Arborwayfan wrote:I'm curious about how the railroads handle the Auto Train, and whether they find it less of a dispatching problem than other passenger trains. I am thinking that because it has no intermediate stops, it never needs to wait at a station until it's scheduled to leave. So the railroad could essentially allow it to "make up time" early in the trip to cover for expected delays later in the trip. No one on board has a reason to care if it passes town A "late" or leaves town B "early". So I wonder (1) does Amtrak schedule it just as optimistically as it's other trains, basically assuming it will get up to the speed limit just outside of Lorton and stay there until Sanford except for crew changes, or does Amtrak schedule it with a little bit of padding that gives the dispatchers some flexibility in how to handle it without delaying it too much and (2) do the dispatchers handle it differently from a passenger train with lots of stops?From a Metrics point of view. Auto-Train is only marked for departure from origin and arrival at destination. There are no intermediate checkpoints for the trains operation from the CSX perspective.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
