Ernestine, Meet Julie -

Try to book a train ticket on Amtrak's home page and you might just swear off train travel. A recent attempt to book a journey from New York to Boston, for example, required toggling between windows, looking up obscure station codes, and waiting for slow page repaints. When the order was finally submitted, an error message came up noting that, due to technical difficulties, the request could not be processed. If only Amtrak's Web designers were as attentive as the makers of the railroad's telephone self-service system. That system, which features the digitized voice of an operator named Julie, is a primer on good customer service.