I took the Sunset Limited/Texas Eagle from El Paso to Austin on Saturday, January 26, 2008. Only a true train buff would take the train from El Paso to Austin. It requires an 8.5 hour sleepover in San Antonio. Mercifully, I can afford a roomette. Clearly, this is not a good idea for a coach passenger.
I used the on-line ticketing kiosk to pick-up my ticket at the El Paso Station on Friday afternoon. It was a piece of cake; I slid my credit card into the reader, and it recognized me immediately. I was asked a few simple questions and, voila, I had my ticket. It was pretty slick. The ticket office was not manned when I dropped by the station, so the on-line ticking kiosk was convenient. If it had not been there, I would have had to wait until Saturday morning to get my ticket.
The El Paso station was squeaky clean. It is an old union station that was opened in 1906, and it has been restored. It was designed by the Chicago firm of Daniel H. Burnham, which also designed Washington's Union Station. The El Paso station is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Sun Metro, which is the El Paso transit system, and Amtrak appear to be the major tenants.
When I got up Saturday morning I checked on-line to see how Number 2 was running. Much to my surprise, the Amtrak web-site showed that the train was on time. Given the Sunset's perpetual tardiness, I must have gasped in surprise. I had breakfast and walked from my hotel to the station. When I got there I was told by the ticket agent that the train would arrive about 9:15 a.m. or nearly an hour late. I told him that the train was shown as being on time. "What happened", I asked him? He said that it was stuck about 16 miles west of town because of track work and freight traffic congestion. Being a veteran train traveler, I broke out a book and settled into one of the benches to wait for the train. About 9:15 the agent announced that the Sunset was further delayed and would arrive at approximately 10:00. Around 10:15 he came into the waiting area and announced that the train was further delayed because the crew had exceeded the 12 hour operating limit. Apparently the El Paso to Alpine crew had to be driven out to the train so that they could bring it into the station. In any case, the agent's frustration got the better of him - I understand how he must have felt, and he came down pretty hard on the Union Pacific. This is not the first time that I have heard an Amtrak employee publicly dump his spleen on the UP. It is a good example, unfortunately, of how persistently late running trains can sap the morale of Amtrak's employees.
The train arrived at 11:03. It consisted of two locos, a transition sleeper, a New Orleans sleeper, a lounge car, a dinning car, two New Orleans coaches (one was a baggage coach), one Chicago coach and one Chicago sleeper.
I had Roomette #5 in car 2230 - New Hampshire. It was clean and properly stocked with towels, wash cloths, and bottled water. However, the safety card that is normally in the room was missing. Also, a copy of the schedule and route information, which is also normally in the room, was missing.
The New Hampshire showed its age. The carpet in my room, at least, was a bit threadbare. Moreover, the occupied/not occupied indicators on the toilet doors are faded, and it was practically impossible to tell whether they were occupied outside of trying the door.
When I got on the train the car attendant told me that I had a lunch reservation for noon. I told him that noon was a bit early, and I asked him if I could get a later reservation. He said that he did not know and told me that I should go up to the dining car to see if the steward could give me a later time. He was a bit gruff; perhaps he too was frustrated by the late running train. In any case, after giving it a second thought, I decided that noon would be okay for lunch. Subsequently, he came back to my room and told me that I could have a new lunch reservation for 2:00 if desired. I kept the noon reservation.
We departed for Alpine and points east about 11:30. But apparently the train gods don't look favorably on the Sunset. About two miles east of the station the train stopped. A passenger had gotten sick and had to be removed from it. This delayed us another 45 minutes. Finally, at 12:15 or thereabouts we got underway for Alpine. From then on it was clear sailing all the way to Alpine and San Antonio. We did not have to take to a siding for any passing freights. And since Number 1 had derailed near Houston, we did not have to worry about it.
I had the garden burger for lunch. It was terrible. It was hard as a rock. Either it had not been prepared properly before it was put on the train or it was not heated correctly. I was afraid that if I dropped it on the table I might have broken it. That is the table.
After lunch I went to the lounge car. Newspapers were scattered all over the floor. This is a potential safety hazard. If someone inadvertently steps on them, he or she could take a tumble. Newspapers slide easily on carpet. I picked them up and put them in the trash receptacle. No one from the crew seemed to notice them.
The best scenery on the El Paso to San Antonio run is arguably between Marfa and Sanderson. The train cuts through the southern edge of the Davis Mountains. Between Marfa and Alpine it climbs over the 5,000 foot Paisano Pass. This is not like crossing the Rockies, although the Davis Mountains are part of the Southern Rocky Mountains, but it is a good substitute. I have been bicycling in and around Alpine for many years. I know the area well. Although I have traveled to many beautiful spots in Asia, North America, and the UK, at the end of the day I always come back to Alpine and the Davis Mountains. The train got to Sanderson about just as the sun was setting, so I did not have an opportunity to see the high bridge over the Pecos River.
