Amtrak's Arrow Reservation System is used nationally in the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
by Amtrak employees to take reservations, check train status, and monitor
Amtrak
The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Trade name, doing business as Amtrak (; ), is the national Passenger train, passenger railroad company of the United States. It operates intercity rail service in 46 of the 48 contiguous United Stat ...
equipment throughout the of the Amtrak network. Arrow was created to make Amtrak's reservation taking more simple. It went online November 1, 1981.
Arrow development is done in-house by Amtrak developers.
The Arrow application is similar to most major airline reservation systems, and runs on
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
's
Transaction Processing Facility
Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) is an IBM real-time operating system for mainframe computers descended from the IBM System/360 family, including zSeries and System z9.
TPF delivers fast, high-volume, high-throughput transaction processing, ...
system. The system is used directly by Amtrak employees and travel agents, and is also the basis for Amtrak.com and Quik-Trak reservations.
On August 26, 2007, the system was the victim of a major power outage at the data center, which impacted Amtrak nationwide. All Amtrak agents were forced to hand-write tickets, and were unable to use the system for any other purposes.
In 2015 a project to upgrade Amtrak's reservation infrastructure left the future of Arrow uncertain with a decision to upgrade or replace it unmade.
See also
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List of Amtrak station codes
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
– alphabetical by 3-letter Arrow ticketing code
*
List of Amtrak stations
This is a list of train stations and Amtrak Thruway stops used by Amtrak (the National Railroad Passenger Corporation in the United States). This list is in alphabetical order by station or stop name, which mostly corresponds to the city in ...
– alphabetical by city name
References
Amtrak
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