It’s not that the Acela trip was bad — it was that the people who work for Amtrak have such poor attitudes, I worked for a freight railroad once that had a contract to run commuter service around Boston once. We could never get people working on the commuter service to think much about customer service — basic things like saying, “thank you” to passengers when they bought tickets,. There’s a long tradition of sour relations between labor and management on US railroads…and for some reason this persists.