I counted approximately 56 passengers on the train between El Paso and Del Rio. Twelve passengers got on the Sunset at El Paso; I did not count the number getting off. It boarded one passenger at Alpine; none got off that I could see. I did not see anyone get on or off the train at Del Rio. It had approximately 20 passengers whose seat checks indicated that they were getting off in San Antonio. I saw very few seat checks for New Orleans.
Dinner was a big improvement over the noon meal. I had the vegetarian selection. I don't remember the name of it, but it was like a soufflé. It was very well prepared. And much to my delight it came with a crisp salad, a roll, and mixed vegetables that had not been overcooked. Gone from the plate was the rubbery broccoli that I have commented on to Amtrak management. I topped the meal off with a piece of cheese cake. It was perfect. The meal was one of the best that I have had recently on Amtrak. On the Eagle out of San Antonio I was served a cold breakfast. The dining car crew does not get on the train until Austin, and the dinner does not open until after departing Austin. A blueberry muffin came with breakfast. It was cold and crumbly. It was awful. The other items were OK. It is hard to screw up cereal, milk and fruit. I understand the challenge of serving breakfast to the sleeping car passengers on the Eagle out of San Antonio, but Amtrak needs to do a better job of it.
The lounge car windows on the Eagle, unlike those on the Sunset, were dirty. Dirty windows in a sightseeing car a good impression does not make.
There is a certain public accomodation aspect to being a common carrier, and pre-Amtrak, there was an expectation in certain quarters that the railroads carry passengers, and if they lost money, too bad.
This matter of a public accomodation is not entirely frivolous. If you are the power company or the local phone company, there is an expectation that you supply electricity or a phone connection to all customers in your service area provided they pay their bills. You don't get to say, "Farmer Fred is too frugal and doesn't use enough electricity to make serving him out in the country pay, I think I will discontinue his service and tell him to get a generator."
The manner in which public accomodation carries over into this day and age is that Union Pacific, CSX, NS, and the others are expected to carry Amtrak trains, for a fee of course, but as part of the social contract for turning the operation of passenger trains over to Amtrak back in 1971.
We speak of the glory days of railroading when the railroads took pride in giving passenger trains priority, and if freight is put into a siding, what is the problem that some inanimate objects have to wait when passengers have places to go? But time is money -- that freight in the siding is burning up crew hours, utilization hours of the cars and locomotives, finance charges for the value of the freight itself, sitting there instead of getting to its destination and being put to productive use, along with the time of customers waiting for their goods.
NARP famously made the point that a single track can carry the passenger capacity of 20 lanes of freeway. Indeed it can if it is a double-track line devoted largely to passenger trains of long train lengths, high seating density, short headways, and automatic train stop -- think of a subway line or the New Tokaido line. If you are trying to highball an Amtrak LD train at an average of 50 MPH down a single-track line with heavy freight traffic where the general flow of traffic runs about 30 MPH, you are going to have problems with capacity for that kind of passenger train, no matter how good-intentioned your host railroad.
The problem is that on one hand, you have the NEC where the fares are high enough (meaning people consider the train of high value with respect to transportation alternatives) to pay above-the-rails operating costs, but where there is the financial burden of running the whole railroad, and then you have most everywhere else, where the tracks are for "free" in the amount of rather low payments to the freight railroads, but one is at the mercies of the railroad dispatcher.
There probably is a formula to get the required speed, on-time performance, and frequencies for a workable passenger service without breaking the bank. It probably involves paying that 4 million/mile or so talked about in the Vision document along with the Ohio Plan -- maybe not buying up the corridors outright, but paying out substantial amounts of money for the sidings, double tracking, crossovers, signals, and so on to boost segments of freight railroad to accept the volume of passenger traffic people have in mind.
One can probably come up with the money to do this for the Ohio corridors -- one is not going to come up with the 8 billion to do this for the Sunset Limited.
I was at a passenger advocacy meeting perusing parts of the Vision document, and I chimed in with, "there may be a real role for passenger service in the 100-mile range -- it says here that Amtrak completely dominates air travel on NY-Philly and LA-SD and the Amtrak share starts tapering off as you go longer distances." One of the regulars turned to me and said "Corridors are anything up to 400 miles" as if 1) I am a complete idiot for suggesting "super commuter service" of 100 mile distances as playing to the strengths of the rail mode, and 2) there is some Holy Writ handed down from the mountain that says passenger corridors are anything up to 400 miles.
