The travail of train travel

Coach Daryl Bonow, Jim and Carol Lemon and I were scheduled to leave McCook last Wednesday night/ Thursday morning at 3:45 but didn't pull out of the station until after 6 a.m. because the train was almost two and a half hours late arriving.

We were due to arrive in Reno, Nevada at 9:35 Friday morning but didn't get there until four o'clock in the afternoon, almost seven hours late.

The return trip was no different. We were scheduled to leave at 4 p.m., but our departure was delayed until 6:30.

We were due to arrive back home at 11:59 Monday night, but didn't pull in to the station until 7 a.m., again seven hours late.

 

Amtrak has major problems.

 

A recent article in the Sacramento Bee newspaper indicates that the California Zephyr, the train we rode, which connects Chicago with San Francisco, has an on time rate of only 7 percent and, in the current fiscal year, the train has not arrived on time even once.

Much of the problem has to do with the tenuous nature of the relationship between Amtrak and the freight rail services, which own most of the tracks Amtrak uses, especially in the western half of the country and particularly Union Pacific.

In 1970, Congress agreed to let the railroads unload the passenger service they said was dragging them down financially in exchange for giving priority on their tracks to trains run by the new national passenger railroad, Amtrak.

This bill, the Railroad Passenger Service Act, (RAILPAX) was passed on Oct. 14, 1970 and was signed into law, Public Law 91-518, by President Nixon on Oct. 30 of the same year.

Conversely, Amtrak pays fees for use of the tracks. According to the Bee, there is little incentive for the railroads to help Amtrak arrive on time because the fees that Amtrak pays to use the tracks and the fines the railroads are required to pay Amtrak when Amtrak IS late are paltry in relation to the dollars the freight lines take in.

 

We encountered this very situation twice on our round-trip journey. We were stopped on a siding just a few miles outside of Reno on our way there for almost two hours because a Union Pacific crew refused to step aside from their work duties to allow us to pass.

When they finally did, the crew stood by the side of the tracks laughing, jeering, and pointing at our train as we passed them, some of them pointing with the offensive finger. On the way back home, we were again delayed for almost two hours just a few miles short of the Continental Divide for the same reason, even though it was pitch dark outside.

When we WERE moving, it seemed we were crawling along at 20 miles an hour much more often than doing the 79 miles per hour allowed as the maximum speed. The animosity between Union Pacific and Amtrak is well documented. On the other hand, it appears that the relationship between Amtrak and Burlington Northern is much more congenial.

 

Even though the delays, the slow speed, and the incredible lateness at arriving at our destinations were the biggest problems with the train, they weren't the only problems by far.

We had a sleeper car that one person would have found cramped and there were two of us. When the two chairs were made into a lower bed and the top bunk was pulled down from the ceiling, there was no room in the car to even turn around. Bonow requested that I sleep in the upper bunk, both there and back and, unfortunately, I agreed.

There was less than six inches of space between my head and the ceiling and there was no window. I'm pretty sure there's more room in a coffin than the room I had in the upper bunk. A claustrophobic person simply couldn't have stayed up there, much less slept.

 

The sleeping car attendant on the way out was often absent from the car and not very helpful or courteous when he was around.

The attendant on the way back was better but not by leaps and bounds. This seemed to be an attitude that infused most of the staff working on the train.

The dining car personnel were rude and arrogant and it was not unusual for people wanting breakfast, lunch, or dinner to have to wait two hours or more to be seated.

When the train was forced to proceed slowly on the tracks for miles and miles, an explanation was usually not given through the public address system. Sometimes it wasn't even given when we were required to stop completely and sit motionless for long periods of time.

 

Much of the talk we had with other passengers on the train revolved around the government subsidies paid to support Amtrak, at the tune of about one billion dollars a year. Granted, the government provides subsidies for many businesses and operations but, in the case of passenger train travel, there is no competition.

When a business has no competition, it is not challenged to be the best it can be. We see this often with cable television and other enterprises subsidized by the government and we had up close and personal experience with this same concept with Amtrak.

Amtrak is the only passenger train at the national level. You either ride it or you find other transportation. Knowing and understanding that, many of its employees seem to reflect that attitude.

 

The only reason we chose to take Amtrak to Reno to begin with was to see the beauty of the Rocky Mountains close-up, without being distracted by the obligations of driving or flying over them at 30,000 feet.

Unfortunately, on a train ride that lasted 37 hours, we were only in the Rockies for about five of those hours. The rest of the trip consisted of plains, sage brush, hills, and desert. The beauty of the Rockies was hardly worth the effort when all of the difficulties and unpleasantries of the trip were factored in.

 

I hope that our two U.S. senators, Sen. Nelson and Sen. Hagel, will weigh in on this issue and try to resolve some of the problems we encountered. If things don't change, I don't see how Amtrak can survive in the long run.

Hundreds of people are packed into those train cars and the only ones we talked to who were enjoying their trip were true train aficionados who were more interested in the journey than the destination.

On the other hand, most of the people were beside themselves with anger and disgust because they had places they had to be; weddings, funerals, reunions, etc. and many of them were simply not going to get there in time. They took the train because it was the cheapest mode of transportation available to them and they depended on the train to get them to where they were going when it said it would.

 

 It didn't.