![By David Brossard [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://sites.lafayette.edu/fultonc/files/2014/03/Amtrak_-Pennsylvanian-_on_Horseshoe_Curve_8991394046-1.jpg)
I’ve posted two new Amtrak route guides: the Pennsylvanian and the Wolverine.
Image of the Pennsylvanian by David Brossard [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Category: Travel (Page 2 of 3)
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Lake Shore Limited redux
Back in March I enumerated seven reasons why I wasn’t going to take the Lake Shore Limited on future trips to the Midwest. To these I might also have added that the ex-New York Central route between Cleveland and Buffalo is particularly vulnerable to weather-related delays in the winter. Unfortunately I was called back on short notice to Michigan and the Lake Shore Limited was the only train I could catch in time. Let me quote from what I wrote in March:
CSX’s handling of the train in western New York. Amtrak is dependent on the freight railroads for dispatching. CSX does an absolutely terrible job between Schenectady and Rochester. They’re incapable of getting the train though on time. It’s just frustrating.
Now, here’s how my train fared across western New York last night, courtesy of the invaluable Amtrak Status Maps:
* ALB 1 620P 1 705P 618P 750P Departed: 45 minutes late. * SDY * * 1 731P * 821P Departed: 50 minutes late. * UCA * * 1 844P * 1009P Departed: 1 hour and 25 minutes late. * SYR * * 1 941P * 1130P Departed: 1 hour and 49 minutes late. * ROC * * 1 1100P * 137A Departed: 2 hours and 37 minutes late. * BUF 1 1155P 1 1159P 300A 320A Departed: 3 hours and 21 minutes late. * ERI * * 2 136A * 533A Departed: 3 hours and 57 minutes late. * CLE 2 327A 2 345A 818A 829A Departed: 4 hours and 44 minutes late. * ELY * * 2 418A * 915A Departed: 4 hours and 57 minutes late.
We were late leaving Albany because we had to wait for the eastbound Lake Shore Limited, which was late, to arrive. CSX is an equal-opportunity railroad; having stabbed the eastbound train it makes sure to stab the westbound train in compensation. Add that to the heavy snow and ice along the coast of Lake Erie and it’s not gone well.
I’m not complaining exactly. I’ve had a good trip: good meals, good company. My roomette is comfortable. I will arrive in Michigan well within my timetable. The snow is messing with the airports too. It’s just that the Capitol Limited, having come up from Washington and missed most of the weather, was only 57 minutes late out of South Bend and will probably hit Chicago within 20-30 minutes of its arrival time.
This is why I don’t take the Lake Shore Limited.
Image by AEMoreira042281 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Two congressmen have introduced a bill (HR 2066, the Pets on Trains Act of 2013) which would require Amtrak to formulate a policy for carrying domestic pets on certain trains. See the Huffington Post for a brief summary, and here for the actual text of the bill. What discussion I’ve seen focuses on a non-issue: that after three days in transit a dog wouldn’t be a good companion in the coach. That possibility is foreclosed by the text of the bill, but no one ever reads such things. I don’t see this going much of anywhere but I thought I’d offer some more detailed commentary.
Amtrak allows service animals only. No comfort animals or pets. I once sat across from a woman with a service animal for two days aboard the Empire Builder and it wasn’t a problem, but obviously (a) service animals are well-trained and (b) their owners are used to handling them in public.
The proposed bill, which includes escape hatches like “certain trains” and “where feasible” would require either that Amtrak either set aside a car where pets would be allowed as carry-on items, provided that the pet is contained in a kennel and that the pet as stowed meets the current carry-on policy or that Amtrak allow pets as checked baggage, provided that the area is “temperature controlled” and that the pet as stowed meets the checked baggage policy. In both cases the journey as ticketed would have to be 750 miles or less and Amtrak would be allowed to assess a commensurate fee. Finally, the bill provides that “[n]othing in this section may be interpreted to require Amtrak to add additional train cars or modify existing train cars.”
750 miles is a magic number in Amtrak transport planning; any route of 750 miles or less, excluding the Northeast Corridor, must be supported by its host state(s) according to a complicated cost-sharing formula. Routes over 750 miles are considered long-distance and may be fully-funded by the federal government. The specific verbiage, however, is “the passenger is ticketed for traveling a distance less than 750 miles.“ I assume that captures all short-distance services, all Northeast Corridor services, and all long-distance trains provided that you’re not going further than 750 miles. I foresee Amtrak arguing that the 750 mile limit would be hard to enforce within the current ticketing system, thus excluding long-distance trains (and upending the raison d’etre of the bill). This, coupled with the issues I’ll outline below, would seem to exclude any sleeping car passengers from traveling with pets.
The checked baggage section is similarly useless. Amtrak’s baggage cars are over fifty years old, some of the last remnants of the “Heritage Fleet” inherited from the private railroads in 1971. They’re in terrible condition and they’re not climate-controlled. Amtrak does have new Viewliner baggage and baggage-dormitory cars on order, but they won’t be delivered for at least another year and I don’t know whether they’ll be climate-controlled either.
