When I started using Amtrak between L.A. and San Diego in 1975, the conductors not only punched the tickets manually, but they also walked down the length of the train calling the stops the way they would have done in 1875. “Santy Ana! Santy Ana next…”. By late 1976 they upgraded to an onboard intercom, but AFAIK they punch tickets to this day.
When you boarded in L.A. they would direct you to a specific car depending on your destination. I always thought this was strictly because the small town platforms were generally much shorter than the train, so the engineer would position the train accordingly for station stops. Now that I think about it, however, this system also probably helped the conductors in checking the tickets as well, though there was nothing to prevent you sitting anywhere you wanted.
I rode trains in Switzerland and Germany about a month ago.
I suspected they’d be good before we got there due to both countries’ reputations but one really gets the sense that if another ounce of efficiency could be squeezed from the systems, they’d be all over it. Both had live conductors doing the ticket punching.
The subway in Paris which was very much like the CTA L with little magstriped cards and turnstiles.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were minimum staffing levels set by various regulatory agencies, either. For example, there are a certain number of flight attendants required for every so many passenger seats (seems to be something like 50:1 for big airliners). It also wouldn’t surprise me if Chicago and other big city transit agencies were able to get around these rules due to grit and clout.
The scheduled time from Clybourn to Ogilvie is roughly 8 minutes. During rush hour, there is no way to drive that trip in 8 minutes - Metra is the fastest option, which is why at least a handful of Bucktown residents take Metra one stop to their downtown job during normal commute hours.
Clybourn is milepost 2.8 (Ogilvie is milepost 0). At 8 minutes, that’s an average of 21 miles per hour. I’m not sure there’s much they can do to speed it up - you must have noticed that the line south of Clybourn is pretty curvy, and then once the train goes south of Grand, it passes through a ton of switches that have low speed restrictions.
Nitpick. Only one person on the train is the conductor. The others, on Metra, are called trainmen.
While the aviation industry grew up with such regs, the staffing levels for railroads and transit agencies are entirely a matter between the company and its unions. CTA, for instance, has had one-person train operation (no conductors) since 1997. Vancouver’s system has zero-person train operation.
The reason Metra has to audit tickets on the trains is because there’s no way to control entry and exit from suburban boarding locations. Some are literally in the middle of the street. The one line that does have controlled access to all its stations, the Illinois Central, was a real pioneer in self-service ticketing, installing machines and automated faregates in 1965, long before BART or Washington Metro. Apparently for union reasons, though, they never got rid of the trainmen checking tickets on board, and in the 1990s IC riders—by now a large proportion of them black—protested that they were treated differently than other Metra riders, and the faregates were removed.
Good point. Here in Virginia several stations have platforms that are open to the public and at which both VRE and Amtrak trains stop. They check your ticket once you get on, and when you get off, you are off, you can just walk out without checking in with the line. Depending on what station you are getting off at and what time it is, there might not even be anyone on duty there.
