A Lament For Clean Trains

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

I got some really great news this week from my regular recurring meeting with Amtrak’s customer-experience leadership – the wash rack in Chicago has just been brought back up and running, which means we’ll start to see a lot more clean windows as the busy summer travel season kicks into high gear.

A recent trip on the Floridian out of Orlando headed north just underscored how great it will be to resume cleaning trains again in Chicago. Take a look at this picture of a “view” from a Floridian Viewliner snapped only three weeks ago.

Last July, Amtrak told us that a capital program to replace all the wash racks had been deemed too expensive, so the Mechanical forces had to fall back on a Plan B built around a mix of replacement wash racks and targeted repairs for other wash racks, plus a temporary work around of having workers manually squeegee cars at certain stations.

It seems they actually wound up falling back further to a Plan C, because it turns out that rules from the Environmental Protection Agency stopped the squeegee plan cold – there was no good way to collect the gunk squeegeed off the railcars. And the rest of Plan B, which would have wash racks going into service later that summer and fall, also seemed to take a lot longer than expected. So yes, this is later than promised and planned.

Still, I’ll take the win and be pleased we’ll finally start looking out clean(er) windows.

I wish we could all declare victory and move on, but another development this week shows that there’s still a lot of work to do.

Meet Noel Philips, one of the proliferating number of successful and popular YouTube travel bloggers. Noel’s subscriber list is two-thirds of the way to one million. Five days ago he posted a video about his attempt to take “luxury” versions of public transportation in the U.S., including a luxury bus and then what was supposed to be a two-day trip on the Floridian to Chicago from Florida. It started out with getting barked at during boarding in Florida and a takeout diner bag in their room shortly after departure. Bad enough. But I’ll cut to the chase: he talked at length about poor cleanliness while narrating close-up video shots of grime and gook in their Viewliner I Bedroom.

The kicker? He and his partner were so disappointed in their “luxury” Bedroom experience, and so put off by the poor hygiene, that they abandoned their trip in Washington, D.C., choosing to go the rest of the way to Chicago via United Airlines first class. They overnighted at the DC Waldorf Astoria, too, complete with spa massages that evening.

And all of this, Philips says, cost him less than the Amtrak ride.

Since his video went live five days ago, it has accumulated 164,000 views and the ticker is still climbing.

We’ve put in years of hard work in the trenches, meeting with lawmakers, briefing congressional staff, helping to draft Federal legislation investing in passenger rail, traveling the country to talk to Mayors and city council leaders and local planners, extolling the virtues of rail travel and the benefits to local economies of investing in passenger rail...and Amtrak can’t keep the trains clean enough to prevent 164,000 people from seeing this influential travel vlogger get off the train early.

For context, the single most popular video on the Rail Passengers channel – a review of the Superliner refresh program – has 37,000 views. Noel’s soapbox is bigger and his megaphone is louder.

Here’s the thing: Noel is not wrong. He is not wrong at all. He’s correct. Some things are inevitable with elderly equipment, but even old stuff can be kept clean. While we wait for new equipment like Airos and Avelias to come on line, and while we band-aid over delayed long-distance fleet replacement with aesthetic refreshes to the bi-level fleet, we still need the value of the basic experience to be at least somewhat in line with the cost of the fare paid. Right now, it isn’t.

I’m in touch with Noel and getting a few more details of his experience to pass along to Amtrak executives. We meet every couple of weeks to talk over customer-service issues, and clean trains remains high on the list.

Some things are going to be expensive and take a long time. But a spray bottle of degreaser and a clean cloth can do wonders, too.