Pre-Amtrak boarding procedures: lines, ticket checks, etc.?

ThirdRail7 wrote:
They started abolishing the ushers in the mid 90s. Trenton went first. They also lost their baggage personnel and red caps. The station masters were abolished after the mail was cut. The positions were folded into a customer service manager similar to the off corridor operations.

Stmtrolleyguy wrote:
People today don't travel by train as much - so you get this mob mentality. Commuters may know that they need to follow the station signs to get on their train - but they have no concept of who's train it is. They see other trains, with different colors and logos, but they just assume they go to other places that they've never been.

Its not always a question of what to do - but how to do it.

This is rather embarrassing because I'm "in the business"....but there is SO much truth to these statements. Wife dropped the MIL off at Trenton for 79 back to CLT, about an hour early. Last couple of times she took the train up here I *put* her on the train up in NWK....this time it was solo. From what she told me she walked into the station, her eyes glazed over at the departure boards....proceeds to walk down the escalator to the WB platform and just got on the first train she saw. I get this panicked phone call "I'm on some train called SEPTA??". Oh Good Lord. She wandered her way onto a SEPTA local bound for 30th St that was sitting on 5 track....and after arriving at PHL and suffering a mini-breakdown consisting of something to the effect of "WHY CAN'T ANYONE HELP ME??????"...someone directed her onto 79 which had just pulled in. To this day I don't know how she pulled that off. Maybe there needs to be more of an Amtrak presence at TRE for LD passengers who may not have a clue....or maybe the majority of society is train-clueless? It's a tough call either way.

I haven't boarded at CUS in a while.

Are things any better there today than this?

Tadman wrote:I know little of Newark, but I tend to agree with Southern and quite heartily disagree with Ryanov. There are absolutely places you can be safe leaving your car running and unlocked. This quite common in a lot of small towns. I grew up in such places which weren't abnormally wealthy or poor and we did left keys in and running sometimes. That said, leaving your car running in a bigger city train station lot is probably not the brightest idea. There are many more people and you're just as likely to have a thrills-motivated theft as a fiscally-motivated theft in a bigger city.

It takes one guy who wants your car. How is that safe? You're taking a risk anywhere you do that.

ryanov wrote:It takes one guy who wants your car. How is that safe? You're taking a risk anywhere you do that.

Completely agree. Now, using basic statistics, which "one" person is going to steal my running car between these two stations?

Lawrence, KS (perhaps five people in this pic somewhere)


Newark (perhaps 500 people in this pic)

Stmtrolleyguy wrote:Well imagine a 1920s passenger trying to use a modern elevator. They're used to elevators with human operators - you tell the guy where you want to go, and he does all the rest. We know that elevators do things automatically - like opening and closing the doors. Someone from the 1920's doesn't, They see a giant wall of numbered buttons, an open door button, a close door button, and a call button. So what do you do? Push the call button to call the operator? Push the door close button to close the door, then wonder why nothing happens? So once the elevator starts moving, you can't see the floor numbers in the elevator shaft - so how do you know where you are? More importantly, how do you tell the elevator to stop? The same way someone from the 1920's doesn't know how to use an elevator, we don't know how to board a train.

My grandmother is a person from the 1920s. I suppose I could ask her what happened the first time she faced an automatic elevator. But I'm pretty sure the answer would be that she figured it out right away, and if not, that she asked someone.

These days, with websites like Yelp, it's easy to see when people have trouble figuring out an intercity transportation service. I keep track of this stuff, and the biggest complaints I see are:

1) People expecting buses to be reserved, and getting angry when they're unreserved and full. (It doesn't help that Greyhound's website makes you choose a date and time to buy a ticket, and doesn't really explain that the lack of a "flying e" logo means it's unreserved and your ticket has nothing to do with that particular trip.)
2) People expecting to be able to show an image of a ticket on their phone, and being told by Greyhound that they need a paper printout, and it's their problem to find an Internet cafe to print one
3) People getting turned away from a reserved service because they didn't arrive early enough

Meanwhile, there were no complaints that said "I got on the wrong train because nobody told me how to figure out which track to go to."