Amtrak train cleaning in Hampton Roads: fast turnarounds

Amtrak train cleaning in Hampton Roads mostly happens out of sight, yet it is essential to keeping busy passenger services running. At 11:30 a.m., Amtrak’s Northeast Regional 67 rolls into the Newport News Transportation Center on time after its overnight trip from Boston.

This is reported by the railway transport news portal Railway Supply.

How Amtrak train cleaning in Hampton Roads works?

For passengers, this Newport News stop is the end of the line, and everyone has to leave the train. For the engineer and conductors, the day is nearly finished as well. Once the coaches are empty, the operating crew turns the train on the wye and pushes it over to the Amtrak service facility near Oyster Point, where the next stage of Amtrak train cleaning in Hampton Roads begins.

Quick turnaround of trains and rising demand

Inside the facility, a different crew — essentially the railroad version of a pit team — is waiting with a long checklist of tasks. They have less than four hours to work through it before the same train is scheduled to leave the yard again for Philadelphia around 3:15 p.m., a quick turnaround that leaves little margin for error.

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“The turnaround on this train is fast,” said Troy Coleman, a customer service quality supervisor with Amtrak. The 47-year-old Navy veteran helps lead the team that makes sure the interiors of the passenger coaches are clean, comfortable and ship-shape for the millions of passengers who, each year, board trains starting their trips in Newport News.

Many say the United States is going through a kind of rail renaissance, and Amtrak reported record travel in its most recent fiscal year. Virginia is contributing to that rail renaissance: over the same period, more than 1.5 million passengers rode one of eight daily round-trip, state-supported trains. A majority of those Virginia state-supported trains begin and end their day in Hampton Roads, which adds to the workload at the Newport News facility.

All of those extra riders mean more trash to remove and more strain on the equipment, especially once the holiday season arrives and trains become even busier. Coleman said the impact of that extra waste and strain on equipment during holidays is particularly noticeable for his cleaning crews, whose already tight schedule leaves almost no room for delay.

Source: www.wavy.com

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