficient commissary, the wasted food, the surly attendants with seniority, and all that … and then be able to put a different form (would it have been a ‘paradigm’ in the '80s?) of full dining-car service back with more of a clean slate when “outcry” demands a return to it?
That would be the time for the outsourcing, too, although I tremble to think of the equivalent of Harvey Girls in a Tilted Kilt kind of world…
Amtrak may have to choose between pleasing Congress and pleasing its customers. The right choice is the latter … and if Congress has the guts to pull the Amtrak plug, which it hasn’t had in 44 years, so be it. I love Amtrak … but we have suffered more grievous losses.
Outsourcing of food service may be restricted by labor contracts.
I have also gotten the impression from my reading that food service on a train was never a moneymaker in its own right, even in the pre-Amtrak era. Dining car prices were also relatively high, which also kept a lot of coach passengers out of the diner.
It is correct that railroad food service has never been financially profitable but it does lure passengers. Old magazine ads showcase dining cars serving gourmet meals; the availability and quality of on-board dining was and still is a great public relations tool (of course no AMTRAK meal can compare to dining on the 20th Century Limited!).
AMTRAK has suspended diners on the Silver Star as a money-saving ‘experiment’, ie: will passengers book sleeper at a lower rate if meals are not included? Of course the proper way of conducting such an experiment would have been to offer sleeper accommodations at two levels: with meals or without. Removing the full-service diner and forcing all passengers to use the fast-food-like cafe/lounge is frankly asinine.
AMTRAK is a bureacracy and they are approaching cost-saving in typical bean-counter fashion: two fully booked sleeping cars with meals included is not as cost-effective as four fully-booked coaches paying per meal in the cafe/lounge. Of course that’s how AMTRAK pencil-pushers see it; they do not consider that once aboard at least half those coach passengers actually pay out-of-pocket for a good sit-down meal in the diner rather than a microwaved snack in the fast-food atmosphere of the cafe/lounge.
When we visit family in North Carolina we ride the Silver Star from Newark to Hamlet and return. Between these cities is not overnight in either direction so we book coach but at eleven hours it is still a long ride. We look forward to lunch and dinner in the diner on the way down and breakfast and lunch on return. It breaks up the trip and no matter the meal I have no complaint of the service nor food itself … it is good. My family of four have always agreed the highlight of our Silver Star travel is the dining car.
I recently sent AMTRAK an e-mail questioning this experiment and their flawed logic. Worse, my family may have to this year consider a different way of getting to our destination (long ago I swore-off that horribl
I think the larger issue is this. Amtrak LD services (the operating expenses) are subsidized by taxpayer. That is just fine, for many reasons. But providing a subsidized dining car experience for sleeper passengers and those in coach who choose to seems excessive. Amtrak’s mission is to provide transportation, not subsidized “civilized rail travel” whatever that is.
Travel by rail is travel in civilized comfort–especially when it is compared with travel by air.
I have not eaten a hamburger in a Superliner lounge in some time, but the buns of two I had last month when traveling in business class were tough; microwaving them does not help them–the buns served with the hamburgers in diners are not tough. I do not think much of what is available for breakfast in any lounge car. Despite the lack of variety served in diners from North to South and from East to West, I enjoy eating in the diners.
The only way to test the concept would be to offer unlimited seats on both the Meteor and Star. That way what train service chosen could be compared. Offering identical bucket types for same day would also need to be offered with identical price changes. Of course the passengers getting on and off between Selma - Savannah & Lakeland - Tampa would not be counted.
Unfortunately Amtrak now does not have the equipment to add all the coachs, diners, and sleepers needed to run such a test now. As the test is set up now certain parameters cannot be measured.
You could set up the experiment using the classic ‘alternate forms’ methodology. In this case run the differing food services on alternate days of the trains with the cost for dining car service deducted from sleepers on the cafe-lounge days.
Having reread the 2015 House THUD bill (that failed to even get a floor vote) and now the 2016 THUD bill (going to markup tomorrow), I believe that the House committee has decided that the traditional Amtrak transfer of revenue from first class to food service is not acceptable. There was more of a reference to this in the 2015 bill but the charts presented do not count as revenue the transfer of funds from 1st class (Acela or Sleeper) fares to food service.
Now does this say no dinner? Of course not, but some of this seems to be related to the above non-sensical distinction. I still cannot see any actual labor savings due to the agreements for the relatively short time period of the test. As National Corridors pointed out there are other cafe cars available with more advanced food preparation areas that could backfill the standard cafes, so it is not a equipment issue either.
—Amtrak consistently incurs a loss on its food and beverage and first class service. As the table below demonstrates, Amtrak’s net loss totaled $387,700,000
There is something not right about the F&B losses. We know that Amtrak has creative accounting but ----
The May performance report lists for the current FY.
F&B revenue $110M, Expenses 208M, Loss 98M
Passengers Total 20M, LD 2M, sleeper 433K
Realize that there does not seem to be a cost allocation for operating the dinner. Does the costs include the $4.00+ per mile cost for regular cars ? ( if that figure is reliable )
Arbritary figures but – If a separate ticket surcharge listed as F&B was instituted of say $5.00 / 100 miles for sleeper passengers and $1.00 / 200 miles on all other passengers you would immediately have a F&B surplus. That way proper food and service personel would be a + revenue source attracting more dining passengers. Too simple probably.? POLS probably would not like a simple solution. Suspect that this is how airlines and cruise ships allocate costs for their bean counters.
