The Amtrak That Works, and the Amtrak That Doesn’t
Its long-distance trains are expensive anachronisms that are dragging down the more successful parts of the system. But Congress can’t bear to give them up.
See the country in all its delayed glory aboard the California Zephyr.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
By the time it crossed the Mississippi River at Burlington, Iowa, last week, our California Zephyr was running more than eight hours late on its journey from the San Francisco Bay Area to Chicago. The last meal, a free, off-menu beef stew, had just been served in the dining car. My wife and I opted instead to consume a couple of Maruchan Instant Lunch cups, purchased in the cafe, accompanied by a half bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, also from the cafe. Occasional wafts of sewage odor tainted the air, the aging Superliner cars creaked and rattled, and the dining- and sleeping-car staff exuded fatigue and resignation. Even the conductor, who had just gotten on at Ottumwa, sounded appropriately defeated when he reaffirmed over the loudspeaker that, yes, every connecting train in Chicago, including the Lakeshore Limited to New York for which we had tickets, would be leaving before our train got there.
Things did improve a little once we entered Illinois. My wife got an unexpected email from Amtrak with a PDF ticket attached for the next day’s Lakeshore Limited, in more spacious accommodations than what we had originally booked. The train also started going consistently faster, mostly between 70 and 80 miles an hour, chipping away at our estimated arrival time by a minute here and a minute there until we were forced to sit still outside the Chicago suburb of Naperville to let a Metra commuter train go by. After a lovely day in Chicago (we stayed with friends, but Amtrak would have put us up in a hotel if needed), we boarded the train to New York only to learn that its departure would be delayed two hours to wait on two very late trains arriving via different routes from Los Angeles, the Southwest Chief and Texas Eagle. The conductor sounded irked about this rather than resigned, and over the next 20 hours we made up about a third of the lost time, arriving in Manhattan in the middle of a minor blackout that spared Penn Station but made getting home from there something of an adventure. Isn’t long-distance train travel great!?!