Amtrak considers narrower seats

As I said... for a paraplegic, wheelchairs are part of the person. You don't buy them off the lot -- they measure you up for it and it's not uncommon to be a custom build.

Before we go too much farther, we need to see why Amtrak's making this change.

The isles are 32", accommodating a 30" wide chair. Assuming the doors are just as wide, you get the ability for wheelchair-bound passengers to move about the train. That means:

• They can hit the cafe themselves, rather than asking a conductor to get food/drink for them.
• They can be loaded and unloaded from a single door, instead of having to move the train in case of multiple people at different ends of each car.

That's... less of an effort for the conductors and support staff.

Since the Venture cars (at least for midwest service), have only a single door in each vestibule (each vestibule opens to a different side of the coach -- I think for built-in lifts, but I don't know), they have to be able to move someone in a wheelchair either between cars or from one end of a car to the other or ensure all platforms are on the same side of the train.

Before we go too much farther, we need to see why Amtrak's making this change.

Agree. If this was being done to squeeze more seats in, my pitchfork would be sharpened and ready to go. If this is about letting people in wheelchairs or otherwise mobility impaired use a form of transportation independently and with some dignity, I'm all for it.

The new Siemens trainsets (to be paired with ALC-42E locos) will have 8 or 12 wheelchair lifts, evenly split on the left/right sides of the train. See the slides at the link below:

https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?u ... #pageNum=8