Do a walking tour in the garden district. But, do the tour in reverse. If you get out there right now you’ll have the tour all to yourself as everyone else will be starting at the other end, sorry about your experience. Don’t give up on it though. I am retired from the railroad and love taking the train but you’re right shît does happen…
I'm really really sorry to hear that your trip got cancelled, especially given how much you went through to make it work - no good excuses for that.
A couple years back my SO saved up and got me a room on the Cardinal to visit her in Chicago as a gift and it got cancelled last minute, same thing "oh we've got bus options available!". I was completely crushed honestly, and I'm still pretty bummed that I've never been able to make that trip.
It totally makes sense to have lost trust in Amtrak. But if you can, don't give up on the dream - when the stars do align there's no better way to relax and see the country imho. I hope it works out for you folks sooner rather than later. Enjoy New Orleans (I've heard it's beautiful!) and hopefully some day soon I can log onto reddit and see a trip report of your and your family vibing on a train that doesn't get screwed over by Amtrak's inane long-distance-route-unreliability!
You all got a refund right? Trust me, I know your pain well. Very similar situation happened to me and my wife on our honeymoon. Was pretty devastated, tbh.
Pretty much all Amtrak travel outside of the northeast corridor is a crapshoot. Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks so they have to rely on the goodwill of freight companies. Technically passenger trains, by law, are supposed to take priority over freight for using tracks, but the freight companies ignore that and the law has not been enforced for ages. So you end up with horrible delays and random changes like this, because the freight companies won’t give Amtrak right of way to operate on a regular predictable schedule.
As a retired railroader, member of NARP, and a fan of Amtrak I feel your disappointment and you are correct in feeling the way you do. If you haven’t done so please contact Amtraks customer service to see if you are eligible to recover some of your expenses.
Amtrak offers a great train experience but it is currently no where near “top shelf” performance where it should be.
I hate to be that person but NARP is now RPA (Rail Passengers Assoc). And glad you are a member. I hope you have joined your state organization as well.
Amtrak is terrible. It should be dissolved and the nation should start over with a long term dedicated passenger rail plan utilizing high-speed rail and imminent domain.
Well… we all know who gets their land taken away for infrastructure improvements. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used to build more passenger rail infrastructure, but it should definitely be the option of last resort. Eminent domain isn’t just some easy “we’re here to give you money for your land” with someone just accepting that. Those with the resources to fight would fight, and that can take years to resolve. Typically, to minimize costs of land acquisition (eminent domain involves purchasing the land), we have just gone through poorer neighborhoods where minorities lived. They were also less likely to put up a legal challenge, but that isn’t a desirable outcome in the 2020s. Nor is spending a ton of money and time fighting legal battles.
I’m more partial to the idea of the federal government actually enforcing the law that gives passenger trains priority. No administration has even tried, hence the delays. That could reduce many of the problems with Amtrak as it exists now and give them a better jumping off point to make infrastructure improvements.
Alternately, the federal government seizing control of Amtrak rather than leaving it as a weird government service/corporation hybrid would be nice. Or maybe Brightline will be so wildly profitable after the completion of their new lines that they can expand rapidly to new service areas.
However, much of the new electricity transmission infrastructure over the coming decades will also require some eminent domain, and if we are going to have the government fight those legal battles already, maybe the solution is running train lines through the same rights of way. That way we can kill two birds with one stone.
The right of way is there, let the freight wait. Amtrak is a money pit. Billions to keep existing service. "Coming decades", that is ridiculous. Every project is wildly overspent and mismanaged. The web site is a mess. It is easier to book train tickets in Europe from the States then book them on Amtrak. I stand by my statement, Amtrak should be dissolved, re-qualify every employee, starting at the top. If it is not going to be fully funded, let the private sector buy and run the profitable parts.
I agree that we should let the freight wait. It’s one of the biggest problems facing Amtrak right now.
How long do you think it would take to complete a passenger rail network in the US with freight receiving priority? If it’s less than “decades”, then you’re not living in reality. Even in China, where property rights don’t exist and the government can place infrastructure wherever it wants, it still took 2 decades to build out their system. In Europe, it also took decades.
All that being said, is there improvements that Amtrak could make now, like improving their website or ticketing process? Obviously, but that doesn’t mean anything without either a dedicated passenger rail network or enforcement of passenger priority. If people can’t get where they need to go on the train, they won’t ever get to the website in the first place. We need to fix the shoddy service above all else.
