I've had bad luck riding Amtrak recently, but in the process I have come to realize a few things and feel like sharing them with you.
Two weeks ago, I was in Chicago. The weather was bitter, below or barely above zero, with gusty winds. Conditions at Fourteenth Street Coach Yard were obviously bad, because nine out of every ten departing trains those two days loaded and left late from Chicago Union Station, sometimes by three to five hours.
Let's set aside the reasons this happened. It's fair to say that Amtrak met the expectations of almost no passengers. I was trying to get to New Orleans, and after the Pullman Rail Journeys cars got left by the City of New Orleans two days in a row, I returned home to Virginia. Last week a huge snow and ice storm made its way up the Atlantic Coast states. CSX may not have given Amtrak much choice, but in any event Amtrak cancelled its schedules south of Richmond last Wednesday and Thursday and most of those trains Friday. I was to ride the southbound Auto Train on Wednesday but instead got to punch my way through the blizzard on Interstate 95. Yet, while inconvenienced, to say the least, I did not feel put out.
In a perverse sort of way, Amtrak at least met my expectations; it decided to play it safe, and I think that was the right call. We think of passenger trains as all-weather conveyances. Next to commercial airliners, they're pretty good. Look at what airlines do these days: at the first hint of severe weather, they cancel flights en masse. Last week airlines cancelled 18,000 flights; another 40,000 were delayed.
These are almost unimaginable numbers. But passengers seemed to accept this. Airlines would rather step back from weather catastrophes than send planes back from the gate, only to have them stuck on the tarmac hour after uncomfortable hour.
Such behavior used to only cause bad publicity; now it invites steep government fines. So here's what I've been thinking: Maybe Amtrak should perform only to its capabilities and skip the heroics. In Chicago two weeks ago it decided to run the entire schedule and angered almost everyone. Last week on the Atlantic Coast it cancelled its schedules and I suspect most people understood why. The host freight railroads have no redundancy of employees to plow rights of way, repair damaged signals, and clear fallen trees, so that Amtrak can operate on time in terrible conditions. Nor are they ever likely to ever again maintain employment levels optimized for the year's worst weather.
My first hope is that for the rest of this winter and next, that Fourteenth Street and Amtrak's other coach yards have the necessary people with the right training and tools to do their jobs, and alert supervision. But if they don't, and another mother of a blizzard sweeps into town, someone needs to decide what can be accomplished in terms of getting trains to the station in a timely manner, then pledge to do it and cancel the other schedules. For instance, most state-supported services have multiple departures, so run just one. If a long-distance train has light bookings two days running, put these people on the second day's train and cancel the first. In essence, this is what Amtrak did once in Chicago earlier this winter.
Speaking for myself, I would rather be told hours or a day ahead that a train won't run than see it leave hours late (or in my case not at all). I've had it both ways, and prefer the former. – Fred W. Frailey
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