An Educational Breakfast in an Amtrak Dining Car
A few years ago, I was on the eastbound Lake Shore Limited headed for Boston. I had just entered the dining car, eager for a good breakfast, and was ushered to a table where a young man in his 20s had already been seated. After the usual where-are-you-headed conversation, the young fellow told me how he had manipulated the system to save money on his fare. He was quite smug about it.
Like me, he had boarded the train in Chicago, but was headed for New York City. However, while I had one through ticket for a sleeping car roomette all the way to Boston, he had purchased two tickets for his ride to Penn Station. Ticket Number One had him in a roomette from Chicago as far as Buffalo, which was then about an hour up ahead of us. But from Buffalo on into New York’s Pennsylvania Station, his second ticket was for a seat in coach … and coach travel, of course, is much cheaper.
I can’t remember how much money he told me he’d saved on that trip, but I checked current Lake Shore fares for travel in mid-February.
The fare for one adult traveling in a roomette all the way from Chicago to New York City is $511. That same roomette from Chicago to Buffalo is priced at $253 and a coach ticket from there to Penn Station is just $50. In other words, switching to coach at Buffalo would save more than $200.
But here’s what I remember most about that young man in the Lake Shore dining car. The train doesn’t get to Buffalo until about 9:00 a.m. By not making the switch until Buffalo, he had time to have breakfast in the diner while he was still traveling on a sleeping car ticket. And dining car meals are free for sleeping car passengers!
I don’t know where that kid is today, but I’ll bet he’s working on Wall Street.
Thanks, Greg … Most informative.
Hi, Jim:
I wanted to give some further information about breaking the trip up like this.
First off, if you want to reserve a train as partly in sleeper and partly in coach, you should book it over the phone with Amtrak reservations.
There isn’t any additional cost, and this way the reservation is set up such that on-board staff know that in fact the same passenger is moving from a sleeper to a coach seat.
Furthermore, it would result in a better price than if one booked two separate tickets in two separate transactions.
Here’s why.
(For the purpose of this example I am using the lowest regular coach fare, the DOF1, and not the seasonal EO2U nonrefundable fare. The DOF1 is the underlying fare used, when a passenger occupies a sleeping accommodation. Also for the sleeping accommodation charge I am using the lowest of the five levels – the so-called “D” bucket, VD in this instance for the the Viewliner roomette.)
Some numbers, first.
CHI-NYP DOF1: $99
CHI-BUF DOF1: $69
BUF-NYP DOF1: $62
If you book completely separate reservations from CHI to BUF, and then from BUF to NYP, instead of paying the through CHI-NYP fare of $99, you will pay a total of $131 – the sum of the CHI-BUF $99 and the BUF-NYP $62. You could actually pay more for the coach or rail portion than if you booked both legs in one transaction.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the price difference on the Viewliner roomette accommodation charge is $67 (the difference between the CHI-BUF charge of $138 and the CHI-NYP charge of $205.
Yes, that isn’t to be sneezed at but it also requires the hassle of moving from one car to another, and it also means that you will forgo the included lunch on the train since you won’t be occupying a sleeper then. (I imagine dinner isn’t served since the train arrives New York at 6:35 pm.)
Now it’s possible that the young man did book with Amtrak over the phone, but if he didn’t he quite likely paid more than he needed to for the coach/rail part of the ticket even as he saved the difference between Buffalo and New York accommodation charges. Amtrak agents are used to booking partial sleeper trips, and it isn’t considered trickery or getting away with something: it’s normal.