My wife and I thoroughly enjoy "the journey," and we have made any number of trips on both AMTRAK and VIA Rail in Canada. There have been good trips, and a couple of not-so-good ones, but the view and the scenery on all of them has been unmatched. A bedroom accommodation also allows you to relax and really unwind. If you want to enjoy the view and not worry about drifting over the lane stripes, then either have someone else drive, or take the train so both of you can enjoy it.
Having said this, we are planning a trip on the Empire Builder, and after buying our tickets, have discovered there have been some pretty big delays enroute. The AMTRAK train status shows the EB to be late most days, anywhere from about two hours to nearly five hours. Normally, I would say, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey. However, when we disembark in Milwaukee WI, we are to pick up a rental car (conveniently at the train station) to continue our journey to northern Illinois that night. The real rub is if the train is more than about 3 1/2 hours late, we cannot pick-up our car until the next day. This causes an expensive and unplanned overnight stay in Milwaukee. The alternative is to take a cab to the airport, and rent the car from there - but the extra charge to do that is about $200 extra! Either way, we could be out some big bucks just because of very poor on-time performance.
My point is this - yes, the journey is half the fun, but trains arriving so habitually late causes an expensive and inconvenient delay to the very people that AMTRAK is trying to keep as returning guests. How is the problem of often very late trains to be reconciled with the negative stress and impact on its customers? Too bad we cannot get a little better and more predictable schedule adherence, and a recognition from the operating railroads (the BNSF in the case of the EB) that getting passengers to their destination closer to schedule really is important.
We're looking forward to our journey once again, but we really hope that a 3 1/2 hour window still will get us to Milwaukee to ensure we can get to our planned final destination that day. Somehow, having to endure added and expensive delays simply can spoil "the journey."
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