I like timetables. You like timetables. Who knows if many other passengers like timetables? Many, probably most, people do all their car navigating by GPS and never use maps; maybe most people feel the same way about getting a transportation schedule. That would make keeping those schedules available a low priority for Amtrak (as it is for airlines, some bus companies, some railroads in other countries, etc.) You and I seem to feel that pdf or printed timetables are something that a train service just needs to have to be doing it right, but our preference might actually be as irrelevant as wanting conductors to wear pillbox hats, as unhelpful as wanting conductors to keep punching tickets, or even as silly as if we wanted kerosene marker lamps.
I would think that pdf/paper timetables would be most likely to help passengers on the NEC and a few other busy corridors (Hiawathas, San Diego-LA) where people are likely to want a quick overview of all the available trains as they are deciding what time to head out/home. I'd think that would be especially true if the fare-and-reservation structure were set up to encourage people to just walk into South Station or Penn Station or wherever and buy a ticket and hop on the next train, instead of squeezing a lot of the potential flexibility out of the NEC and other corridors by offering low advance fares and really high walk-ups, a pricing model that seems to me to fit a one-a-day LD much better than a corridor that's trying to compete with driving.
But right now, where there have been so many changes in schedules, Amtrak might just not want to spend the time and money to make the nice pdf schedules and keep them up to date. If they don't make and upload pdf schedules, schedule changes can be handled by the day in the booking software, and they eliminate the confusion caused by having a pdf schedule that says one thing and booking software that changes it. That might actually be someone's long-term plan, even from before Covid. If there's no pdf schedule, it's much easier to shift trains a little earlier or later in the day to make room for maintenance or whatever; many passengers will never know their train's schedule was changed, because all they'll see if the time they were offered for that day. A good idea overall? I don't know. A practical way to reduce staff time without hurting most passengers? Yes.
