Amtrak ticket bookings were back to normal
Monday after a computer glitch crashed the rail line's entire
reservations system for most of the weekend.
According to the
Amtrak, Arrow, the line's res system, began experiencing
intermittent problems at around 9 a.m. on Saturday, followed by an
"unprecedented" failure of the entire system for the remainder of
the day. Arrow was once again up and running mid-afternoon on
Sunday.
The system failure,
which lasted nearly 24 hours, impacted everything from Amtrak's
telephone reservations lines to Amtrak's Web sites and its
automated Quik-Trak ticket kiosks at Amtrak stations.
"You couldn't call
into [Amtrak's interactive telephone reservations line] and if you
called (800) USA-RAIL, they couldn't assist you because they didn't
have [Arrow] access either," Katrina Romero, Amtrak's spokeswoman,
told TravelWeekly.com. "It was system-wide, across the whole
country, which is unprecedented."
The only way to get
an Amtrak ticket during the system crash was at an Amtrak station,
where tickets were handwritten by Amtrak agents.
The system failure
was ultimately traced to a faulty computer component, which was
replaced and the Arrow system was began operating normally at
around 12:55 p.m. on Sunday; the Quik-Trak ticket kiosks became
operational at around 3:10 p.m.
"[The Quik-Trak
kiosks] were the last system back up because we had to reset them,"
Romero said.
The system failure
raises questions about having one system control all of Amtrak's
reservations.
"This has never
happened before," Romero said. "But having every [reservation] go
through our Arrow system has worked for many, many years. It is
easier to keep track [of Amtrak reservations] if you have them in
one system," which manages inventory and prevents
overbooking.
It was unclear how
many passengers were impacted.
"We are thankful
that it happened on a weekend," Romero said. "It would have been a
lot more difficult for us on a Monday."
Last year, Amtrak
carried more than 24.3 million passengers nationwide on Amtrak's
300 train routes, averaging about 67,000 passengers a day. Amtrak
serves more than 500 destinations in 46 states.
To
contact reporter Michael Milligan, send e-mail to [email protected].