Are there Amtrak timetables these days? Not necessarily the printed ones but on their website?
I searched yesterday, even asked on their help chat line (no answer) and couldnt find one. One must enter date, origin and destination for a train schedule. I like looking at a timetable to make decisions.
thanks,
Ed
Just spent time on line and on phone with Amtrak.
Timetables (printed or pdfs) are history. You must now enter origin and destination and date to get info.
Ed
It’s going to get worse.
Don’t be too surprised when you read that the Spring timetable will be published on the Amtrak website only in Cyrillic or Mandarin.
Like a bank says when they close a branch office, it’s all “To serve you better…”
No timetables: ridiculous.
These are not official, but you can get timetables from the Rail Passenger Association website:
https://www.railpassengers.org/resources/amtrak-timetables/
You can browse their timetables and then confirm availability on Amtrak.
But agreed - Amtrak not publishing timetables is an abomination.
And just when was the last time you were able to pick up an airline timetable? Besides the enthusiasts, who really cares?
Thanks for the link…exactly what I wanted!
Ed
Why? They have virtually no use for the majority of the riding public. They’re an artifact of a increasingly long gone era when information was distributed on paper. They’re as antiquated as a physical paper ticket for a football game.
I take your point, but I respectfully disagree because it would cost Amtrak virtually nothing to have timetables on their website, as they did previously. No one here expects them to ever print such a thing again.
Are slide rules still made? Why?
NCDOT publishes it’s own timetables for the Carolinian and Piedmont services. They are available online, in the stations and from crews and train hosts and are very often requested.
The failure of Amtrak to provide even a pdf format time table for all services simply shows their lack of interest or concern for their own customers.
In this age of on-line everything, I agree that a print version is of little use, except maybe as you are travelling so you know what’s going by the window.
On the other hand, having even an on-line timetable that would allow one to see available routes and schedules might actually bring in business (although some question if that’s even a goal any more).
I can only hope that if I want to go from Point A to Point B on Amtrak, that the system is smart enough to know what the nearest station is to each terminus.
If I want to fly from A to B, I can put that into one of the on-line travel sites and I’ll get all available flights between those points.
Which raises the question, is Amtrak a party to any of that? If I want to travel from Syracuse to Denver, will an Amtrak routing even show up?
Nickle Plate…I found the Amtrak system to be extremely difficult to navigate. With multiple trains it would have been much easier to look at a pdf timetable.
BTW…I have a collection of 25 slide rules. Use one frequently.
Guess I am old school.
Ed
Does Amtrak still print employee timetables? Other railroads?
I have ETTs for both railroads I run over. They are really time tables, though. They just list all the stuff we need to know to run on the railroad - track chart, stations, crossings, special considerations, etc.
I have a fairly recent CSX ETT - which is basically the same as I just described.
"Just spent time on line and on phone with Amtrak.
Timetables (printed or pdfs) are history. You must now enter origin and destination and date to get info."
In other words, its just like my making an airline reservation. I’m not sure I see any real problem with this.
I would opine that the difference is that if you’re flying from A to B, there are usually several flights daily, and likely on several airlines (except the really small places). So your decision comes down to what time you want to fly, and on which airline.
If you are making a trip that might involve several “hops,” that will all get laid out for you, with options.
If you want to take the train from A to B, which days does it run? Aside from the corridors, there aren’t a lot of trains running, really. If I’m planning a trip, it would be nice to be able to see what’s available at a glance, instead of having to put in city pairs to see if the service I’d like is even offered when I want it.
I would also add that unlike airlines, rail travel often provides options to either get on or off at a smaller intermediate station instead of just large end point cities. Having a timetable allows one to see those potential locations in the context of the entire route. To use the web site, one either has to know in advance where the stations are or do that reasearch prior to loading end point pairs. Timetables make this process much easier.
The online travel sites won’t, because most of the stations aren’t assigned airport codes anyhow. Without IATA or ICAO codes, there’s no real way to insert them into the system. Just cramming in the station codes is going to create conflicts at worst and unclear routings at best. I’m not sure how much use they are anyhow. I can’t even get European ones to work on travel sites (XIK for Milan, for instance).
Google Maps does pull Amtrak data for travel routing. I decided a student living on campus at Syracuse wanted to go to the Wings over the Rockies Museum in Denver. https://tinyurl.com/bwk8f3eu
Here is an example for alphas; similar to your trip - Syracuse to Denver:
If I was a person who knew absolutely nothing about Amtrak, it’s routes and services (which is probably quite a few people in USA Today) and I wanted to take a train from Columbia, SC {personal note, this is near where I live} to Chicago, IL: I could go to the Amtrak web site and enter these two end point cities. Guess what? The web site would tell me "no train service available
NKP:
Picked up a great K&E 4081-3S this weekend at an estate sale, along with the leather pouch, original box and the instruction manual. Total cost for the slide rule and several other items was $5.00. Nice addition to my collection.
Ed
Anything of printed documentes within the rr industry are moving towards digital formats. No more hard copies. Just like in the freight industry, Amtrak has chosen to keep their clients in the dark with as little info as possible.
Sam