That leaves setting aside a coach for contained animals. Anyone who knows anything about Amtrak operations knows that Amtrak is desperately short of equipment of all kinds. On many routes demand has long outstripped supply. Furthermore, this isn’t Western Europe. A 750-mile train trip can take the better part of the day. I can’t see passengers without pets happy with being seated in the pet coach. This places an artificial limitation on Amtrak’s carrying capacity. I would imagine Amtrak would levy a hefty surcharge on pet transport to compensate, but it still winds up losing passengers which hurts it down the road.
All that being said, if limited to carry-on there’s plenty of space in Amtrak’s primary coaches (Amfleet, Horizon, Superliner) for carry-on baggage, and there’s supplemental storage space on the lower level of the Superliner that could be pressed into service. I just don’t see many people taking advantage of it, and I don’t see Amtrak willingly implementing a policy given the issues I’ve outlined above.
This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.
The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.
The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!
Today’s Vermonter has five Amfleet cars: four reserved coaches and a cafe/business class car. At the front is an EMD AEM-7, one of Amtrak’s venerable “toasters” now in its fourth decade of service. It brought the train up from Washington and will pull it to New Haven, where we’ll swap it out for a GE P42DC “Genesis” diesel locomotive. We have to do this since there’s no electrification north of New Haven. Lunch today consisted of a turkey panini (good), hummus plus pretzel bits (okay), and iced tea. I’m pleased to finally ride over the Hell Gate Bridge but it really is more impressive from the park below looking up.
Early into New Haven and the power change starts at once which means no head-end power (HEP). I think of this as a staple of American railroading, though very few passenger trains do it now. The long-distance trains which travel south from New York (Silver Star, Silver Meteor, Crescent, Palmetto) change engines in Washington. The Vermonter does here in New Haven. The Pennsylvanian does in Philadelphia. I think some of the upstate New York trains do in Albany (switching from dual-mode electro-diesel to straight up diesels). Fascinating to think about the long-haul diesels which run, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty hours on the Western trains.
I hope I don’t offend anyone (too much) when I opine that Connecticut, at least what I can see of it, is ugly. Admittedly March is an unkind month for viewing the outdoors when there’s no snow on the ground.
We hit our dwell stops (New Haven and Springfield) with plenty of time to spare. Amtrak’s issuing a faster timetable on Monday, and I’d say that’s reasonable. I’ve arrived or departed from Springfield numerous times over the years but this is the first time I’ve headed east. We go as far as Palmer, and then perform a thankfully rare “backup” maneuver. There’s no northeast/southwest connecting track at Palmer, so we have to make what amounts to a J-turn in railroading–crossing the connecting track, stopping, throwing a switch (manually, no less), then reversing direction. The re-route I mentioned earlier will eliminate this step.
Here’s some very crude text art illustrating what we’re doing:
C
\_
\\_________________
A_____________\_________________\(E)______B
\
\D
A-B is the CSX main between Springfield and Boston. C-D is the New England Central Railroad. The direct intersection between the two has no switch. We pull past toward B to the switch at (E), then backup on to the second track which links up at C. It’s horribly slow and inefficient. You leave Springfield at 3:15 PM. By 3:45 PM you’re just getting down with this nonsense and heading north.
Amtrak’s obviously embarrassed about it. There’s a nice long warning about it over the PA, emphasizing that this is normal and planned. I think the only constituency who enjoys this are the railfans who gather since it’s such a great photo-op.
I’m now on the stretch that Amtrak will leave in a year or two. This New England Central RR track is rough; some stretches are worse even than CSX around Buffalo, which has always been my “gold standard” for an unpleasant ride. It makes no sense to rehabilitate it of course when Massachusetts and the Feds are fixing up the new, more direct, route. I don’t disagree with the logic at all. Still, damn. There’s some talk of new service over this route to link Amherst with New London. I don’t see it getting done without serious federal money, and there are other more pressing passenger rail projects.
As I submit this we’re fifteen minutes out from Brattleboro and dead on schedule. No better way to travel.
I’ve posted a route guide to the Vermonter.
I keep track of all my train mileage because I’m one of those people. By my reckoning I’ve done over 41,000 miles on Amtrak alone and another 10,000+ on other systems, mostly in Europe. A full quarter of my Amtrak mileage is on a single train: the Lake Shore Limited, which operates between Chicago and New York, with a section to Boston. I’ve taken it to three Moodle Hack/Doc Fests: Summer 2009 at Smith College, Winter 2010 at Lafayette College, and Summer 2011 at Hampshire College. I’ve ridden it to a pair of weddings. I took it to HighEdWeb 2012 and B-Fest 2013. I’ve made three trips on it in the last eight months. This makes writing the following all the harder: Lake Shore Limited, I’m afraid that we may have to break up.
Here’s the situation. I have cause to make the trip between New York and Chicago at least once a year for the B-Movie Festival in Evanston, Illinois. I’m likely to make it another time for business related to the German Studies Association, and it’s a fair bet that I’ll make at least one trip for pleasure to the Midwest. I’ve never made less than two round-trips in a calendar year since 2009. I’ve done one already this year, another is booked and at least one more is on the horizon. I’m just not sure I can do it on the Lake Shore Limited anymore. I think my future lies with the Capitol Limited.