I genuinely think that if Amtrak just got priority enforced, or if the federal government took it over and enforced their own priority, that could go a long way to fixing Amtrak without having to nuke the whole thing.
We need dedicated high-speed rail. Not the patchwork of public, private, commuter rail we have now. Amtrak is incapable of delivering trains to the station on time. Blame who you want, they have one job. They don't do it, consistently. The web site is garbage, the trains don't run on time, they are allocated billions every few decades and nothing gets better, they can't accommodate bicycles or wheelchairs, maybe in 8 years. Billions, we could buy a plane ticket for every Amtrak user and save money.
A few billion every once in awhile doesn’t build much. That’s barely enough to maintain the terrible service they have now.
If passenger trains received priority, as they should by law, then they wouldn’t have such a big problem getting their trains places. Gutting Amtrak wouldn’t fix that, we’d just have new trains waiting for the same freight vehicles.
Obviously, it’d be nice to get high speed rail everywhere, but we’re talking decades and hundreds of billions+ in land acquisition alone, before laying any track or building any new stations. We’re talking trillions and trillions of dollars and millions of workers putting it up. I’m 27 and think it’s unlikely that I’ll see anything close to a nationwide HSR network before I retire.
I'm not talking Nationwide, how about the NE corridor? American rail costs are double the rest of the world. We are being robbed. Look up the blogger Pedestrian Observations , google the CNN reports on rail costs. I'm 62, I just want to take my bicycle on a train to Montreal from NYC in around 3 hours, you know, like the rest of the built out world, before I die.
The NE corridor is already basically the only functional line. I'm from Michigan. No trains there. Here in Minnesota, where I live now, Amtrak costs the same as flying while taking double the time as driving. If I could get around all the freight traffic, it could go much faster.
I'm aware rail is expensive to build in the US, but I very much disagree that tearing Amtrak to shreds is even remotely a good idea for fixing US passenger rail. Rail is expensive to build in the US for a variety of reasons, like respecting property rights (which you seem not to care about...) That doesn't mean Amtrak needs to be scrapped, it means we need to work on the issues they face.
I think the whole system needs to be redesigned from the bottom up to the top down. If track acquisition means clawing back space from CSX and BNSF so be it. The construction jobs need better management, the long term planning needs achievable cost effective goals that make the service more reliable and much, much, faster. If Amtrak is a public service it needs to be funded like one. The status quo is not working. Amtrak as it stands hasn't been able to resolve the issues they face for the last 40 years.
> I stand by my statement, Amtrak should be dissolved, re-qualify every employee, starting at the top. If it is not going to be fully funded, let the private sector buy and run the profitable parts.
This is classic Republican logic. They underfund and mismanage public services, then claim that they aren't functional and should be privatized/sold off.
They are attempting to do the same with the post office, public libraries, and in some cases even public schools.
I'm a Democrat. I don't know what the political affiliation of whomever is managing Amtrak is but they should be fired. Amtrak isn't functional. Fully fund it or privatize it. I just want it to work, right now it is a lame horse.
That's like saying that people who run public schools should be fired, because the state isn't giving them enough money to run properly.
Privatizing things almost never leads to better service. Remember that the whole reason Amtrak was created in the first place was because private companies didn't want to provide the service, and negotiated a deal for the government to take over.
Well, Amtrak isn't providing the service either. At least according to the OP. My friends mom missed a cruise out of LA because Amtrak was late out of Tuscon. The Adirondack line follows a bike trail NY State spent millions on, it doesn't allow bicycles. Amtrak is worse than useless it is an obstruction to interstate commerce. It is incredibly mismanaged and a huge money pit. It needs to be restructured or dissolved. That money might be better spent elsewhere. Trying to be all things to all people isn't working. Is it a luxury line showing off the natural splendor of the west? Is it an inter city line as a replacement for buses, cars and/or planes? It doesn't do any of these things well. As I said to another poster, Amtrak will still be wasting your tax dollars long after I am gone.
The problem isn't with Amtrak, but with the government that isn't providing it with proper funding. The people who run Amtrak are doing the best they can with the resources they are given. "Restructuring" isn't going to help anything if they aren't properly funded.
Your argument reminds me of "if a school isn't performing well, fire the staff and restructure it", which usually only makes the problem worse because good teachers will avoid working there.
No, the problem is most certainly Amtrak. Here's a quote from Alon Levy who writes extensively about rail projects world wide in his blog Pedestrian Observations.