NARP and many others in the advocacy community end up believing our own press releases and talking points and we end up with things like the Sunset. (At the same meeting there was the obligatory complaining about a certain presidential candidate's war on the Sunset Limited.) Of course all of this is the fault of the Union Pacific, the fault of Amtrak management, the fault of the White Haired One running for high office, the fault of an uninformed public that won't vote enough money. None of this can be layed at the feet of the advocacy community for getting what we have been asking for all of these years.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
No, Paul, it's 500 miles for a corridor In the more enlightened metric world, which is more proper, it Kilometers. To covert, you double it and add 30, so a corridor is 1030 kilometers.
Although, apparently for a mere pittence, you can put in 24" superelevation on the old PRR mainline and get it up to 150 mph class 8 track and then a corridor would be 900 miles, (if you don't stop in Pittsburgh. All those Pittsburghians will just have to move to NY or Chicago to catch a ride.) The only catch would be having to stop every 500 miles to let all those fuel savings out of the tank before it overflowed. Maybe we could put 36" wheels in the front and 45" wheels in the back, so the train would ALWAYS be going downhill.
(sarcasm filter is OFF)
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
oltmannd wrote: No, Paul, it's 500 miles for a corridor In the more enlightened metric world, which is more proper, it Kilometers. To covert, you double it and add 30, so a corridor is 1030 kilometers.
To convert miles to kilometres, multiply by 1.609
So 500 miles is 804 kilometres.
And the Sunset Limited may travel at 79mph or 127kph.
To convert kilometres to miles, multiply by 0.6214
So the new Madrid - Barcelona line will have a maximum line speed of 350kph or 217mph.
Chafford1 wrote: oltmannd wrote: No, Paul, it's 500 miles for a corridor In the more enlightened metric world, which is more proper, it Kilometers. To covert, you double it and add 30, so a corridor is 1030 kilometers. To convert miles to kilometres, multiply by 1.609So 500 miles is 804 kilometres.And the Sunset Limited may travel at 79mph or 127kph.To convert kilometres to miles, multiply by 0.6214So the new Madrid - Barcelona line will have a maximum line speed of 350kph or 217mph.
I think you might need to turn your web browser's sarcasm filter on.....
Not a fan of SCTV's Great White North, eh?
Bob and Doug decided that the "double it and add 30" was a universal English-Metric conversion factor. They particularly liked that a dozen donuts would be 54 metric donuts.
To show you how old I am, I have that album. And a 6-pack is 42 metric beers.
Paul Milenkovic wrote: To show you how old I am, I have that album. And a 6-pack is 42 metric beers.
it WAS beers. The donut bit was about parking spaces....
http://www.cepheid.org/~niklas/bobanddoug.com/sounds/gwn/mtrcbeer.wav
The most troubling part of Samatha's trip report to me was when she first wanted to change her dinner seating from the one the car attendent had gotten for her prior to her boarding, the attendent told her to go do it herself!
I'm still wondering why the car attendents and dining car staff need to sleep on the train and use up valuable revenue sleeper space. Why not rotate them on and off like the train crews?
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=112503&nseq=0
11 sleepers and coaches in 1984
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=221014&nseq=2
5 sleepers and coaches in 2008
Even factoring up for Viewliner vs. 10-6 and 44 seat Budd vs 60 seat Amfleet II....
Same route, same schedule (+/-), higher population along route.
What's going on?
Riding on the Sunset:
I was on the Sunset Limited in November Westbound from SAS to LAX. They were talking about an article I think was in the New York Times, "Sunset Limited, a family of strangers."
I had a good trip and took some photos and video. I had been on several Amtrak trips, but only recently started taking pictures. I like to take the West LD trains having family in Vancouver BC, Los Angeles area, South Texas, St Paul , Chicago. So I have made the time for the 'big swing' around the USA a few times. Over several years I have been fortunate to make all connections and be close to on time.
When I tell family and friends about Amtrak they always wanted to know more and see pictures. I also try to get photos for educational purposes.
http://www.doe.mtu.edu/~ehgroth/website/index.html
Added Reference to aboveFamily of Strangers on the Sunset LimitedBy Ralph BlumenthalFrom the New York Times, November 23, 2007
Tigerholm @Yahoo.com
Video http://www.youtube.com/user/lakesuperiorvideos#p/p
daveklepper wrote: But I hope this trip report did reach Amtrak.
