In my immediate family, we’re no slouches when it comes to punctuality; we take timeliness very seriously. In fact, if we’re not at least 10 minutes early, we consider ourselves late. I, personally, never run late unless it’s somebody else’s (Steve’s) fault.
As he and I prepared for our first-ever, almost-month-long, cross-country Amtrak trip, we watched lots of YouTube videos about train travel and read lots of reviews, and we learned that long-distance passenger trains are notorious for running behind schedule. This is where our pre-trip sleuthing really paid off, because had I not known this ahead of time, arriving late might have driven me crazy; but because I was prepared, I was mostly just curious to see if, in fact, passenger trains really do run late as often as they are purported to.
What I found was that during the course of our journey, there were times we arrived right on schedule, and there were even a couple of occasions when we slid into our destination a tad early (10 to 30 minutes). Sure enough, though, arriving late was very common (we were anywhere from one to three hours late at various stops).
Now, here’s the thing: despite having prepared myself for being tardy, I hadn’t given any thought to the possible consequences. A late-night, late arrival in Maricopa, Arizona, wasn’t initially a problem, as an Amtrak-sponsored shuttle was waiting to take us on to Phoenix. But once in Phoenix, the tardiness caught up with Steve and me, and our fellow passengers, many of us having lost our free, pre-arranged transportation to our various destinations in the city. Eventually, we all banded together and paid the shuttle driver who had taken us to Phoenix (and was supposed to drop us all off at one central location) to continue driving around the city, taking us all to our individual stops.
En route to Chicago, we were running about an hour and a half behind schedule when passengers started calling friends and relatives who were scheduled to pick them up at Union Station, to let them know they’d have some extra time to kill. A woman sitting next to us spent over an hour on the phone with a rental car company: She wasn’t going to arrive in time to pick up the rental car she had reserved and she was trying to figure out her options. What she really wanted was to talk to someone at the specific location where she was supposed to get the car, but that was oddly impossible, and instead she went round and round with someone in the company’s main office. Finally, she resigned herself to having to spend the night in Chicago, booked a hotel room, and accepted the fact that she’d have to deal with the rental car situation first thing the following morning. (FYI: There’s no such thing as a private phone conversation on public transportation.) Eventually, our hour-and-a-half delay stretched into a three-hour delay, and a number of folks ended up missing their connecting trains.
Another consequence of late arrivals is late departures. We were sitting in a depot in Kingman, Arizona, scheduled to leave the station at 2:25 a.m. — yes, a.m. — but due to the late arrival of the train we were catching, we didn’t depart until 3:16 a.m. And trust me, when you’re running behind schedule by about 50 minutes at such an unthinkable time of day — in a bare-bones station with no vending machine and one non-working toilet — every minute counts.
Different culprits are to blame for train tardiness. Just outside Kansas City, we stopped on the tracks for over an hour, with an intercom announcement informing us that we couldn’t approach the depot because the situation there was “a mess”: We had to wait for a logjam of trains to clear out before we could pull in. In Texas, we came to a standstill for a few minutes because of debris on the tracks ahead of us.
The most common reason for tardiness, though, is that freight rail companies own most of the tracks, so freight trains get priority — meaning that when it comes to a face-off between a passenger train and a freight train, the passenger train will pull off on a sidetrack and wait.
I do think that, to the extent possible, Amtrak does its best to keep delays to a minimum. For instance, one aspect of train travel is the frequent stops at depots all along the route to allow for quick boarding and deboarding of passengers, and to serve as brief “smoke stops.” Arriving in Lafayette, Louisiana, our conductor announced “an extremely short smoke stop, one to two puffs at the most.” Neither Steve nor I are smokers, so these stops didn’t mean much to us, but the smokers onboard lined up at the doors and were always ready to jump off, the second the train came to a standstill — and they were always issued a standard warning as they did so: Don’t wander too far away or you’ll get left behind (and, they were, assured, it wasn’t an idle threat — yikes!). In other words, the trains didn’t tarry any longer than necessary.
Despite punctuality being extremely important to me in my day-to-day life, the lack of it didn’t bother me much when traveling by train, and I think there were probably a couple of reasons for this: First, as stated earlier, our pre-trip planning had somewhat prepared me for it. And second, it was something that was so completely out of my control that I knew there was no use letting it get to me. (Third, I was so whacked out of my mind with COVID during a portion of the trip that we could have been running several days behind and I wouldn’t have even known it — but that’s a story for another time.) The bottom line is: Late or not, we made it safely to all our destinations, and that’s what counts.
Next week: What’s the likelihood that Steve and I will ever take another train trip?