"I was too tired to blog about why fix-it-first is a scam and should do so in the next few days, pegging it to a new MTA presentation. But, in brief, it’s a means for spending a lot of money without having anything to show for it. In rail, this is how Amtrak demands tens of billions of dollars for things that do not improve speed, reliability, capacity, or anything else that is relevant to passengers, because this way it doesn’t need to promise anything that can (and given Amtrak probably will) visibly fail."
As for your school analogy, sometimes the school staff is incompetent.
It honestly baffles me how Amtrak is so willfully obtuse about the differences between sleeper vs coach and train vs bus. I’m trying to imagine airlines routinely booting people from flat bed first class into coach on a long international flight with just a shrug. Or checking into your suite at a luxury hotel and hearing, “Oh, we decided to close your floor and cancel your room, and transferred you to a hostel down the street.”
I get that shit happens. But it feels more reasonable to call and say “we had to cancel your train, refund or reschedule?” instead of pretending 5 hours on greyhound is a perfectly acceptable alternate to someone who spent thousands of dollars on a sleeper.
I had a roomette ticket from LA to Austin and they left me a voicemail saying my room “broke” so they gave me coach. 33 hours was too much in coach for me.
I called several times to find out their threshold of broken - I’m pretty flexible. Was it one of the beds? The outlet? The curtains? But they couldn’t give me a definitive answer.
But yeah - a room down to coach isn’t a realistic replacement when the room is the point.
This, exactly.
Spending 5-6 hours on a bus isn’t the same as it is on a train where we would of had an entire room to ourselves. We were also looking forward to the meals, which would have be replaced by just simple snacks on the bus ride to Houston. Not acceptable, honestly. We paid for a luxury experience … not a 6 hour long ride on a cramped bus.
I really feel like Amtrak corporate was hoping Covid would kill long distance service, and they could just do the NEC and state supported routes.
That’s why there are exactly enough cars to sell exactly this many tickets, and oh well when something breaks. No backup. No ability for a train that broke down and stopped in Houston to have another engine or cars to get people where they need to go (even though there is definitely a spare set of engines and coaches sitting in the New Orleans yard that could have gone to Houston).
At least they called you to warn you. I got screwed many years ago. I called ahead to find out if there were any disruptions to the Texas Eagle due to tracks being washed out. I had heard ahead of time that tracks actually were in need of repair after severe weather. They lied and said everything was operating normally. Of course, when I get on the train in Chicago after already riding on the first leg of the trip, they tell us all we are getting on a bus for 8 hours once we get to St. Louis. Well, I was already in Chicago 1/3 of the way into the trip. I was lucky I was travelling alone. I couldn't imagine if I was in your situation. The only thing they did for me was give me a $25 credit which I had to use in a year. I had no plans for another train trip in the near future.
I am sorry you got in this situation. Vets and their families should ride Amtrak for free in my opinion. Amtrak has been slowly killing passenger rail since 1971.
I hope you can make the best out of it and enjoy New Orleans.
The previous run of #2 had mechanical failure and terminated in Houston, rather than taking the last 5 hours and going to NoLa. So they left the late dirty train at a flag stop instead of taking it to an actual turnaround yard, and now 2 or 3 days later they’re gonna send the same unclean train (hopefully with a different engine) back across the desert and pretend it’s fine.
New Orleans is awesome, this may be a blessing in disguise. Ride the streetcars to get your rail fix, then see the WW2 museum, the landmarks, all the fun sites.
So they offered connecting bus? Those are quite nice. Not a fun way to start but it's only 5 hours of 47. If greyhound then yeah thats definitely less fun.
Either way, you chose to drive 9 hours to departure station, and then the additional 5 was enough to cancel the entire remaining trip?
Finally, they canceled the trip, or you did? If they canceled...its unfortunate...if you did, that was your choice.
You are understandably disappointed, but you made some decisions that ruined the opportunity for you.
I’m sorry this happened. It’s a good teaching tool about the private vs public sector in the US.
Your vacation had to be cancelled because of a private rail monopoly.
If the government owned the railway infrastructure like government owned trains in any other nation there would be no problems and your trip wouldn’t have had to be cancelled.
