If you are using it primarily as a mode of travel to get from point A to point B. Then don’t do it. Amtrak is slow, unreliable, and not inexpensive relative to other modes.
If you are traveling by train primarily for the experience of traveling by train, then do it, but be prepared for slow, unreliable, not inexpensive service.
Amtrak’s unreliability has been mentioned many, many times in this thread – a great bit of it was about the strategy of staying overnight rather than depending on a too-short layover when changing trains.
And as for slow and “not inexpensive,” if you can stand coach it’s cheaper than air and faster than the bus. Sleeper is OTOH, pretty expensive.
Yeah, I found that planning a long day of sitting in coach (and sometimes a night slept reclining… in a sleeping bag for maximum coziness) and then a layover somewhere with a real bed (hotels, or once a relative’s house) worked great, and was much less than a sleeper.
Though I still cherish the family trip we took Chicago-> Seattle. We got a sleeper and I got rocked to sleep pretty quickly. Did wake up once in Montana somewhere… staring out the window at the utter blackness of wheat fields with no moon, I suddenly watched a Pepsi machine whoosh by.
Depends on what makes it worth it. We did LA to San Jose, and it was $55 per person on coach. For two of us in a small compartment it was $210, so $100 more, $50 each. We got two meals for about $20 each during this 8 hour trip, so that was really about $80 in meals. So really only costs $20 more, ok, so had to do this with two, but the point still stands, it has some value to go more than coach sometimes.
You can buy a ticket to San Francisco, and the bus will be waiting when you get off the Amtrak in Emeryville/Oakland. I did find Emeryville, middle of the day, much more quiet and with it’s resident aggressive hobo begging there. I didn’t fancy being there at night,
I did Sacramento to Santa Barbara several years ago; as I recall it was exactly the same price. For comparison, a flight to the Santa Barbara airport would have been several hundred dollars. I maybe could have gotten a cheap flight to Burbank or LAX, but then I’d still have to travel an hour to 90 minutes more to get to my actual destination. The train, on the other hand, dropped me off walking distance from my destination (the marina; I was taking a boat trip to the Channel Islands).
Admittedly, the train was slower than driving would have been, but it was much more comfortable. I could get up and walk around, go sit in the observation car and watch the Pacific ocean go by, go have lunch in the dining car, and go downstairs to the toilet when I had to pee rather than having to look for a place to stop.
I find that people are much more forgiving of cars and planes than they are of trains.
Ok, so Amtrak is slower than normal trains (ie: compare Eurostar vs planes London to Paris or Brussels, and it’s a no brainer), but people often quote the “it takes an hour to fly” when it clearly does not. It takes however long to get to airport (and if you start in centre of a city, that is significant). Then there’s checkin time, if you have luggage. Wait at least an hour at airport to get on. Maybe extra time to make sure you don’t miss the plane. THEN the flight. Then picking up luggage time. Then getting back to the centre of town time. That’s not counting not being able to drink, if you are driving other end. Car hire. Parking on one end. Things like that.
Also if you’re visiting, you’ve not got a car, and would have to hire one.
We also stopped a night in Santa Barbara. When we did the San Diego - Santa Barbara - SF - Portland - Seattle - Vancouver by Amtrak (ok last bit was bus, but I believe it does go by train sometimes). We’d done LA once before, not a fan of that city without a car, and nearly missed the Amtrak due to 30 minute cab ride trying to get through the LA Marathon on that day. So did Santa Barbara instead of LA, and nice to be able to walk with the suitcases ten minutes to the hotel by the beach. That’s Amtrak.
Less so when we wanted to do Reno to Emeryville, and had to go by bus to Sacramento due to the Amtrak being 8 hours late. It strikes me the cross country ones through the rockies much more prone to delays.
I took Amtrak from La Crosse, WI to Everett, WA (and back) partially to try a long train trip, and partially because Amtrak would transport my bicycle fully assembled.(I did as part of a self-supported bicycle camping trip – mostly on Whidbey Island)
There was a 3? hour delay westbound (rocks on tracks?), but eastbound was on time.
