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I love Amtrak, and it seems to be getting more popular lately. I hope to see more funding and support for passenger rail in the U.S.'s future.

I've started commuting by Amtrak, as I'm lucky enough to have the flexibility to work around its limited schedule. My quality of life is so much higher now that I don't drive. Also every single Amtrak employee I've met so far has been super nice.

The website and app are trash. I was not able to buy a ticket on my desktop, I had to use the app. The app decides to reload all the time, sometimes losing my ticket if I don't have cell service. I have no idea what kind of APIs are available, but if anyone has an idea for fixing this please let me know.

3 comments

Amtrak is a nightmare. Their on time percentage is abysmal. https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance

I've taken 4 Amtrak trips in my life, 3 basically ruined the trip.

First, when I was a kid we took a train to Chicago from Michigan and for whatever reason we checked a bag. They lost the bag with my favorite stuffed animal in it and I remember spending most of that weekend crying.

Second, we tried going skiing in Whitefish Montana from Seattle and they made us take a bus to Spokane to "get the train back on schedule." We were something like 7 hours late getting to Spokane because of traffic and snow (not enough snow to mess up the train) and we missed a full day of skiing on our 2 day trip. (There'a a LOT more to that story that made it even more ridiculous.)

Third trip was from Seattle to Portland and it went fine.

Final trip was from Seattle to New Mexico. I had the time and figured it would be kinda cool to see the country by train. The first leg of the trip to LA was actually pretty fantastic, but shortly before arriving the second leg was canceled because one of their bridges burned down in a wildfire near Palm Springs. I realize that was a freak accident but they offered zero help and I had to scramble to find lodging and eventually a Greyhound bus to my destination.

> I've taken 4 Amtrak trips in my life

C'mon, that's not a big sample size for such sweeping conclusions. I've taken many trips, more than I can count. On-time hasn't been a problem for me. But they've become very expensive.

If you use/consume 4 of anything and 3 of those things are a bad experience, I think it's reasonable to have a bad opinion of said thing.

Imagine buying 4 Cokes in you life and 3 of them being flat. Most people would probably consider Coke a bad product at that point, even if the sample size _is_ small.

Or imagine going to a restaurant 4 times. and 3 of those times getting food poisoning. Most people would probably consider it a bad restaurant.

I don't even know if most people would even manage 4 visits after getting food poisoning twice, let alone thrice.

It's not reasonable because it's unsupported by the evidence.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone had bad feelings about it, but that's different than drawing conclusions about all of Amtrak everywhere.

>> it's unsupported by the evidence.

Freight train interference — a dispatching decision made by a freight railroad to delay Amtrak passengers so that freight trains can operate first — caused 1.1 million minutes (about 2 years) of delay in 2022. [1]

[1] also lists Percentage of On-Time Customers by Route – 2022 which clearly shows that it's abysmal.

See the report card [2] where they have put in 80% as the benchmark.

IIRC, I had also seen a full historical report across multiple years but can't find it now. We recently did a trip going from SFO to LAX to San Diego by Coast Starlight and the Surfliner. Thankfully I had read these reports and dropped the plan to do the Zephyr as it has only a 25% on time performance (in 2022). It would only be slightly better as 2022 reports state it has deteriorated further as compared to 2021.

The lesson we learn from looking at all this on time data and checking out some other forums was that when traveling by Amtrak, budget for delays, cancellations, re-reouting by bus and all the pain that comes with it.

We come from the UK and are train lovers, having done most of the train travel in UK and Europe, Amtrak has a lot to do to catch up.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance.html

[2] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

This site has historical data -- just use wildcards... and then write a scraper :)

https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php

Um. The evidence very much shows how much of a shitshow Amtrak is.

Have a look at Grand Junction station delays for the past week[1]. Seven out of eleven have delays of over thirty minutes. Three of those are an hour late. One of them is a five hour delay.

And in 2023 so far [2] it's 376 out of 524 that are at least 30 minutes late. 291 of those over an hour. 71 are over four hours late. 15 were eight hours late. And one was delayed by over 1000 minutes (16.75hr).

A lot of this is because Amtrak doesn't have propriety over the lanes and has to yield to cargo traffic (though I'm not familiar with the nuances).

[1] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t... [2] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...

If you consider that Grand Junction is pretty much in the middle of a route from Emeryville, California to Chicago, which takes over two days, a delay of 30-60 minutes doesn't seem that huge anymore. Nevertheless, I guess Amtrak is only for people with plenty of time to spare - and the on-time performance won't improve as long as Amtrak trains are "second-class citizens" on freight companies' tracks.

