This thread made me look into taking the empire builder from Seattle to Chicago. The prices are insane. It’s basically a $250/night hotel room with a shared bathroom - budget accommodations for a non-budget (not luxury, but definitely not budget) price.
Is this just due to covid? Or are prices always this high?
It’s funny how Americans like to say “no one rides Amtrak” when, in fact, capacity has been their biggest problem for at least a decade.
I think the rise in prices for sleepers might be the result of the last two Amtrak CEOs having come from airlines, being willing to see what the market will bear in airline-style yield management. For quite a while during COVID, Amtrak was only operating about half its schedule outside the Northeast Corridor. Daily trains went to three per week. For a while, half the seats were unsold for passenger distancing.
Demand, however, continued to be exceptionally strong. Apparently, during the pandemic, a lot of folks thought of Amtrak sleepers as a safer way to travel long distances than airports and airplanes—a very different calculation than I made about modern airliners and their HEPA-filtered air.
Personally, I don’t sleep well enough on a moving train to pay the premium for a room; I just make myself comfortable in coach at a fraction of the price, with a down blanket, my own pillow, noise-canceling earbuds. I also preferred (in normal times) to spend daylight hours in the bar/lounge, meeting other passengers, rather than sitting in my little roomette with one window.
Dates don’t matter much except on the Northeast Corridor and other regional service where trains run weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays on slightly different schedules. Everywhere else it’s one train a day. And looking again, I see that Portland’s arrival is indeed, 3:30pm. I’ll have to update my saved timetables.
https://www.railpassengers.org/site/assets/files/20928/coast-starlight-schedule-101220.pdf
https://www.railpassengers.org/site/assets/files/20928/empire-builder-schedule-101920.pdf
My wife and I took Amtrak from Chicago to Denver during our honeymoon, 30 years ago; about 10 years ago, we decided that we might want to take it again for a trip out to the West Coast. At that time, for one of the bigger bedrooms, it was extremely expensive – I don’t remember the exact price, but I want to say that it would have been a couple of thousand dollars for a two-night trip.
So, no, it’s not just COVID.
It pays to get on Amtrak’s mailing list. They have some pretty good sales throughout the year.
Also, when you book a roomette or sleeper, on many routes your meals are included (with drink).
Have you looked at the price of hotel rooms lately? A decent hotel room (albeit with a private bathroom) and 3 meals a day (no extra charge for having your meal delivered to your room) will be pushing those prices these days.
AFAIK it’s all of the routes. You buy a sleeper compartment, you get all of your meals and one alcoholic beverage per trip. There used to be morning coffee and tea in your car as well. That stopped with Covid but may have been restored.
Well, I certainly hope the OP didn’t pick this weekend to take their trip;
The OP was talking about going to Wisconsin – that train was westbound. Of course, most likely the line will be down for a few days for inspection and investigation.
And I wouldn’t be going until December.
And speaking of that, I just thought of something. How common are delays due to snow that time of year, particularly in the Sierras if I do the California Zephyr?
I just found out about this and came to report it. The car on its side is the cafe/lounge. Three dead, an unknown number injured but six counties are taking them in.
Pay no attention to the animation found down page a bit. That’s the Cascades derailment they had a few years ago when they ran too fast through a sharp curve the first day on a new route.
That was right in my backyard, and it shut down I-5 for three whole days, which made travelling between Olympia and Tacoma pretty close to impossible. My current boss, who lives in Olympia but was working in our Tacoma location at the time, had his 30-minute commute taking close to 4 hours each way because the best detour around the base was down a two-lane country road that really wasn’t built to accomodate commuters.
I went under that bridge about twenty minutes before the derailment; first I heard of it was my daughter calling me frantically to make sure I was all right. And I agree about the commuting mess: a couple of times I looked at the traffic map and decided to go from Olympia to Tacoma via Shelton (73 miles v 30).