Brian
Damn, that’s like the ultimate “Livin’ The Dream” trip!
We did Chicago to Seattle, and we saved money by taking the Portland route… The train literally split (at Spokane?), with some sleeper cars going straight to Seattle. But the Portland route didn’t have sleepers (no prob, we’d slept through the Rockies and were wide awake by that time) and was much cheaper.
We got a five-hour layover right near Powell’s Books (worth the trip right there), and then took a faster commuter train with a cool bar car up the coast to Seattle (literally, we were right on the water for some of the trip, like we were right on the Mississippi at suppertime, in Wisconsin).
Odd that there were no sleepers on the Portland side of the run. Every time I have taken 7 or 8, there was at least one sleeper on the tail end of the Portland cars. It is kind of the suck for the Portland people, though: the Seattle sleepers are right in front of the dining car, but the people in the Portland sleepers have to walk through 4 or five cars to get to the dining car (at least about a football field).
The Cascades run had the route changed to through the Nisqually valley and up alongside JBLM so it no longer goes along the Sound.
Not yet, they’re still recovering from the derailment of the first train to take that route. I’ve been watching the WSDOT project page, which still projects summer/fall 2021 — but it’s somewhat out of date.
The Sunset Limited does the same thing in San Antonio, tacking a coach and sleeper from the Texas Eagle onto the back of the westbound.
The sleeper passenger only have two coaches and the cafe to walk through to the diner though.
The Carolingian turned out to be the best option by far when I took my elderly parents down to North Carolina to visit my brother this summer. Mom has back problems and Dad’s on oxygen (& medication requiring frequent bathroom visits). I actually did suggest flying, that god a hard no from Dad. Driving technically would’ve been faster & cheaper, but only if we (by which I mean I) drove more or less non-stop. And I hate driving even when Mom isn’t playing backseat GPSs or Dad needs sudden roadside stops. By contrast on the train we had very comfortable seating (Business Class so we could pick club seating & got free non-alcoholic drinks), plentiful bathrooms that could be used at will, ability to get up & walk around whenever we wanted, a cafe car (limited selection, but there was booze and Dunkin coffee), and it was easy for us to bring our own picnic lunch. I think it actually turned out to be our least-stressful and most drama free family trip ever. It would’ve been more convenient if we could’ve traveled over night (and about the same price if you compare sleeping accommodation to the Manhattan hotel room we spend the night before).
Bathrooms are a HUGE plus when traveling by train. No “seatbelt signs are still on” restrictions - you can go potty whenever you want to!
And thank heaven we were on a train the last time I had food poisoning. It’s about a 4-5 hour drive from New York to DC; if I’d gotten sick during the drive, I might never have been able to leave the bathroom at whatever crummy rest stop we wound up at. Bleh.
The NY-to-DC route is one where the train is actually faster than driving nonstop would be, actually, vs others I’ve taken (e.g. here to Chicago is 12-14 hours nonstop, while the train is 18+ hours). The Empire Builder’s route from Chicago to Seattle takes 46ish hours and could nominally be driven in 30 - but assuming you do not have access to large quantities of amphetamines, it’s gonna take at least 1 night on the road, and thus would take as long as the train.
Amtrak, some years back, had a train from DC to NY that actually included sleeper service. I don’t recall whether it was part of a longer train - I don’t think so. But basically you’d get in at, say, 3 AM but you didn’t have to leave the room until 7 or something like that. I expect there just wasn’t enough demand for it.
We’ve booked the last leg of our big trip for next year. So, 3 days from here to Portland, OR; a few days there, a few days driving south to Los Angeles to visit family, a day back north to San Francisco, then 3 days from SF (well, Emeryville) to here.
My husband transferred the balance of his rewards points to me (fee of 20 bucks, cheaper than purchasing the same amount), and I did still have to buy some points, but even so we paid about half the retail cost for that leg (the Coast Starlight). We booked a roomette despite it being a 12 hour trip with no overnight, since we don’t know what COVID will be doing and we want the privacy. There’s always the sightseeing car if we’re on the “wrong” side. Plus it means we get meals.