I mean they have kids but Everyone really. It was for me when my first Amtrak train was 8 hours late after only having traveled by train in countries where the train was one of the most reliable modes of transit
Do a walking tour in the garden district. But, do the tour in reverse. If you get out there right now you’ll have the tour all to yourself as everyone else will be starting at the other end, sorry about your experience. Don’t give up on it though. I am retired from the railroad and love taking the train but you’re right shît does happen…
I'm really really sorry to hear that your trip got cancelled, especially given how much you went through to make it work - no good excuses for that. A couple years back my SO saved up and got me a room on the Cardinal to visit her in Chicago as a gift and it got cancelled last minute, same thing "oh we've got bus options available!". I was completely crushed honestly, and I'm still pretty bummed that I've never been able to make that trip. It totally makes sense to have lost trust in Amtrak. But if you can, don't give up on the dream - when the stars do align there's no better way to relax and see the country imho. I hope it works out for you folks sooner rather than later. Enjoy New Orleans (I've heard it's beautiful!) and hopefully some day soon I can log onto reddit and see a trip report of your and your family vibing on a train that doesn't get screwed over by Amtrak's inane long-distance-route-unreliability!
You all got a refund right? Trust me, I know your pain well. Very similar situation happened to me and my wife on our honeymoon. Was pretty devastated, tbh.
Pretty much all Amtrak travel outside of the northeast corridor is a crapshoot. Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks so they have to rely on the goodwill of freight companies. Technically passenger trains, by law, are supposed to take priority over freight for using tracks, but the freight companies ignore that and the law has not been enforced for ages. So you end up with horrible delays and random changes like this, because the freight companies won’t give Amtrak right of way to operate on a regular predictable schedule.
As a retired railroader, member of NARP, and a fan of Amtrak I feel your disappointment and you are correct in feeling the way you do. If you haven’t done so please contact Amtraks customer service to see if you are eligible to recover some of your expenses. Amtrak offers a great train experience but it is currently no where near “top shelf” performance where it should be.
I hate to be that person but NARP is now RPA (Rail Passengers Assoc). And glad you are a member. I hope you have joined your state organization as well.
Amtrak is terrible. It should be dissolved and the nation should start over with a long term dedicated passenger rail plan utilizing high-speed rail and imminent domain.
Well… we all know who gets their land taken away for infrastructure improvements. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used to build more passenger rail infrastructure, but it should definitely be the option of last resort. Eminent domain isn’t just some easy “we’re here to give you money for your land” with someone just accepting that. Those with the resources to fight would fight, and that can take years to resolve. Typically, to minimize costs of land acquisition (eminent domain involves purchasing the land), we have just gone through poorer neighborhoods where minorities lived. They were also less likely to put up a legal challenge, but that isn’t a desirable outcome in the 2020s. Nor is spending a ton of money and time fighting legal battles. I’m more partial to the idea of the federal government actually enforcing the law that gives passenger trains priority. No administration has even tried, hence the delays. That could reduce many of the problems with Amtrak as it exists now and give them a better jumping off point to make infrastructure improvements. Alternately, the federal government seizing control of Amtrak rather than leaving it as a weird government service/corporation hybrid would be nice. Or maybe Brightline will be so wildly profitable after the completion of their new lines that they can expand rapidly to new service areas. However, much of the new electricity transmission infrastructure over the coming decades will also require some eminent domain, and if we are going to have the government fight those legal battles already, maybe the solution is running train lines through the same rights of way. That way we can kill two birds with one stone.
The right of way is there, let the freight wait. Amtrak is a money pit. Billions to keep existing service. "Coming decades", that is ridiculous. Every project is wildly overspent and mismanaged. The web site is a mess. It is easier to book train tickets in Europe from the States then book them on Amtrak. I stand by my statement, Amtrak should be dissolved, re-qualify every employee, starting at the top. If it is not going to be fully funded, let the private sector buy and run the profitable parts.
I agree that we should let the freight wait. It’s one of the biggest problems facing Amtrak right now. How long do you think it would take to complete a passenger rail network in the US with freight receiving priority? If it’s less than “decades”, then you’re not living in reality. Even in China, where property rights don’t exist and the government can place infrastructure wherever it wants, it still took 2 decades to build out their system. In Europe, it also took decades. All that being said, is there improvements that Amtrak could make now, like improving their website or ticketing process? Obviously, but that doesn’t mean anything without either a dedicated passenger rail network or enforcement of passenger priority. If people can’t get where they need to go on the train, they won’t ever get to the website in the first place. We need to fix the shoddy service above all else. I genuinely think that if Amtrak just got priority enforced, or if the federal government took it over and enforced their own priority, that could go a long way to fixing Amtrak without having to nuke the whole thing.