(Oddity: I spent the weekend in Portland, and took the last Cascades back on Sunday because I wanted to be on the last train to stop at the old current Tacoma station. So maybe you can blame it on me.)
As to the current derailment, that’s a puzzler: it’s a pretty straight and very flat part of the route, and if it happened around 16:00 the train would have been pretty much on schedule so excessive speed is unlikely. Obviously the NTSB and FRA (the rail equivalent of the FAA) will investigate and report, but equipment or track failure come to mind.
What is “excessive speed”? That is the stretch between Havre and Shelby, which I have been on numerous times. “Normal” speed on the Malta-Havre-Shelby legs, which are each about a hundred miles, is 80mph. The train is very well designed, but it seems like it would not take all that much to throw a 2-story train at that speed. When you are on a train going 80, it feels quite unsmooth.
I agree that it was likely to have been clipping along at 80 or so. The fact that it appears to have happened on a straight stretch would suggest an equipment failure on one of the cars, a segment of the track which had fallen just enough out of alignment, or a foreign object on the track.
What I meant by “excessive” is anything significantly above normal — such as speed necessary to make up for an earlier delay (hardly unknown on this route). But given the time of the derailment, it would appear that this train was pretty much on schedule: according to Amtrak, it would leave Havre at 15:04 and arrive in Shelby at 17:17, and Joplin is prit’ near halfway between the two.
It might have been traveling too fast, and if so that will come out during the investigation. But at the moment equipment or track failure (or, as kenobi_65 mentioned, a foreign object on the track) seem more likely.
Well, if one of the other passengers is in a “sharing” mood, you might need to…
Also the hotel room stays in one place; on the Empire Builder is moving you to your destination.
It can vary widely depending on when you book - prices do seem to creep up.
I could swear that the last time we looked, it would have been under 1500 bucks for the two of us, one way, from DC to Portland (the other terminus of the Empire Builder) including a “family bedroom” on both legs - but when I went to book it a few days ago the price had a) crept up, and b) did not include a sleeper west of Chicago. Or maybe it did but it was just a roomette. Nope, not for a 46 hour jaunt!
I did just book our trip - long-planned gathering next May. I just got tickets one way as we’re not sure what our return plans will be (maybe a drive down the coast and a train or flight back). It wound up being about 2600 bucks, once I upgraded the western leg to a “family bedroom”. A “bedroom” (upstairs, has its own toilet) would have been 300-400 more. Depending on our rewards points situation in a couple months, I may try to use points to upgrade that part, though a family bedroom is actually fairly spacious for 2 people. The eastern leg is just in a roomette though - but for 24 hours we can deal with it .
“They” all try to claim that it’s still worthwhile because you’re getting fed and not paying for a hotel - er, yeah, that offsets some of it, but if I spend 150 a night on a hotel, and 100 a day on meals, that’s still less than the sleeping accommodations. Let’s face it: you don’t do this for the economics, you do it for the experience.
For two travelling together, I’d almost suggest getting 2 roomettes, though that’s the most expensive of all (just looked at the prices on that route for another date).
If you go in coach, it can be quite affordable: 2 people could go cross-country for 400 bucks or thereabouts. I went to Florida in coach, a couple years back. Yeah… not doing that again. When my son travelled out west 2-3 years ago, I posed the suggestion that if he wanted to save money, he could do coach for the here-to-Chicago bit then a roomette afterward, which was what he wound up doing.
We both use CPAP machines. Not sure how we’ll manage that on the train; last time we went, we just didn’t bother as it was just 1 night. Though on that Florida trip, I did see one fellow sleeping in his coach seat, all masked up.
The only way we can justify our train trips is as entertainment. The trip itself is a major part of the vacation, so it’s worth the bucks.
With the wife and kids, we’ve gotten sleepers, which I love. But I’ve taken train trips by myself to see friends/relatives, and for those I’ve slept in a seat in coach (yeah, I’m cheap when I’m not traveling with family).
I’ve learned to warn my siblings or pals that I’ll need a nap and a shower shortly after I arrive.