Much like Greyhound drivers, Amtrak conductors don't always ask to see ID, regardless of where or how the ticket was purchased. It's hit-or-miss in coach, depe

Much like Greyhound drivers, Amtrak conductors don't always ask to see ID, regardless of where or how the ticket was purchased. It's hit-or-miss in coach, depending (at least) on the conductor, the train, and your boarding station. In first class it's either exceedingly rare or nonexistent, at least west of Chicago. The NEC may be different; I've traveled over 40,000 miles on Amtrak but never there. A reasonable thing for the author to point out would have been that this has become yet another seldom-enforced law/regulation. Such policies are bad because they allow for selective and abusive enforcement, erode respect for the rule of law as an institution, provide none of the purported security benefits for which the policy was made in the first place, and create confusion as to what laws and regulations actually exist. As a separate thought exercise, consider the otherwise law-abiding individual who has constructed an identity and identification indistinguishable from a real one, but different from his own. Since there is no means of validating a piece of identification anyway, and in the circumstances described herein no means of determining from an individual's name whether he is to be prohibited from boarding, what's the point anyway? There are a lot of similar rabbit holes here; it's really best not to think about it, because (a) nothing you or anyone does is ever going to change it for the better, and (b) you're never going to discover any kind of logic to any of it. Make yourself a phony-but-real ID if you want, or don't. Travel, or don't. But don't try to reason about or change government policy; it's a waste of mental energy.