Hastings Station to Lose Ticket Agent

Amtrak will remove ticket agents next month from the station in Hastings, Nebraska.

The move will become effective the second week of July and Amtrak will hire a part-time caretaker to clean and inspect the station.

“The volume of ticketing at stations, large and small, has been declining due to e-ticketing and the way technology has changed,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. “More than half of passengers do their ticketing without any human intervention at all.”

He said that most Amtrak passengers purchase online tickets, print their tickets at home or have their smart phones scanned, which contains their tickets.

“Of the 500 places you can go to on Amtrak, fewer than 200 are staffed,” Magliari said.

Magliari said the move to end ticket agent service came after the current full-time agent decided to take another job.

The move will leave only Lincoln and Omaha as staffed stations in Nebraska. All of Amtrak’s five stations in the state are served by the Chicago-San Francisco Bay California Zephyr.

Tags: Amtrak, Amtrak staffed stations, Amtrak stations, Amtrak's California Zephyr, California Zephyr, Hastings Nebraska