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Okay I think Amtrak is not really remotely interested in providing a positive passenger rail experience, but is instead used by the automotive and railroad industry to provide a poor experience, ensuring that people keep buying cars and gas and keep the rail lines free for commercial usage.
Here is my primary piece of evidence; in e-commerce web design to increase sales your goal is to remove barriers between a motivated customer and them clicking buy. A company the size of amtrak should have a decently sophisticated process of multi variable testing and focus groups to at least someehat improve the process over time and make it easy for people to plan route trips and buy tickets.
And yet in the decades that Amtrak has been operating they user experience has barely changed and seems to do just the minimum to keep up with the times and not look stale. And it's not an overly complicated item they are selling. A very small in house team would be able to make a very usable experience in just a couple of years. But it's absolute shit. It's so frustrating and to try and plan a train trip and it always has been, for absolutely no reason.
Either this massive company has had absolute fools in charge of their web dev for decades leaving piles of money on the table due to incompetence.. OR they actually just don't care about making sales for whatever reason. I think that reason is that they exist just to keep the rail experience shitty.
My secondary piece of evidence is how poor and shitty the actual train service remains after so long in business. Train travel has not gotten better at all in my lifetime, only worse.
Destroying amtrak is literally a republican agenda, for the automotive reasons you stated.
Also, if you can spring for a sleeper car, the experience is fucking amazing. Three meals (and one boozy drink) included a day, there was a wine tasting, just all around pretty rad.
I have enjoyed the sleeper cars! I'm a fan of rail travel which is how i know that the user experience hasn't changed in 30+ years!
My favorite is the observation cars on the coast starlight.
The trains are still infrequent, often not to schedule and with minimum available routes. Short hops are far too expensive for the experience you get as well. The only thing keeping Amtrak from working seems to be Amtrak.