All Things Empire Builder

Whitefish is most certainly a crew change location.. For the Engineers only, however. The train crew continues through to Spokane or Shelby depending on your direction of travel.

Engineer only ( ie train crew continues on) changes occur at Milwaukee (train 8 only) Whitefish, Wenatchee (Trains 7&8) and Pasco (Trains 27&28)

I might suguest that you add St. Paul to the list as that is where the change between the BNSF and the CP takes place, making for some interesting statistics..

Added.

Now to begin collecting the data

AMTK1007 wrote:Whitefish is most certainly a crew change location.. For the Engineers only,

OK, thanks. That puts Amtrak's engineer crew change points at the same points that BNSF swaps engineer/conductors.

But no other servicing takes place in Whitefish, save for unloading garbage bags and loading up on the daily newspapers for Sleeping Car passengers eastbound. (Whether the Daily Interlake is a useful newspaper, is debatable...)

Eric, That is correct there is not any other serviceing at WFH beyond what you mention.

Crew Changes are as follows:

Train 7
Chicago
Winona
St Cloud
Minot
Shelby
Whitefish (Engineer Only)
Spokane
Wenatchee (Engineer Only)

Train 27
Spokane
Pasco (Engineer Only)

Train 8
Seattle
Wenatchee (Engineer Only)
Spokane
Whitefish (Engineer Only)
Shelby
Minot
St Cloud
Winona
Milwaukee (Engineer Only)

Train 28
Portland
Pasco (Engineer Only)

Anyone have experience with Minitab?

BTW Mr. Primrose, care to share with the Forum where you are now going to school?

I'm back at Towson University in Baltimore MD now. This is my actual school that I was a freshmen and sophomore at, for Junior year, I went to Umass Amherst through a program called National Student Exchange (www.nse.org)

This is my senior year, I'm def old now (22 in less than a week)

If anyone would like to read it;

http://tiger.towson.edu/~gprimr1/empire.doc

and if anyone has Minitab and wants to play

http://tiger.towson.edu/~gprimr1/stats.mpj

Summery:

I found that the mean arrival time for the Empire Builder between October 14th and November 27th was actually negative (early) for all segments except MSP-CHI.

Shame on you CP

We have a name for this phenomenon, you know. We call it the "CP Challenge."

I got an A on the project

Hooray. Sorry, I guess I responded to your PM a little late. I just now saw that it was even in there. (Hope that didn't make the difference between an 'A', and an 'A+'... )

gprimr1 wrote:I got an A on the project

congratulations!

In another topic in this forum I mused about how Amtrak filled up Sleepers and suggested it was from the middle out...E. D. C. B. A for bedrooms and 1, 2, 3, etc for roomettes.
If my assumption is correct (we have bedroom E on all other SL legs of our trip this spring, reservations for which we made a little over 5 months in advance) then the Builder must be pretty full. Our bedroom assignment for 15 June CHI/SEA IS 730A.
I rang Amtrak just a couple of minutes ago, trying to switch from A to E and was told the only room available/able to be booked was another A.
The clerk suggested I continue to try in the future in case there was a cancellation.
When is the best time to contact Amtrak to see if another bedroom, preferably E has become avialable.
As always, apprecaite your responses,
Best regards,
Rodger

You can check it yourself on-line. Simply start a dummy reservation booking 8 passengers from CHI to SEA on 15Jun. When the train selection screen comes up, select the upgrade option for #7 and then open the pull-down for number of bedrooms. The system will tell you the number of bedrooms left up to eight. If there are two or more, you know at least one of the available rooms is a room other than "A".

Right now, however, there are no bedrooms available on your train. But keep watching.

They mist be giving something away in Seattle the period we're traveling.
Checked today for bedroom availability on 06.14/15 and 16 and bedrooms were sold out on each date. Roomettes and family bedrooms were still available but no bedrooms.
Best regards,
Rodger