What is the absolute worst pre-Amtrak train trip you ever took? For me, it was southwestern Virginia to Washington/Union Sta. in 1969 aboard the BIRMINGHAM SPECIAL – no diner and locked restrooms!
If you have a worst trip in terms of high expectations not being met, that would be fun, too.
Just to deal off the same deck, let’s keep it confined to pre 5-1-71 and in the USA or Canada, if possible.
Thanks! al
How about taking the CASCADE expecting the Cascade Club and finding an Automat substituting. Or taking a SUNSET without a sleeper diner or lounge but again an Automat with no advance warning in either case. It took me six weeks to get a refund of my sleeping car space for a car that had been out of service when I booked and paid for my trip. I later found out that was becoming quite the norm for the SP in the mid 1960’s.
Al - in - Stockton
In the winter of 1962 I rode the PRR from Chicago to New York. It was a personal trip and to economize I was riding coach on the Manhattan Ltd to Pitsburgh and had a roomette from there on overnight to NYC. Despite its impressive name the train turned out to be a number of head end cars followed by two coaches, a diner and a single sleeper. The coaches were dirty inside and out and the first one where I chose to sit became almost unbearably hot early in the trip so I moved to the other one. Lunch in the diner was a disappointment, mediocre food very poorly served by a surly waiter. Following lunch I returned to find the coach that had been comfortable before was now almost fridgid so I moved back to the stuffy, overheated one. Along the way the train continued to fall behind schedule and somewhere in Ohio stopped for nearly two hours where an attempt was made to fix a brake problem on one of the headend cars. Because of my earlier experience in the diner I decided to skip dinner. We finally limped in to Pittsburgh about four hours late and I went into the station to get couple of candy bars but the shops were closed at that late hour. I found out the Broadway Ltd (which itself was about 40 minutes late) would arrive in 20 minutes and I could switch to it if I wanted. I ran back, grabbed my luggage off the Manhattan and in a few minutes was comfortably settled (but still hungry) on board the Broadway. I slept like a babe and didn’t wake up until the train was in Newark. I regretted not getting up earlier so I could enjoy breakfast in a diner that I knew would be far superior to the one I had eaten lunch in the day before.
Mark
I suspect that there were a fair number of “good-guy” passenger-carrying railroads pre-Amtrak (ATSF and SCL come first to mind), but also some stinkers. How sad that your experience on the Manhattan Limited should be so relentlessly awful a full six years before the PC merger.
Worst, and best, at the same time…
April 25, 1970–after a day of railfanning in Chicago, a bunch of us (members of the West Michigan Chapter of the NRHS) rode the Grand Trunk Western’s Mohawk out of Dearborn Station to Battle Creek. The Mohawk was a train that pro-passenger CN/GT had recently instituted to give a fast option between Chicago and Detroit, and it beat the heck out of the PC schedules, in spite of covering it in a longer distance. GTW had recently gotten and refurbished a number of former UP coaches–some for Detroit commuter service to Pontiac, but some for mainline service.
Anyway, our train left the station, went a short distance, and stopped at Ashburn crossing, with a freight train blocking our way. Transfer cabooses were unusual to me then, and a blue one from the Norfolk & Western was even more of a novelty, but the novelty wore off during the hour or more that I was staring at that thing. Sometime during that hour, the a/c in our coach failed. The crew was very apologetic, but there was little they could do–the blockage was beyond their control, and the cooling defect couldn’t be repaired. No room in the other cars, so it couldn’t be emptied.
Well, when the N&W finally cleared us up, we were practically slammed into our seats by the engineer taking off. We did pretty well, and made up about ten or fifteen minutes of time by the time we hit South Bend.
I remember a fast departure from South Bend–a rough ride on the joint trackage with PC, then the curve onto GTW’s own trackage–a bouncy ride across the St. Joe River bridge, then we really took off. Timetable speed for passenger trains on GTW was 79 at the time, and their steam-generator GP9s and GP18s (we had one of each that day) were geared for 83. But we were clocking mileposts as he went through Indiana and into Michigan, and got several in a row at 36 seconds–100 m.p.h.! It wasn’t just me
I take it that on the AV the worst pass carriers in the US in this period would have been:
PC
SP
MoPac
Rock Island
Southern - pre Claytor.
In 1967 or 68 my wife, two young children and I rode the Texas Eagle roundtrip between Marshall, TX and St. Louis. It was still very much a first class train with good equipment, service and dining. I don’t know how badly the MoPac’s trains deteriorated between that time and 1971. I had made several trips between New York and Boston at least four years earlier on New Haven trains that were very inferior in all respects to the Eagle.
Mark
I was basing the view held by many that MoPac in the late 60’s were very keen to get out of the passenger game. How true that was is another thing.