Bob Stewart’s observations bare out what anyone with a grain of sense should have expected in this matter. Of course Amtrak will temporarily “save” money on food service on Trains 91/92–because dumping the 3-4 man diner crew can ony result in short-term “savings”, but the long-term lossest hrough outraged passengers can not be quantified even by continuing this travesty of a studty until January 31, 2016. Once passengers say “never again” they mean it, not only for themselves, but also for all the friends and colleagues they tell about their atrocious experience. Today riders always have alternatives to train travel.
If Amtrak had been remotely sincere about making this a fair test they would have put an Amfleet II “Diner-lite” service as on the CARDINAL on this train–(or even, God-forbid–put a second attendant on the STAR’s lounge car to ease waits and allow for two serving lines). But of course no test was needed for this “experiment”, as Amtrak already has a decade of cost/revenue/staffing/service experience with precisely this service model to look at on the CARDINAL. Yes meals are still “included” on that train for sleeper passengers–but fine, if that were the issue take the “included” meals off on the CARDINAL without changing the menu. At least Amtrak would not have destroyed the on-board experience on what is typicaly the first or second most heavily uused long-haul train in the east!
Amtrak is pandering to Congressman Mica because of the inexcuseable cowardice of Joe Boardman in not standing up to Congressional
Dining car costs have always been high, even prior to May 1971. A lot of attempts have been made to get these costs down, ranging from snack bars and galley-lounges to SP’s automat cars. The question comes down to what sort of service do you want to provide? A fine dining experience is going to cost a lot to provide but is it what the market really wants?
My grandfather was the Superintendent of a Class 1’s Dining Car & Commisary Department for 20 years prior to his retirement in 1957.
By his own admission, the department never turned a monetary profit during his tenure - nor did Senior Managment intend that it turn a profit on its own. The name of the game was provide reasonably priced meals of high quality as a means of influencing the ‘movers & shakers’ of the shipping public to favor his company with their business based on a good meal with extrordinary service. My grandfathers job evaluations came in the form of letters written by signifigant parties in the shipping communites to his carrier’s Senior Management concerning their experiences on the company’s diners as well as keeping the costs in check so that the losses didn’t hemmorage from his carriers coffers.
Providing good food to order and good service on a moving vehicle is a high cost undertaking. The staff does not work for 1/2 the minimum wage + tips - they work for a middle class living wage as defined by the various labor agreements. The staff is not teenagers getting their 1st job and having to be trained on a cash register that is keyed with ‘Big Mac’, ‘Large Fries’, ‘Medium Fries’, ‘Small Fries’, ‘Fish Sandwich’ etc. etc. etc.
The problem on the SILVER STAR is general to both sleeper and coach passengers. Of course sleeper riders wil be more upset, because 100% of them on-board at meal hours could be expected to eat in the diner, as their fares included in the price paid a very generous allowance for the cost to Amtrak’s food services for those meals in the diner. But typically at least 20-25% of long-distance coach riders also use the diner and they lose as well.
More significant is the matter of revenue dilution. Sleeper fares are typically two to four times higher than coach for the same distance traveled. Yes some of this was for food, “porter” service, linens and laundry, but at the end of the day sleeper travelers are much more lucrative to Amtrak than those in coach. And this sleeper market is much less price sensitive, as evidenced by the frequent sell-outs of sleepers months before departure, which Amtrak can rarely respond to due to lack of equipment (which is why I am so concerned about the fate of the VIEWLINER II order).
But at the end of the day quality of service does matter to all riders. Coach passengers are not completely indifferent to being treated badly. Coach passengers very often patronize the diner–particularly for breakfast (the worst meal in terms of choice/edibility on the “new” trains 91/92). Dinner is the next most common coach passenger choice, with lunch being the meal most often either brought on-board or taken the the cafe car. But Amtrak has guaranteed that even the lunch experience in the cafe car will be terrible by understaffing and understocking, both of which Bob Stewart’s report eloquently establishes.
The SILVER STAR “experiment” is so particularly awful because Amtrak made no effort to provide even a slight improvement in the cafe menu or experience. Indeed a short-haul coach passenger on-board only for one lunch may not mind facing a choice of only 4-5 sandwiches, but the same passenger on
The issue is not so much ‘what the market wants’ (which is likely to be flexible, and should have been the fosuc of a considerable amount of Amtrak’s market research and testing) so much as it’s ‘what can Amtrak pay for that fulfils what the market expects’.
The era when dining service could be a ‘loss leader’ has really been past for the whole of the Amtrak experience – when you lose money on every train, why spend extra so you can lose even more? If there is a counterpart to ‘shippers’ in Amtrak service, please tell me what it would be.
So the question becomes something a bit different: Is some net loss on F&B acceptable if it keeps overall profitability for other areas more than commensurately higher – and, by extension, could a given level of required F&B quality, not justifiable ‘by itself’, be part of an overall service formula or experience that would achieve ‘orofitability’ (or reduce unacceptable train-operating losses) in some politically-justifiable way?
My understanding is that some of the ‘strange’ conventions in standard railroad-car dining – waiting to be called, waiting in line to be seated, having to write the order yourself – are already expedients for reducing overhead cost and confusion. Are there potential alternatives, for example the equivalent of ‘takeout’ – where a passenger would submit an order ‘in writing’ ahead of time, and go to the diner at a prearranged time to pick it up on a tray, in a warming sleeve, in a bag, etc. together with a made-up set of condiments, etc.? Is there any safe way to arrange the use of ‘leftovers’ via steam tables or microwave/convection reheat in the lounge car?
We’ve already covered some other options in food choices.&n