Amtrak revised the Sunset Limited schedule yesterday, adding three and a half hours westbound and eight hours eastbound from Los Angeles to San Antonio, no changes were made east of San Antonio…
Three and a half hours is awful, but eight hours is insane… The Sunset Limited will retain its link with the Texas Eagle, but the Coast Starlight link has been severed…
Maybe this has something to do with the congestion that Trains magazine wrote about a few months ago concerning the UPRR Sunset route?[:o)]
At the same time, does it do any good to keep the old schedules and be 3.5 to 8 hours late all the time? I’ve often wondered this while I travel the California Zephyr. It doesn’t bug me an awful lot, but the few times that we been 3+ hours late, there have been some people awfully hot under the collar. At 8 hours late, I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how hot and bothered they’d be.
I think if the folks traveling Amtrak had a more realistic schedule, even at the cost of 8 extra hours, if they could maintain it, it would be an advantage.
Just me [2c].
Chris
The eastbound retiming of the Sunset Limited should make its connection with the eastbound (northbound?) Texas Eagle more reliable, but at what cost? Would the 8 hour retiming of the Sunset Limited east of San Antonio alone cause it to lose pasengers? How often has the Sunset Limited been delayed more than 2 hours eastbound between Los Angeles and San Antonio? If theSunset Limited has been seriously delayed so many times why hasn’t Amtrak braced the Union Pacific about the delays?
The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. We’ll have to see if the Sunset is still late a lot of the time.
I’m all for realism in schedules, even if that is s-l-o-w realism. That’s true of any transportation service, not just rail. No one is expecting a land-speed record on the Sunset. [I rode the bus to college, and the published rush hour schedule was only 4 minutes longer than off-peak schedules. Yeah right.]
I am hoping they hold to the new “realistic schedule”. Keeping the old schedule, and ending up with 0% on-time arrivals and a series of “only once; never again” angry passengers surely wasn’t doing Amtrak any good.
H’mm I wonder if A/trak has done this to discourage passenger usage of the train so that they can terminate its existence.
One thing Amtrack needs is credibility. Being late does NOT build credibility. It makes for angry people.
Last year, I took a mentally and physically challanged child and his family on a roundtrip Cascades trip between Portland and Seattle. Not to my credit, I picked a day when both the Mariners and Seahawks had home games. The trains were SRO. My group didn’t care how late the train was or was not. But a wife had given her husband Mariners tickets and a RT on the Cascade betwee Eugene and Seattle. The train would arrive just as the game would be starting and depart shortly after it ended.
It was one of those days when nothing went right. The UP split a switch right in front of the Cascade at Albany and was 90 minutes late into Portland. The crew died on the Law just 10 miles short of King Street. The game was into the 7th inning when we arrived in Seattle. This was that mans first train trip. I can guarentee you it was also his last. He did not enjoy anything but the first 45 miles (which were on time). Even though we were on time all of the way on the return trip, his day had been ruined. Not even a full refund did anything to salve the hurt.
I am doubtful this will solve Amtrak’s on-time issues with the Sunset Limited. It will probably help for awhile and then performance will start to slip again. My reasoning is that the train can already get across the route on the current schedule so long as freight trains don’t get in the way, signals don’t break and the train doesn’t malfunction. However, slowing the schedule will not solve those problems. Other freights will still delay Amtrak before getting out of the way and there will still be unplanned malfunctions that slow down the train. But hopefully, I am wrong.
Last I checked, Amtrak was still a government run entity. Amtrak’s problems are not so much with itself, it is running on railroads whose capacity was met several years ago.
Amtrak could work, I don’t think they could ever make a profit, if everyone realized what it really is–subsidized passenger service. If t he federal government (who subsidizes Amtrak btw), mandated that the the lines over which they operate be free from state property taxes and the savings of said property taxes must be returned into capacity improvements. Would the Class I’s jump? Of course not, it takes a lot more money to build another siding or double track a line, but it might get their attention.
We subsidize Greyhound and every other bus service in this country, airlines (who pays for the FAA, Air Traffic Controllers, dams and locks?). The taxpayer.
It truly may be time to let Amtrak to focus only on its’ successful corridors (NE, Midwest, California, Oregon and Washington). With railroads at or near capacity, it may take the federal government to take a good hard look at helping build capacity. It seems that they have no problem adding lanes to congested Interstates whoses truckers are not paying they’re fair share for the upkeep of said highway, yet RR’s are to pay for every penny of the maintenance of their tracks, and property taxes on top of this. Unfortunately, our government rarely has ever been pro-active in railroads and/or highway congestion.
BR-87 (brazos87)
It is a given that no one who is time constrained is going to use Amtrak for a long trip. The traveler who uses Amtrak still expects something close to on-time performance, so being “on the advertised” is an important goal.
It is a well known fact that Amtrak has added a lot of minutes to most schedules as contingency slack. In this case, Amtrak and the UP worked together to “get real”. Obviously, this is not a very good situation, but even if capacity projects were started yesterday, it would still be years before before big improvements would be realized.
I so tired of you people making Amtrak a scapegoat for everything that is wrong with this country’s inept transportation policy. I’ve flown also, and believe me when I tell you that the airline aren’t on time either. I’ve missed connecting flights because the flights I just happen to be on had to circle the airport a few times before landing. Plus, I’ve been on the ground while our flight waited for an open space at the terminal. Don’t get me started. I’ve been stuck in traffic(on a four lane highway) because people want to stare at an accident, which by the time you get up to where the accident scene is, there’s really not much to see. If your going to lay blame on anyone, lay it on the freight railroads that Amtrak has(must) contract with in order to get it’s trains from/to thier destinations. Some of you are really pathetic.
GLENN
A R E A L AND D E V O T E D RAILROADER AND MACHINIST!!!
A R E A L AND DEVOTED AMTRAKER!!!
A T R U E L Y DISSAPPOINTED AMERICAN!!!