Viewliner II Delivery/Production

Watching the Silver Star and Silver Meteor roll by on the railcams, I'm reminded of why I was not a fan of the Phase III color scheme revival that coincided with the Viewliner II order. As I suspected, all these years later the sets are still unmatched and it makes them look worse imo than if Amtrak had stuck with the Phase IVb. It always takes years to get fleet uniformity even when some effort is made, and it seems like Amtrak is making no effort to get a uniform appearance.

The fleet uniformity thing is always nice, but you notice conventional consists in Europe don't match over half the time. And that leads me to my most important point: Why is anybody worrying about new/historic paint jobs when they can barely run the trains right? Clearly hours of brainpower is being spent on which colors are best, and there is an active heritage program. But we can't figure out how to open all the doors at MKA or have a decent boarding regimen in Detroit?

If you recall Mike Haverty, the guy who brought back the warbonnet at ATSF and the southern Belle at KCS, he arrived at KCS to some fanfare. Lots of people thought he was going to spearhead a turn in fortune and suggested reviving the Belle look. He told the team that was a great idea, but they had to focus on performance. If the performance occurred, they would shift to the Belle scheme as a show of prosperity and success.

TLDR, the heritage program and continuously shifting paint schemes are like eating your desert before your vegetables. Focus on the prize, then celebrate.

There are two problems with Amtrak's in station presence: not having near-level boarding, and not having pre-assigned seating.

The first is fixable at most stations, but it will be a long, slow, and expensive process to do so (basically it can be fixed by building appropriate platforms for the cars at hand).

But fixing those platforms to allow all doors boarding won't help if you don''t the problem that most routes don't have a mechanism to let people know what their seats are ahead of time, so you can't be at the correct position on the platform to know which car is yours to board. Given the number of passengers who use paper tickets, and the inability to mark a seat as reserved between two stations or unreserved until a specific station (as the ICE trains in Germany can).

But this does all suggest that how the station and passenger car is designed matters (regarding fixing boarding at Detroit, Amtrak had ordered cars to fix that by allowing near level boarding at low level platforms, but instead got a derivative of Brightline's single level cars due to the whole Next Generation Bi-Level Passenger Rail Car debacle), and that having delivered those cars painted the same way as the existing fleet would have been preferable to what they did do.

not having near-level boarding, ...

The first is fixable at most stations,

Disagree. THe class I's do not want this and will require obscene capital costs to do so - switches, platform tracks, etc... which are either grossly expensive and sometimes not possible to fit. Then you have to dump all the Superliners, Surfliners, etc... Most of Europe has non-level boarding, which is about the same height in step-up as a Superliner or Surfliner.

And it still doesn't fix the real problem. If you board a train in Detroit, they lock the platform doors until the train nears. Then they crush load everybody up the stairs and stop them halfway up the stairs with 100 people in line carrying suitcases. Then when the train stops they try to sort the passengers at some sort of defacto gateway. This sucks. Nobody enjoys it. It is not safe to stop people on the stairs. Somehow Delta and Metra and LIRR and United and DB and LNER and all the legacy roads that had passenger trains all have figured out how to board passengers without officious idiots making their own decisions on account of absent management.

As i have said before, this is a zero dollars problem. Create a standard, publish the standard, enforce the standard. What does it cost to put laminated PDF's in the vestibule of every Amfleet and Horizon in the fleet? $200???