DOWNING JENKS WOULD APPROVE.

I've had occasion to ride the Texas Eagle beyond St. Louis in 2004, 2012, and 2014.  The Missouri Pacific Railroad did such a good job discouraging passengers that the remaining Texarkana to St. Louis plug train didn't even get written into the initial Amtrak network, and what we understand as the Eagle today began as a St. Louis to El Paso Inter-American connecting, at one time, with a passenger train in Mexico.  (Try finding a common-carrier style intercity passenger train in Mexico today!)

The Eagle has always had potential as a business train between north Texas and St. Louis, although it's overpurposed as the midday corridor train between Chicago and St. Louis.  These days, though, the people at Amtrak seem to be as determined as Missouri Pacific management once was to discourage use of the Eagle.

“There is no Sightseer Lounge on this train. Once again, there is no Sightseer Lounge on this train,” emphasized the public-address announcement. “You must buy food to sit in the café car; if you don’t buy food and we see you sitting in the café, we will ask you to return to your seat.”

Another announcement warned passengers not to bring laptops into the car. There was, of course, no “fasten seat belt” sign or announcement, but there might as well have been. The message was clear: passengers were basically expected to stay where they were.

A recent round trip on the Chicago-San Antonio, Texas, train — once nurtured by the home-grown Texas Eagle Marketing and Performance Organization, or TEMPO — showed how service has been castrated from Washington, D.C., by a cost-enamored management and a complicit board of directors.

You know that when a corporation attempts to spin a degradation of service as an improvement that something is wrong.

In a 2021 letter to an Eagle passenger, Amtrak claims “retirement of the Sightseer Lounge car … is part of Amtrak’s plan to modernize our fleet of equipment,” though the cars are not being retired. The letter adds, “these determinations were not made lightly and are being implemented wholly with the purpose of ensuring the financial excellence Amtrak requires to deliver intercity transportation into the future with superior safety, customer service, and efficiency.” The writer appears to have borrowed from communications responding to discontinuance of the Starlight’s popular Pacific Parlour Car first-class lounge, a move ordered by then-CEO Richard Anderson in 2018. Those popular but significantly older cars were, indeed, retired.

Currently, replacements for the late 1990s Acela trains are under construction, and new short-haul coaches to replace the late 1980s Horizon Fleet cars are showing up in the Midwest and California.  There are no replacements on order for the Superliner coaches.  Perhaps if the Western trains become etiolated conveyances with no room to deal card games or mingle with other passengers, there will be no reason to buy any.