I took the Sunset Limited/Texas Eagle from El Paso to Austin on Saturday, January 26, 2008. Only a true train buff would take the train from El Paso to Austin. It requires an 8.5 hour sleepover in San Antonio. Mercifully, I can afford a roomette. Clearly, this is not a good idea for a coach passenger.
I used the on-line ticketing kiosk to pick-up my ticket at the El Paso Station on Friday afternoon. It was a piece of cake; I slid my credit card into the reader, and it recognized me immediately. I was asked a few simple questions and, voila, I had my ticket. It was pretty slick. The ticket office was not manned when I dropped by the station, so the on-line ticking kiosk was convenient. If it had not been there, I would have had to wait until Saturday morning to get my ticket.
The El Paso station was squeaky clean. It is an old union station that was opened in 1906, and it has been restored. It was designed by the Chicago firm of Daniel H. Burnham, which also designed Washington’s Union Station. The El Paso station is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Sun Metro, which is the El Paso transit system, and Amtrak appear to be the major tenants.
When I got up Saturday morning I checked on-line to see how Number 2 was running. Much to my surprise, the Amtrak web-site showed that the train was on time. Given the Sunset’s perpetual tardiness, I must have gasped in surprise. I had breakfast and walked from my hotel to the station. When I got there I was told by the ticket agent that the train would arrive about 9:15 a.m. or nearly an hour late. I told him that the train was shown as being on time. “What happened”, I asked him? He said that it was stuck about 16 miles west of town because of track work and freight traffic congestion.
Being a veteran train traveler, I broke out a book and settled into one of the benches to wait for the train. Abou
There is a certain public accomodation aspect to being a common carrier, and pre-Amtrak, there was an expectation in certain quarters that the railroads carry passengers, and if they lost money, too bad.
This matter of a public accomodation is not entirely frivolous. If you are the power company or the local phone company, there is an expectation that you supply electricity or a phone connection to all customers in your service area provided they pay their bills. You don’t get to say, “Farmer Fred is too frugal and doesn’t use enough electricity to make serving him out in the country pay, I think I will discontinue his service and tell him to get a generator.”
The manner in which public accomodation carries over into this day and age is that Union Pacific, CSX, NS, and the others are expected to carry Amtrak trains, for a fee of course, but as part of the social contract for turning the operation of passenger trains over to Amtrak back in 1971.
We speak of the glory days of railroading when the railroads took pride in giving passenger trains priority, and if freight is put into a siding, what is the problem that some inanimate objects have to wait when passengers have places to go? But time is money – that freight in the siding is burning up crew hours, utilization hours of the cars and locomotives, finance charges for the value of the freight itself, sitting there instead of getting to its destination and being put to productive use, along with the time of customers waiting for their goods.
NARP famously made the point that a single track can carry the passenger capacity of 20 lanes of freeway. Indeed it can if it is a double-track line devoted largely to passenger trains of long train lengths, high seating density, short headways, and automatic train stop – think of a subway line or the New Tokaido line. If you are trying to highball an Amtrak LD train at an average of 50 MPH down a single-track line with heavy
No, Paul, it’s 500 miles for a corridor [:o)] In the more enlightened metric world, which is more proper, it Kilometers. To covert, you double it and add 30, so a corridor is 1030 kilometers.
Although, apparently for a mere pittence, you can put in 24" superelevation on the old PRR mainline and get it up to 150 mph class 8 track and then a corridor would be 900 miles, (if you don’t stop in Pittsburgh. All those Pittsburghians will just have to move to NY or Chicago to catch a ride.) The only catch would be having to stop every 500 miles to let all those fuel savings out of the tank before it overflowed. Maybe we could put 36" wheels in the front and 45" wheels in the back, so the train would ALWAYS be going downhill.
Reading this reminded me of my trip two years ago on 421 from Chicago to Los Angeles and all the fun things that took place along the way and got me looking forward to the trip I will be taking from Los Angeles to Chicago on 422 coming up very soon. Thank you for sharing, always nice to hear of peoples adventures.
I think you might need to turn your web browser’s sarcasm filter on…
Not a fan of SCTV’s Great White North, eh?
Bob and Doug decided that the “double it and add 30” was a universal English-Metric conversion factor. They particularly liked that a dozen donuts would be 54 metric donuts.
This is definitely one of the best AMTRAK threads I’ve read lately. Samantha’s report was great. Felt like I was there. From what I gather, El Paso is a rather major choke point on the UP’s Sunset Route. I make an annual trip from Montgomery Alabama, to Los Angeles by auto. As many of you know, UP is doing some major capacity work on it’s El Paso-Los Angeles main. The primary beneficiary of the increased capacity will be freight, but certainly we can hope AMTRAK time keeping will be aided by the double and triple tracking. When all the smoke clears and the dust settles, this country is going to have to make a major commitment to quality rail travel. The “hired help” in Washington is largely clueless in regard to transportation issues in general, and rail transportation in particular. Certainly, there are some exceptions, but in general, the hired help doesn’t have to stand in security lines at airports, or put up with chronically late running passenger trains. That being the case, few of them really care.