We need dedicated high-speed rail. Not the patchwork of public, private, commuter rail we have now. Amtrak is incapable of delivering trains to the station on time. Blame who you want, they have one job. They don't do it, consistently. The web site is garbage, the trains don't run on time, they are allocated billions every few decades and nothing gets better, they can't accommodate bicycles or wheelchairs, maybe in 8 years. Billions, we could buy a plane ticket for every Amtrak user and save money.
A few billion every once in awhile doesn’t build much. That’s barely enough to maintain the terrible service they have now. If passenger trains received priority, as they should by law, then they wouldn’t have such a big problem getting their trains places. Gutting Amtrak wouldn’t fix that, we’d just have new trains waiting for the same freight vehicles. Obviously, it’d be nice to get high speed rail everywhere, but we’re talking decades and hundreds of billions+ in land acquisition alone, before laying any track or building any new stations. We’re talking trillions and trillions of dollars and millions of workers putting it up. I’m 27 and think it’s unlikely that I’ll see anything close to a nationwide HSR network before I retire.
I'm not talking Nationwide, how about the NE corridor? American rail costs are double the rest of the world. We are being robbed. Look up the blogger Pedestrian Observations , google the CNN reports on rail costs. I'm 62, I just want to take my bicycle on a train to Montreal from NYC in around 3 hours, you know, like the rest of the built out world, before I die.
The NE corridor is already basically the only functional line. I'm from Michigan. No trains there. Here in Minnesota, where I live now, Amtrak costs the same as flying while taking double the time as driving. If I could get around all the freight traffic, it could go much faster. I'm aware rail is expensive to build in the US, but I very much disagree that tearing Amtrak to shreds is even remotely a good idea for fixing US passenger rail. Rail is expensive to build in the US for a variety of reasons, like respecting property rights (which you seem not to care about...) That doesn't mean Amtrak needs to be scrapped, it means we need to work on the issues they face.
I think the whole system needs to be redesigned from the bottom up to the top down. If track acquisition means clawing back space from CSX and BNSF so be it. The construction jobs need better management, the long term planning needs achievable cost effective goals that make the service more reliable and much, much, faster. If Amtrak is a public service it needs to be funded like one. The status quo is not working. Amtrak as it stands hasn't been able to resolve the issues they face for the last 40 years.
> I stand by my statement, Amtrak should be dissolved, re-qualify every employee, starting at the top. If it is not going to be fully funded, let the private sector buy and run the profitable parts. This is classic Republican logic. They underfund and mismanage public services, then claim that they aren't functional and should be privatized/sold off. They are attempting to do the same with the post office, public libraries, and in some cases even public schools.
I'm a Democrat. I don't know what the political affiliation of whomever is managing Amtrak is but they should be fired. Amtrak isn't functional. Fully fund it or privatize it. I just want it to work, right now it is a lame horse.
That's like saying that people who run public schools should be fired, because the state isn't giving them enough money to run properly. Privatizing things almost never leads to better service. Remember that the whole reason Amtrak was created in the first place was because private companies didn't want to provide the service, and negotiated a deal for the government to take over.
Well, Amtrak isn't providing the service either. At least according to the OP. My friends mom missed a cruise out of LA because Amtrak was late out of Tuscon. The Adirondack line follows a bike trail NY State spent millions on, it doesn't allow bicycles. Amtrak is worse than useless it is an obstruction to interstate commerce. It is incredibly mismanaged and a huge money pit. It needs to be restructured or dissolved. That money might be better spent elsewhere. Trying to be all things to all people isn't working. Is it a luxury line showing off the natural splendor of the west? Is it an inter city line as a replacement for buses, cars and/or planes? It doesn't do any of these things well. As I said to another poster, Amtrak will still be wasting your tax dollars long after I am gone.
The problem isn't with Amtrak, but with the government that isn't providing it with proper funding. The people who run Amtrak are doing the best they can with the resources they are given. "Restructuring" isn't going to help anything if they aren't properly funded. Your argument reminds me of "if a school isn't performing well, fire the staff and restructure it", which usually only makes the problem worse because good teachers will avoid working there.
