I was trackside for the first eastbound trip of the Grand Luxe cars on an Amtrak train from California when it came through Aurora back in the spring but have not seen any of their cars on any Amtrak train since so I was wondering to myself whether they had discontinued the service. Well, I just searched the Amtrak web site and found that there are no longer any Grand Luxe services on either the California Zephyr or Southwest Chief. I assume this is due to low ridership but can anybody shed any additional light on this situation?
Actually I was on Amtrak’s web site researching possible trips to Des Moines, IA (via Amtrak stop at Osceola, IA) and Omaha, NE as I now have IA and NE as parts of my sales region and this would be a welcome change from Southwest or any other airline (by the way, the Amtrak fare to Omaha from Naperville, IL would be $64 each way, very competitive with Southwest and to Osceola it would be much better than United Airlines could ever do…the only downside is the schedule…getting me into either city way after dinner…but I think that would be a small negative to the big positives of the arrangement).