I semi-jokingly suggested that for the night in Emeryville, we skip a hotel room and just hang around the train station all night, but I expect we’d get chased out as vagrants. There’s at least one hotel nearby, so we’ll likely do that.
Amtrak has put sleeping cars back on the overnight Northeast Regionals, but only as far south as DC.
According to my map program, Chicago to Seattle is 39 hours on the road. If you had a 3-driver rotation, where at least one driver could get decent sleep, allowing you to pound through, that realistically works out to at least 42 hours, because there will be fuel stops and just stop stops that work out to several hours off the highway. You can go pretty fast through much of SD, WY and MT, pushing 90 for some stretches, but those speeds increase the number of fuel stops. The speed is also dependent on the season – at least half the year, you will be plowing through some iffy conditions, especially in the mountains, which will increase your travel time if you are non-suicidal.
Google maps tells me 31 hours, avoiding tolls (I hate dealing with the toll booths). Given the 2100 miles of road to cover, that seems about right.
Anyway, that seems to be about the standard for train routes: the are so slow that you could drive solo, with necessary overnight stops and no corners cut for safety, and make it as fast or maybe even a little faster than by train. Sleeper cabins aren’t cheap, and even coach tickets are the same order of magnitude as equivalent gas/lodging, and then of course there is the problem of delays and missed connections if it’s not just a single train the whole way through.
I love trains, but for now that’s only as a novelty. If I am fortunate enough to settle down somewhere along an Amtrak route, I might sell my car and see the train as more practical, but until then it doesn’t make much sense to take the train (except, again, for the novelty). If I have time, I’ll drive. If I don’t, a train won’t get me there any faster.
I would suggest upping that to full joke. Emeryville is in the Berkeley-Oakland sphere which already has an apocalyptic homeless problem. You do not want to join their ranks even for one night. You may be spending time with some unsavory types.
Odd - I got 31-32 hours just now doing Chicago Union Station to Seattle King Street Station by car. The routes suggested are all roughly 2100 miles in length. I think Google Maps assumes an average speed of 70 mph, and bladders and gas tanks of infinite capacity.
Taking rest stops into account, the most we’ve EVER averaged on a driving trip is about 60 MPH. This is with minimal breaks - maybe a fast-food lunch, but otherwise only bathroom / fuel stops. Maybe a titch better if I’m driving solo (as I am very rarely the one who demands a bathroom stop). Admittedly, this is East Coast driving; last time we were west of the Mississippi, the speed limit was still 55 (and we were mostly not on interstates), so I don’t know what speeds we might average out there. Still, assuming 60 MPH, 2100 miles would be about 35 hours. So, yeah, quite doable in not much more than that with 3 drivers; I wouldn’t try it with only 2 without some real sleep time - or, as noted, some fairly serious drugs on board.
The trips for which we do have personal car vs train comparisons would be DC to Chicago (train time, 17+ hours, nominal driving time just under 12, real driving time 14 or so), and DC to southern Florida (train: 22 hours, driving: 18ish hours), DC to Rutland, VT (just under 10 hours by train, just under 9 by car per Google, real travel time 11ish hours with stops). You’d need to weigh driver / passenger fatigue (trains rule) versus flexibility and convenience (car wins hands-down) in the decision.
All else being equal, it seems like real driving time versus train time is pretty much a wash. The western states might indeed be a bit more “fun”, possibly more than half the year (we drove through falling snow in Wyoming on Memorial Day). I would not risk them in the winter without a lot of supplies in the car and a solid plan for places to stop if things got dicey.
Anyway, 'nuff of the rambling digression; time to get back to work.
@WildaBeast : any plans yet?
Yeah, I truly don’t want to spend the night lurking around a train station.
How insane would it be to plan to go to a nearby hotel on foot? There’s one a block or so away, and another a block or so further. Seems silly to get a cab for such a distance but if it’s genuinely unsafe…