I rode round trip on Brightline from Orlando to Miami. Everything was great except for the seats. The back does not recline at all. The seat itself only moves forward a couple of inches. Three hours in those seats is all I could take. I hope they don't use them in the new long distance cars.
Does anyone know when Amtrak first stopped turning seats on the routes on that fact sheet? I saw the post about 1980 and the Pennsylvania services, but in terms of the Midwest State supported trains out of Chicago, was it all of the routes at once or piecemeal?
I get that this isn't the end of the world, but forcing half the riders to ride backwards is lousy no matter where it is. I hear the Europe argument, except we're the United States, not Europe and frankly I could care less about how they run their trains. This is just another nail in the coffin of what was once standard in American coach rail travel...you faced forward. I hear the heavyweight Pullman argument, but that wasn't coach it was Pullman. As Mr. Norman pointed out the walkover seats were once standard. Here in NY we had them on Metro-North on the old New York Central 1962 and 1965 built Pullman-Standard MU cars until they were retired in 2005. They were great, commuters loved them. On the very same NYC electric lines, when the M-1 Metropolitan MU cars with fixed seats were introduced in 1971 the seating was the commuters main gripe with those cars. Same on the old New Haven two years later when the M-2 Cosmopolitan MU cars were introduced. Fifty years ago it was the exception and now it's the norm, but that doesn't make it good. You don't ride in planes, cars or buses backwards...why should a train be any different? I highly doubt anyone was ever excited to find out that half of the seats in their train now face the wrong way, no matter where or when it was implemented.