Wooo!! Fredericksburg line rocks!!! Sorry, had to get that out of my system.
For some reason (and VRE claims there really are good reasons), new equipment tends to populate the Fred line first. Not sure if it has to do with the maintenance facilities at XR or not. At any rate, that's fine by me if we get V50 first! Though with the huge problem Manassas line has with wheel-slip during the fall months, I do wonder how the MP36s would fare on that terrain.
Getting back to the initial topic, sure folks are upset. But they also know that there is no reason for Keolis to bid for a contract, win it, hire folks, certify them for CSX/NS/Amtrak territories, and then give up do a poor job. Engineers are going to have trouble spotting the train consistently (which has gotten far better, BTW, though they stop in different places than the old crew, which irks some people for some reason), there will be problems with the wheelchair lifts, etc. etc. But are those complaining about this forgetting the days of coupled trains, overshot platforms, bus offloads, and *gasp* derailments (1 time, CSX's fault 100%) that happened under Amtrak? It's been 3 weeks with Keolis! Even the crew, when there is a muckup, are the first to say, and I quote, "Sorry folks, we'll do better next time." No shrugging, no ignoring, no talkback. They know they're being scrutinized, and there's no reason for them to be malicious. After all, if Keolis goes bye-bye, they're out of a job. There is a kink somewhere for sure, and I'm not covering for them, just pointing out that the bitter attitude and nasty remarks about the new guys are just as off-putting as the comments about Amtrak intentionally not pulling their weight or flat-out sabotaging; it's getting tiresome.
Oh, as for the person who got 10 FRCs in 10 days? Amazing. I've gotten....none. So there's your other side of the coin on that issue. To be fair, I happened to be out the day there was an hour delay in the morning, but the other delays have been under 30 minutes, usually no more than 15, and 1 of them was for mechanical problems when they had to add an extra engine in the yard and were late arriving. They made up 8 minutes of that time between Fredericksburg and Alexandria. As a matter of fact, I just counted through my 4 FRCs that I racked up from back in early summer.