Kinda missing the point by focusing on the 30-60 bracket there, friend.

You also need to consider the people who are on the train with delays. One of the sadder things I've seen is someone missing a post-midnight intercom announcement saying that all stops right before St Louis through Chicago would would be skipped (because delays), and they'd need to get on the next train. So when she inevitably didn't get off, she was forced to going all the way up to Chicago and had to get picked up by family and drive all the way back down to St. Louis.

Anywho.

Amtrak has legal priority. In practice this doesn’t mean much.

The legal means to enforce this was with the DOJ, which for Amtrak’s existence has had bigger fish to fry. Amtrak was granted the ability to sue freight carriers for enforcement in 2019, the first lawsuit is making its way through the legal process and Amtrak wants to establish it as case law for this legal priority.

Well that's a wild complex relationship I had no idea existed. Pretty fucked up.

What's the court # for that case? Are they explicit in their filings that they seek to change the case law?

> It's not reasonable because it's unsupported by the evidence.

I guess you missed the link I posted above. (It also seems to link to a slightly different page than yesterday.) The very best Amtrak line is only on time 70% of the time.

The majority of them are below 50% on time, some dramatically below.

https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance.html

> C'mon, that's not a big sample size for such sweeping conclusions.

Sleuth the monthly Host Railroad Reports here[1], direct from the cow's mouth. The company sets an aspirational 900 minutes delay per 10k train miles target metric and their monthly reports are lit up in breach like a Christmas tree year round across the country.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/reports-documents.html

I’ve ridden long distance a few times and if I (not necessarily the train, mind you) end up at my destination station within the quarter of the day it was scheduled, I count it as a win.

Pro tip - fly OUT to your vacation, and take the train back.

Then the worst case you miss work and oh so sad cry cry.

> Third trip was from Seattle to Portland and it went fine.

I did the other direction. It took over 4 hours, because the train had to go 20 mph due to flooding elsewhere.

On the other hand, Boston -> NYC and NYC -> DC went fine.

If you like trains, then take Amtrak for that. Not because you expect a great trip.

Amtrak owns about 3/4 of the tracks between Boston and DC, so those will be their most reliable. That’s what I use it for the most. From my experience, that’s also more expensive than other trips, but I haven’t done an extensive comparison.

Elsewhere, on tracks that are owned by others, especially commercial companies, Amtrak may not get priority, so things get dicier.

it's probably unacceptable for Amtrak to just say "hey, we can't give good service on this route, and it's unprofitable anyway, so we're ending it."

Congress would then say, "well, then, we're ending your subsidies."

It would be an interesting exercise to see if they could be profitable, albeit smaller.

If Amtrak were a normal business they’d probably run the Northeast Corridor route and just shut everything else down.

NEC, Surfliner, maybe a few others. All the long distance routes save the auto train would be cancelled leaving only the commuter trains.

If it has sleeper cars, it loses money.

However Amtrak serves a portion of the population that are in areas not serviced by much else and I’m perfectly fine with subsidizing that outright. But that may be because choo choo go choo.

Yeah, I think you & ghaff have the right idea. But even Reagan didn't touch this one. Much political pain, not much gain.

> Amtrak is a nightmare.

It depends on the route. Long haul trains like the ones you describe are a dubious choice. I've done that twice, and that was enough.

I've also used Amtrak to commute on the Northeast corridor literally hundreds (if not thousands) of times. In that scenario, I'd be hard pressed to choose anything else. It's vastly more convenient and flexible than the alternatives.

I think that Amtrak is severely challenged by being a second-class citizen of the rails and at the whims and mercy of freight traffic.

There's ways to address that but we don't have the collective political will to do so.

I think the on-time-ness might depend on the route. I've done the NYC<->Boston trip a lot and it's on time within a couple minutes about 75-80% of the time and on time within 10-20 minutes most of the rest of the time. I've done NYC<->DC fewer times but had roughly the same experience on that stretch.

I've done the NYC-Boston trip once. The Boston end was underwhelming to put it politely. Back Bay station was just nasty. Even the Wikipedia pictures comment on the haze and air pollution at the platforms. Getting a Charlie card took a few tries across a few stations.

Acela? Acela was fine but it's both expensive (presumably because of the demand) and a lot slower than it ought to be. That entire stretch of Metro North(?) tracks through Connecticut? There's no good reason the track is in such poor shape and no good reason to limit Acela to a snail's pace.