I take three or four trips a year on Amtrak. At the conclusion of each trip I send a report to the President of Amtrak. I have gotten a nice reply for each one. In addition, I send a copy of my report to the Amtrak Customer Service Committee.
I tell Amtrak management, as well as the ACSC, what I think they are doing right as well as point out opportunities for improvement. It is important to give management a balanced report. Too many people just highlight what is wrong.
I rode #2 the entire route 2/24-2/26. Had a slpr compartment. Car attendent was very helpful. Runtime was not very bad w/the worst being 90 min off, but I arrived into N Orleans just under an hour late. Food service was not bad. I did not even know Amtrak had changed menu selections within the last yr when I last rode Amtrak. Anyway, the service was prompt and food was good except on the first morning my breakfast choice of an omlette was lousy. Since I arrived into N Orleans within an hour of scheduled arrival time, this gave me time that evening to check the scenes on Canal St & the French Qtr. That was interesting and this became the first time I have spent time sightseeing in the Big Easy. This trip I would rank a B. Good two stressful free days spent which is what I needed badly.
Oltmannd,
I've been told that as the older generation that was used to riding LD trains and was leary of planes dies off, their replacements are getting fewer and fewer in number. However, I've never seen any hard statistics to back that up. Still, it does seem plausible. That's a 28 year time period you're comparing and there's been a lot of changes in everything during that time.
I personally suspect that the development of the low-cost airlines might also have something to do with it.
alphas wrote: Oltmannd,I've been told that as the older generation that was used to riding LD trains and was leary of planes dies off, their replacements are getting fewer and fewer in number. However, I've never seen any hard statistics to back that up. Still, it does seem plausible. That's a 28 year time period you're comparing and there's been a lot of changes in everything during that time. I personally suspect that the development of the low-cost airlines might also have something to do with it.
The Pro-Amtrak mantra has been that "more people are riding Amtrak". If true in aggergate, it might not be true in particular. It appears that the Crescent might be going backwards in absolute terms when it should be growing like a weed if it was even keeping pace with population growht along its route.
I found this report interesting and alarming.
I rode the Sunset Ltd back in 2004, on my very first Amtrak "excursion", from Orlando to El Paso. I was on the #2 that was halted at New Orleans because of track damage due to Hurricane Charley. The following year, I rode #2 east from NOL to cover the ground I had missed the previous year. Two weeks later Katrina ravaged the area, and I haven't been able to ride the Sunset out of FL since. Your report reminds me of some of the really wonderful aspects of that first trip - the fantastic scenery around Alpine, the Amistad Dam area, the Medina Valley.
I find it alarming, however, that some of the less enjoyable aspects are still present. Especially alarming is the continued lateness. While an hour or three is better than the 12, 18 and 22 hour delays the Sunset has been routinely known to acrue, it's still too bad that the postponements at El Paso continue. The day I came back in 2004, we were told on FIVE separate occasions that there would be a further delay. I think we ended up departing more that 6 hours later than expected that day, making it totally dark all the way through the "scenic" parts. I guess the tiny ridership is merely symptomatic of the poor on time record.
Perhaps I'll ride west from ELP one year. Maybe that way I'll have the "mostly good" experience I have had on most other Amtrak LD trains.
Samantha,
Interesting report on the Sunset.
You raised a question whether Amtrak promotes the Davis Mountains as a recreation destination, at least for Texas. I'm sure the overnight layover in San Antonio doesn't help.
Similarly, I've seen some recent promotion for the Isaac Walton Inn at Essex, MT in Glacier Park on the 'Builder route; but Amtrak might do more with the Ohiopyle State Park southeast of Connelsville, PA on the Capitol route. The latter is only a couple miles from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Waters" house and landmark.
Alphas,
I guess we have a difference of opinion. The very problems you list - Ohiopyle is small and remote - I see as opportunities. It would be great for a day trip/excursion/camping from Pittsburgh with the present train schedule.
The recreational activities are fantastic, if more seasonal. Cycling, hiking, and camping have a longer season.
Falling Water seemed a lot closer than 8 miles when I was there a few years ago. Still, its a lot shorter drive than down the country road from the Turnpike. In any event, you'd need an old school bus to shuttle people forth and back, and for a shelter waiting for the return train. (Or would it have to be accessible?)
Harvey
As I said, not very realistic. No real Amtrak market as all most people come either in small groups utilizing their personal vehicle or with larger groups using charter buses. Even with gas at today's prices, its cheaper than it would be coming by train (unless Amtrak would provide a big subsidy per passenger--which they won't), not to mention faster and more convenient. I looked at my road map--my memory was correct as it shows Fallingwater is 8 miles away.
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