by Tadman
Basically Jim has it.
If you can put car/room numbers on a ticket for sleeper, you can put car/seat numbers on a coach ticket.
Also, worth noting, many European tickets have seat/car numbers AND track/platform numbers. As well as diagrams on each platform of the trains that serve that platform.
No joke, in Germany, lots of stations are 4-track, 2-platform. Outers are express, inners are local. Most larger cities have 12+ track terminals or through stations. In all of them, they know months in advance where the train is going. Because of that, each platform has a pictogram of an ICE or regional train with the car numbers.
I'm sure this is hard to do in the US at larger stations because trains vary in OTP so much that the station master has to be creative. When NYP has 14 LD trains and 20+ off-NEC corridor trains at the mercy of CSX et al... you can't count on Train X to arrive on platform Y at 1423 every day.
If you can put car/room numbers on a ticket for sleeper, you can put car/seat numbers on a coach ticket.
Also, worth noting, many European tickets have seat/car numbers AND track/platform numbers. As well as diagrams on each platform of the trains that serve that platform.
No joke, in Germany, lots of stations are 4-track, 2-platform. Outers are express, inners are local. Most larger cities have 12+ track terminals or through stations. In all of them, they know months in advance where the train is going. Because of that, each platform has a pictogram of an ICE or regional train with the car numbers.
I'm sure this is hard to do in the US at larger stations because trains vary in OTP so much that the station master has to be creative. When NYP has 14 LD trains and 20+ off-NEC corridor trains at the mercy of CSX et al... you can't count on Train X to arrive on platform Y at 1423 every day.
The new Acela: It's not Aveliable.