There's got to be a way to have a car with a good view without it being a whole extra car JUST for viewing. Long example with Superliners coming; I think the basic ideas would apply to new and existing single-level cars, too. I'm thinking about Superliner diners and the sightseer lounges. So we have summer-length CZ, something like 3 or 4 coaches, one or two with lower-level seating, two regular sleepers and a transition sleeper with some space available to passengers. Say 5.5 to 6.5 revenue cars in which passengers can buy seats. Then we have the diner and the lounge. Passengers can only use the diner when meals are being served, which is maybe 3 hours for each meal, with three or four hours in between and then the whole night. All passengers share the lounge; they mostly compete for the cool upper-level seats, and hardly anyone uses the lower level eating area. The last time I was on one the neat little compartment with a couple long tables and curved benches was empty two lunches in a row except for us and a bunch of extra drinks and other supplies. The conductor used the table closest to the stairs (a logical enough place for him or her to be available to pax without taking up sightseer space) and all the other pax just came in, bought food, and left. So that's half the lower level of the lounge riding empty most of the time, and the whole diner riding empty half the day and the whole night as well. I know that there are other economic problems with food service (cost of storing and serving food when everything is more expensive because you're moving, cost of well-paid workers who have to be well paid because it's fair and because they are away from home for days etc.) but hauling all the tons of railcar to move those square feet of space that no one pays to ride in is part of it, and turning around and not using that expensive non-revenue space so much of the time seems wrong somehow.
Solutions? Amtrak's only real attempt to change the picture was those funny diner-lounge things on the City of New Orleans (something Cafes?). Partly a good idea, to combine the sit-down and walk-up parts in one car. Partly a lousy idea, because now no one gets the special view from the lounge. Maybe not much loss in Illinois, where you hardly need a glass roof to see the landscape, but would be a great loss in the mountains.
Other possibilities to better use the space and/or to help the lounge and diner pay their way:
1. Let people sit in the diner between meals when lots of people want to play cards or do paperwork or, as I saw once, tie flies. That expands the lounge space, which is one way of making riding the train more tolerable to more people because they can move around. Even just use one end of the diner for this.
2. Put a dozen regular seats in the little-used back compartment of the lounge, and sell them. Basically free revenue once you've made the change, and no different from putting business class in one end of an Amfleet cafe car.
3. Just sell short-distance pax tickets to a spot in the lower level of the current lounge car, without changing the seats. Add "Lower-level table seat" to the list of seat choices. All the professors who get on the CONO at Champaign-Urbana would look twice at that option. Again, free revenue.
4. Or, for something more drastic, turn the sightseers into the main food-service cars by changing how downstairs is used and how the full-meal food is served. In detail, put a somewhat bigger kitchen and/or a bigger self-service food serving system, which much better food than current lounge car offerings, including more fresh fruit and veg and a better range of heatable entrees, into the lower level of sightseer lounges. Maybe have two or three cook-servers and have a kind of take-out grill down there. (US railroads did this, and Norwegian LD trains do it now: self service, but they'll give you hotdogs and mashed potato, various premade entrees, good pizza, etc.) Maybe have just one cashier but really set the place up for pleasant self service (sightseers are kind of set up with way now, at least some of them, but the food and the cabinets are both kind of unattractive and awkward for pax to use; go look at a Swedish cafe car and do that. If necessary, reduce the lower-level seating and expand the storage so that there is plenty of room for all the food currently served by dining car and lounge together. Maybe even install a dumbwaiter to that waiter station on the upper level, the one that hardly ever gets used, and put an electronic ordering-and-paying system up there so folks can order from upstairs if they don't want to walk down. Eliminate the diner; in this model, we lose the sit-down dinner with waiters, but we keep some of the same type of food (not "contemporary dining"
) and we keep the sightseer lounge.
[Ends long speech.]