An excellent thread, and some very good points made. All we can hope for regarding the Sunset Limited is that Congress and the Senate will not allow our Presidents, this or the next, to have their way, that the UP planned and budgeted capacity expansion program will remove any excuses for delaying Amtrak, that the resulting better on-time performance will improve employee moral, and that specific on-car problems light threadbare carpet, will be rectified. But I hope this trip report did reach Amtrak. They can do something to make food more consistantly good.
The most troubling part of Samatha’s trip report to me was when she first wanted to change her dinner seating from the one the car attendent had gotten for her prior to her boarding, the attendent told her to go do it herself!
I’m still wondering why the car attendents and dining car staff need to sleep on the train and use up valuable revenue sleeper space. Why not rotate them on and off like the train crews?
I’d turn around a write that to our DC congress folk, it is easy to think that Highways are an investment because they know of people who use highways, and use highways themselves. Amtrak, even when they come across someone who has traveled by intercity train, is easy to categorize as “Trains that nobody rides,” or something that has such a small impact on the transportation marketplace that it is not worth it. This, because of perceptions and because of Amtrak’s already small and skeletal structure, it is easy and very, very quick to dismiss intercity trains completely.
Which is a shame. The argument can be summed up as trains having low ridership (thus not worth investment), or trains not being around very much (thus not worth the investment, despite this low presence being the result of such very low investment).
I was on the Sunset Limited in November Westbound from SAS to LAX. They were talking about an article I think was in the New York Times, “Sunset Limited, a family of strangers.”
I had a good trip and took some photos and video. I had been on several Amtrak trips, but only recently started taking pictures. I like to take the West LD trains having family in Vancouver BC, Los Angeles area, South Texas, St Paul , Chicago. So I have made the time for the ‘big swing’ around the USA a few times. Over several years I have been fortunate to make all connections and be close to on time.
When I tell family and friends about Amtrak they always wanted to know more and see pictures. I also try to get photos for educational purposes.
I take three or four trips a year on Amtrak. At the conclusion of each trip I send a report to the President of Amtrak. I have gotten a nice reply for each one. In addition, I send a copy of my report to the Amtrak Customer Service Committee.
I tell Amtrak management, as well as the ACSC, what I think they are doing right as well as point out opportunities for improvement. It is important to give management a balanced report. Too many people just highlight what is wrong.
I rode #2 the entire route 2/24-2/26. Had a slpr compartment. Car attendent was very helpful. Runtime was not very bad w/the worst being 90 min off, but I arrived into N Orleans just under an hour late. Food service was not bad. I did not even know Amtrak had changed menu selections within the last yr when I last rode Amtrak. Anyway, the service was prompt and food was good except on the first morning my breakfast choice of an omlette was lousy. Since I arrived into N Orleans within an hour of scheduled arrival time, this gave me time that evening to check the scenes on Canal St & the French Qtr. That was interesting and this became the first time I have spent time sightseeing in the Big Easy. This trip I would rank a B. Good two stressful free days spent which is what I needed badly.
I’ve been told that as the older generation that was used to riding LD trains and was leary of planes dies off, their replacements are getting fewer and fewer in number. However, I’ve never seen any hard statistics to back that up. Still, it does seem plausible. That’s a 28 year time period you’re comparing and there’s been a lot of changes in everything during that time.
I personally suspect that the development of the low-cost airlines might also have something to do with it.
The Pro-Amtrak mantra has been that “more people are riding Amtrak”. If true in aggergate, it might not be true in particular. It appears that the Crescent might be going backwards in absolute terms when it should be growing like a weed if it was even keeping pace with population growht along its route.
I rode the Sunset Ltd back in 2004, on my very first Amtrak “excursion”, from Orlando to El Paso. I was on the #2 that was halted at New Orleans because of track damage due to Hurricane Charley. The following year, I rode #2 east from NOL to cover the ground I had missed the previous year. Two weeks later Katrina ravaged the area, and I haven’t been able to ride the Sunset out of FL since. Your report reminds me of some of the really wonderful aspects of that first trip - the fantastic scenery around Alpine, the Amistad Dam area, the Medina Valley.
I find it alarming, however, that some of the less enjoyable aspects are still present. Especially alarming is the continued lateness. While an hour or three is better than the 12, 18 and 22 hour delays the Sunset has been routinely known to acrue, it’s still too bad that the postponements at El Paso continue. The day I came back in 2004, we were told on FIVE separate occasions that there would be a further delay. I think we ended up departing more that 6 hours later than expected that day, making it totally dark all the way through the “scenic” parts. I guess the tiny ridership is merely symptomatic of the poor on time record.
Perhaps I’ll ride west from ELP one year. Maybe that way I’ll have the “mostly good” experience I have had on most other Amtrak LD trains.
You raised a question whether Amtrak promotes the Davis Mountains as a recreation destination, at least for Texas. I’m sure the overnight layover in San Antonio doesn’t help.
Similarly, I’ve seen some recent promotion for the Isaac Walton Inn at Essex, MT in Glacier Park on the 'Builder route; but Amtrak might do more with the Ohiopyle State Park southeast of Connelsville, PA on the Capitol route. The latter is only a couple miles from Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Waters” house and landmark.