Al of my bad experiences were PC. For intercity travel I cannot pin down one train but a number of the clockers from Philly to NY were very bad. But my absolutely worst train ride was on an old P70 still in PRR red on the Long Branch. My kidneys still ache when I think of that ride. That was a commuter run, but still pre Amtrak.
My worst pre-Amtrak trip was riding the Golden State Limited from Pheonix to Kansas City in June of 1966. Departure from Pheonix was a few minutes late and I was sitting in a Rock Island coach. The trip as far as Tucson was uneventful,however, once leaving Tucson we seemed to into the hole for every westbound frieght between Tucson and El Paso. The Golden State carried a dining car but the Sunset Limited section had an Automat car. It was an hour and a half late into El Paso. I had supper in a Southern Pacific staffed SP diner while sitting in the El Paso station. The Golden State arrived at Tucumcari only a half hour late where we were turned over to the Rock Island. Now the real fun began. Tucumcari to Liberal Kansas was uneventful, at Liberal the air conditioning in the Rock Island coach stopped working, and had to move to another coach. After leaving Liberal back in the hole for the west bound Golden State, then after I had been seated in the dining car for breakfast the Golden State sat for almost an hour and a half while waiting for a west bound Rock Island frieght and more coaches lost their air conditioning. This was Kansas in June with 90 degree tempertures and passengers not happy. McPherson Kansas arrival was three hours late. The train did have an ample supply of beer and soft drinks which made passage bearable. The Golden State limped into KC almost four hours late.
Missouri Pacific in 1970.
To be fair to MoPac, I’ll report on my two round trips on the Texas Eagle from San Antonio up to Jewett (a flag stop) that year, before the train came off during the summer. It was about 150 miles each way.
When I bought my ticket in the station, when on the train, and when flagging it down for my return to S.A., the personnel were ALL courteous to this low-ranking serviceman. The train wasn’t looking too fancy by those days, but did run reasonably well on schedule.
My favorite moment was in the diner: I ordered a beer in the afternoon (somewhere past Austin, I think) and the attendant politely told me that we were in “dry” territory, but that he could serve me as soon as we crossed the county line. Sure enough, maybe ten minutes or so later, I received a cold one.
No complaints at all–I’d love to take that ride again.
Worst? Outside of a very cranky ATSF brakeman on the San Diegan in 1969, I really had NO bad experiences pre-Amtrak. Even my last SP San Joaquin Daylight ride (though with the Automat) wasn’t marred by rude personnel.
Post-5/1/1971? Don’t ask!
Odd that MP gets high marks on this thread, as the San Antonio section of the Texas Eagle TWICE made my bottom feeders list. In 1966, entering the Army, I travelled by rail Richmond, CA to San Antonio and return, utilizing one of the smallest “Union Station” transfers known to me, at Milano, TX. It was ATSF #2 Richmond to Clovis, MN, where my Pullman was switched into the connecting train to Houston, and on to Milano, to transfer to the Eagle. This MP dog was easily the worst passenger train experience of my life, and yes I did ride PRR and PC in their “dog days”, we had the whole package, surly crew, hot cars, dome windows covered in plywood, yes plywood, horrible and horribly overpriced food in the diner-lounge, and the train was filthy in both directions. Santa Fe, by comparison, was impeccible in every manner. And yes, I did ride SP many times towards “the end”, and found their trains to be well maintained and cleaned on all my rides…and it hurt that now I had to bring my own food aboard due to conditions in whatever “food service car” was in service that particular day, but spared me that big disappointment in the diner. AA
Do y’all think that a RR pre-Amtak could maintain pretty good service and standards on its main route, yet go to H*** on what it considered secondary routes or trains they were trying to discontinue?
One must wonder if management went to the conductors of the “bad trains” and tell them, “Courtesy isn’t necessary. Just answer the question.”
Do you think in the latest years pre-Amtrak the individual RR’s would deliberately schedule their lowest rolling stock that still met standards?
Despite my own favorable experience with SP’s San Joaquin Daylight near the end, that carrier attained almost legendary status when it came to discouraging traffic on a targeted train.
Maybe at Penn Central and others it was just the side effects of poverty, but it was open aggression at Southern Pacific, which was still making serious profits through the 1960s.
There are too many similar accounts for it not to be true–the Friendly was downright hostile to passengers or would-be passengers when being so figured to help the cause.
Shortly before the trains came off, SP ticket clerks would reportedly deny (surely under orders) that trains 39-40 (?), that secondary run on the Sunset route, even existed. Lots of strange stuff went on.
I don’t know of another Western carrier which came close to SP in being (as a company) blatantly hostile.