OTOH Acela still seems to be pretty popular, so perhaps Amtrak can afford to let it rot for a bit. Hopefully not for too long.

The alternative to Acela is flying so that’s how the pricing is set. Or take the Regional which is what I usually do with my own money. Or drive and driving into Manhattan is awful b

It sounds like you were on the accursed coast starlate. Back in the day it was routinely 6-12 hours late - so much so that I relied on that fact when booking tickets (no way did I want to get up at 5 AM to catch the Sacramento to San Luis Obispo train).

I thought it had improved since 20 years ago :-\

It’s a single track with no other routes available, and corn trains seem to always fall off the tracks.

It’s a beautiful ride but on time it is not.

Pro tip: bring a pack of cigs even if you’ve never ever smoked in your life. If the train stops in the middle of nowhere because a corn train decided to leave the imposed restrictions of the rails, you will be let off the train, but only if you’re a tobacco addict. You can also sometimes order delivery to a stuck train.

There are really two Amtraks.

There is the Northeast Corridor, including the Acela, and then there is everything else.

I mean this fairly literally: Amtrak both owns are operates the NEC vs. the situation for the rest of the country. They even operate different Twitter/X accounts for service alerts between NEC and "everything else".

The Northeast Corridor operates something like a typical middle-distance, reasonable frequency, reasonable timeliness rail system would do in a European country. The rest of Amtrak is for rail fans only.

There are a few other trains that are NEC in quality. The Pacific Surfliner for example is relatively reliably on time (used to ride it every weekend). The key is the commuter trains often run on rails that are relatively freight-free.

Yep, took Amtrack from Chicago to Las Vegas and was over 24 hours late arriving and luggage was another day late after that. At least they did send it to the hotel. Never again.

Do you love trains or Amtrak?

Because Amtrak isn't all that great from what I remember, there are far better carriers but maybe not in the US.

Not the OP, but I love trains and the idea of Amtrak, while the reality actually makes me pretty sad. It says something pretty bad about the US when we seem to actively choose to make our train service embarrassingly terrible even in places where trains make a ton of sense and absolutely could work (e.g. the US northeast).

Don't get me wrong, I'm also a private pilot and a car guy...I love our train alternatives too and flying and driving are things the US does a better job of. But leaving out trains as a realistic transportation option feels like a weird blind spot.

Amtrak absolutely blows. Always prefer the regional provider ticket if you can. But then so does eurail (as perceived by the end user, I’m sure some independent providers are similarly fine).

Small regional trains in general are decent, but they’re no match for planes across any long distance.

I just earlier today was trying to get a Eurail pass for some traveling around europe over the next couple weeks. The minimum you pay is $211 for 4 days of use across a month, but every train worth using has a “seat reservation fee” on top of that. I literally couldn’t find a more expensive way to do that route I had planned.

I've had the exact opposite experience with long distance Amtrak travel. Nice sized seats which are much more comfortable, better views, no getting groped by a TSA agent. Other than the time it takes to travel being much shorter, planes aren't even in the same league as Amtrak.

> time it takes to travel being much shorter

And that depends on how far you travel, of course:

Fixed overhead for planes is around 2.5 hours (depending on airport, etc.) for parking, travel to terminal, security, time to gate, 'deplaning', time from gate to ride/car. For Amtrak, that's about 40 minutes IME.

Marginal time cost for distance is, of course, far less on a plane.

If I want to get somewhere slowly I’ll just drive. Even taking my gas guzzling 2004 V8 truck at CA gas prices is far cheaper than Amtrak, and my dog can come. And that’s with just me, for 2+ people there’s no contest whatsoever.

>no getting groped by a TSA agent

Don't worry, they're working on remedying that.

I know. :(

Both, and I like that Amtrak is semi-public. I think it's the right system, if only the federal government would choose to protect / support it. Amtrak is bad because it is not allowed to succeed.

I used to work for a boss who was a train fanatic and executive leadership consultant for Amtrak.

His stance was that the government should not give a single dime to Amtrak in it's current configuration.

Apparently leadership is thoroughly toxic and only cares about two things: adding more stops and getting more tax dollars. Things like service quality, reliability, cost competitiveness, or even ridership numbers have any consideration.

Adding stops is directly tied to tax dollars. If you’re a representative of TinyTown, ND and you get Amtrak to add a stop, you’ve won reelection for life.

I have seen stores with hours like “8-5, plus an hour around whenever the train shows up”.