7 things I don’t like about the Lake Shore Limited
- The eastbound departure time from Chicago. The Lake Shore Limited is Amtrak’s cleanup train, handling misconnecting passengers from the west. This is a necessary and useful function, but the 9:30 PM departure is a hardship. You’ve got to find dinner in Chicago, though if you’re a sleeper passenger they give you all the wine you want. If the Empire Builder got stuck in the Dakotas you might be a few hours late leaving.
- The eastbound afternoon crawl across upstate New York. Because of the late departure time from Chicago you spend all the daylight hours between Buffalo and Albany. It’s very, very boring. You do get lunch.
- CSX’s handling of the train in western New York. Amtrak is dependent on the freight railroads for dispatching. CSX does an absolutely terrible job between Schenectady and Rochester. They’re incapable of getting the train though on time. It’s just frustrating.
- The toilet in the Viewliner roomette. Amtrak experimented with the design of the Viewliner and included a toilet in each roomette. There’s no problem with smells or anything like that it’s just…awkward…in an already confined space. I can’t tell you how many times I wished for a public restroom instead, even though it meant a walk.
- The track quality around Buffalo. It’s very rough around Buffalo, and westbound you hit it around midnight (ish, depending on how badly CSX screwed you, see point #3) which guarantees you’ll be woken up.
- The Amfleet lounge. I’ve discussed this in the various route guides linked above but the Amfleet lounge/cafe simply doesn’t compare to the Sightseer Lounge on the Capitol Limited. There’s no good place for sitting and watching, and perhaps more importantly there’s not enough seating.
- The Amfleet lounge, Part II. It’s located on the back of the train because it travels to Boston. If you’re a New York sleeper passenger you’re walking through five coach cars to reach it.
The Capitol Limited improves on all these points. Its most significant drawback, of course, is that it doesn’t go to New York–it terminates in Washington, D.C. Passengers traveling to and from New York must take a Northeast Regional. That adds about four hours to the trip, allowing for connection times. This April I’m testing out taking the Capitol Limited westbound. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ve posted a route guide to the Capitol Limited.
Yesterday I showed my phone to gate agent in Chicago and successfully boarded the Wolverine. This morning we boarded the Blue Water in Kalamazoo using only a phone. Our conductor beeped the QR code on the screen without incident.
Folks, I’m here to tell you that e-ticketing works. The only open question is how well these trips post to my rewards account. I don’t expect problems but I’ll check in a week or two to see if the points post. As I said in Part I the only thing missing from the app is my room and car assignment on the sleeper, and that’s only for my benefit.
Previous posts about e-ticketing:
Yesterday I discussed Amtrak’s rollout of eticketing nationwide. I outlined four tasks which required a proof of ticket and which I hoped to accomplish with my phone alone. So far, we’re two-for-two. At the baggage counter, the attendant didn’t bat an eye as I offered her my phone with the eticket displayed. Our bag was ticketed through to Chicago and whisked away. Painless. At the Club Acela, I showed my phone again and the attendant verified that we were ticketed for a roomette on today’s Lake Shore Limited, allowing us access. Two steps to go.
As an aside, the baggage attendant had no problem with ticketing our bag to Chicago even though our ultimate destination, Kalamazoo, has no baggage service. I’m still puzzled by Seattle’s refusal to do the same thing in May 2011 with the Empire Builder, and I have to assume it was because of the endemic delays at that time (those delays will be covered in a future post).
This summer Amtrak rolled out e-ticketing on all its routes. This is long overdue and a step in the right direction, not just in itself but for the efficiencies which should follow. One of the interesting features of the old system is that the paper tickets had cash value–that is, they were important in themselves. I once had to mail my actual ticket stubs via certified mail to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia in order to procure a refund (long story, and Amtrak fulfilled my request). With e-tickets Amtrak’s on the same footing as the airlines–your e-ticket holds no value of its own. This is a huge step forward.
And tomorrow I’m going to find out how well it works. I’m going to try to do all the following with my phone (I do have printouts available as a quick safety):
- Check a bag through to Chicago
- Gain entry to Club Acela (Amtrak’s lounge at Penn Station for First Class and sleeper passengers)
- Board the train (thus satisfying the gate agent, an institution Amtrak can abolish whenever it wants)
- Get my actual ticket checked.
I’ve already noticed a limitation that will probably require the printout for step #4. When you book a sleeping accommodation with Amtrak (in effect, a hotel room) you’re assigned to a car and room. This information is on the printout. However, it’s not visible on the phone. Doing this with the phone alone I would have no idea where my room was. The New York section has two sleeping cars (normally); each has two bedrooms, a handicapped-accessible bedroom, and twelve roomettes.
The last time I took the Lake Shore Limited was in May, before the nationwide rollout. I’m honestly curious to see the effect on boarding procedures. I’ve boarded at all four stations I’ll be using this trip (New York Penn, Chicago, Kalamazoo, Milwaukee) so I have a basis for comparison.