AutoTrain on time performance?

[Anonymous]

I'm taking the AutoTrain to Florida with my family this summer. We did did so in 2003 and had a great time. I've seen in Trains magazine recently that the AutoTrain is frequently late now, because CSX has been giving its freight trains higher priority. I saw in the June issue of Trains that Amtrak added an hour to the AutoTrain's schedule.

How late has the AutoTrain been lately? Is there any place I can find out about the AutoTrain's on-time performance? I tried web searches and came up empty.

Just now I tried web seraches for Amtrak on time performance, and I got this web site: 

http://web.peoriadesignweb.com/cgi-bin/amtrak/train.cgi

You can search there for any Amtrak train, by train number and destination. According to this web site, the average delay for the last three weeks has been about an hour. Now that I've found what I'm looking for, does anyone know where these figures come from?  

Thanks!  

[cordon]

Try AMTRAK's monthly report here:  http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/0702monthly.pdf

Look in Appendix E, about 3/4 to the end of the report.  As I read it, it seems to be a bit more than an hour. 

 

[Anonymous]

I actually wrote that script, and just registered a new domain for it, amtrakdelays.com . Hopefully that should be easier for people to remember and share. The data comes directly from the website, the same data that is presented to the user when you use their own calculatator to see when a train arrived. The problem is their site only goes back five days, but mine goes back three weeks.

[Dakguy201]

Duke, that is an interesting project you built, but you have bugs.

Examples -- I ran train 7, the Empire Builder, and Seattle.  It reported on time EVERY day for the last 21.  Granted the EB is one of the best performers, but I doubt that is true.

The graph always presents five days results, but does not correspond to the actual data.  In the example above the graph contained late arrivals while the data section did not.  If you run train 5 and DEN, on the graph the third previous day is shown as something approaching 600, but the data for 21 days contains nothing worse than 375 minutes.