No seating on Amtrak's new café cars
Reflective of a cultural change in America, perhaps?
Quick post just for something I found interesting. I took Amtrak back to East Lansing yesterday. Amtrak has been running their new Siemens Venture coaches in Michigan for a while, but always with an old café car attached. The old café cars had five or so booths in the car where you could sit and eat, look out the window, play a game of cards with friends or strangers if you’d like. The booths seemed to be a preferred place for the conductors to sit and do paperwork too. The new café cars look like this.
No seats! There is a very narrow counter along the window on one side, with some electrical outlets, and I suspect very few people will use it (unless you really hate your seatmate). It is interesting to me though that I would have predicted the seats go away with a redesign, community seating like that felt like a relic from yesteryear. I suspect this is a combination of:
Just not that many people want to sit and talk with strangers anymore.
There is a general sense of, you paid for your seat in coach, please go back and sit in the seat you paid for. We don’t want you “wandering” the train, we don’t want you somewhere we can’t find you when your stop arrives. Get your food and go back to your seat!
And, I’ll be nice here, the new Venture equipment does have wider spaces everywhere to let the wheelchairs and such get through - that door at the end of the car there is maybe twice as wide as on the old coaches. You could’ve fit a booth or two in there still though!
Anyway, the change got me thinking. (I’ve been riding Amtrak long enough that back in undergrad I remember them showing a movie for everyone on a television in the lounge car! I’m sure that’s gone now too. You want a movie, use your phone.)
From your photos, this car looks like it could just as easily be in an airport. Not ugly exactly, but there's absolutely no charm there.