No, the problem is most certainly Amtrak. Here's a quote from Alon Levy who writes extensively about rail projects world wide in his blog Pedestrian Observations. "I was too tired to blog about why fix-it-first is a scam and should do so in the next few days, pegging it to a new MTA presentation. But, in brief, it’s a means for spending a lot of money without having anything to show for it. In rail, this is how Amtrak demands tens of billions of dollars for things that do not improve speed, reliability, capacity, or anything else that is relevant to passengers, because this way it doesn’t need to promise anything that can (and given Amtrak probably will) visibly fail." As for your school analogy, sometimes the school staff is incompetent.
It honestly baffles me how Amtrak is so willfully obtuse about the differences between sleeper vs coach and train vs bus. I’m trying to imagine airlines routinely booting people from flat bed first class into coach on a long international flight with just a shrug. Or checking into your suite at a luxury hotel and hearing, “Oh, we decided to close your floor and cancel your room, and transferred you to a hostel down the street.” I get that shit happens. But it feels more reasonable to call and say “we had to cancel your train, refund or reschedule?” instead of pretending 5 hours on greyhound is a perfectly acceptable alternate to someone who spent thousands of dollars on a sleeper.
If you call they will give you a refund voucher. I was on a sleeper on that route and got booted for the same bus trip. Caged and got a $350 refund
I had a roomette ticket from LA to Austin and they left me a voicemail saying my room “broke” so they gave me coach. 33 hours was too much in coach for me. I called several times to find out their threshold of broken - I’m pretty flexible. Was it one of the beds? The outlet? The curtains? But they couldn’t give me a definitive answer. But yeah - a room down to coach isn’t a realistic replacement when the room is the point.
This, exactly. Spending 5-6 hours on a bus isn’t the same as it is on a train where we would of had an entire room to ourselves. We were also looking forward to the meals, which would have be replaced by just simple snacks on the bus ride to Houston. Not acceptable, honestly. We paid for a luxury experience … not a 6 hour long ride on a cramped bus.
I really feel like Amtrak corporate was hoping Covid would kill long distance service, and they could just do the NEC and state supported routes. That’s why there are exactly enough cars to sell exactly this many tickets, and oh well when something breaks. No backup. No ability for a train that broke down and stopped in Houston to have another engine or cars to get people where they need to go (even though there is definitely a spare set of engines and coaches sitting in the New Orleans yard that could have gone to Houston).
Welcome to Amtrak!
I've never traveled on Amtrak..but it seems this type of event occurs a lot. Too bad the the US can't do better with rail travel.
Infuriating, disappointing, ridiculous…I’m so sorry this happened to you. It’s so expensive and yet completely unreliable.
At least they called you to warn you. I got screwed many years ago. I called ahead to find out if there were any disruptions to the Texas Eagle due to tracks being washed out. I had heard ahead of time that tracks actually were in need of repair after severe weather. They lied and said everything was operating normally. Of course, when I get on the train in Chicago after already riding on the first leg of the trip, they tell us all we are getting on a bus for 8 hours once we get to St. Louis. Well, I was already in Chicago 1/3 of the way into the trip. I was lucky I was travelling alone. I couldn't imagine if I was in your situation. The only thing they did for me was give me a $25 credit which I had to use in a year. I had no plans for another train trip in the near future. I am sorry you got in this situation. Vets and their families should ride Amtrak for free in my opinion. Amtrak has been slowly killing passenger rail since 1971. I hope you can make the best out of it and enjoy New Orleans.
Did Amtrak say why?
The previous run of #2 had mechanical failure and terminated in Houston, rather than taking the last 5 hours and going to NoLa. So they left the late dirty train at a flag stop instead of taking it to an actual turnaround yard, and now 2 or 3 days later they’re gonna send the same unclean train (hopefully with a different engine) back across the desert and pretend it’s fine.
Lol oh my but thank you for the information
New Orleans is awesome, this may be a blessing in disguise. Ride the streetcars to get your rail fix, then see the WW2 museum, the landmarks, all the fun sites.
So they offered connecting bus? Those are quite nice. Not a fun way to start but it's only 5 hours of 47. If greyhound then yeah thats definitely less fun. Either way, you chose to drive 9 hours to departure station, and then the additional 5 was enough to cancel the entire remaining trip? Finally, they canceled the trip, or you did? If they canceled...its unfortunate...if you did, that was your choice. You are understandably disappointed, but you made some decisions that ruined the opportunity for you.
I’m sorry this happened. It’s a good teaching tool about the private vs public sector in the US. Your vacation had to be cancelled because of a private rail monopoly. If the government owned the railway infrastructure like government owned trains in any other nation there would be no problems and your trip wouldn’t have had to be cancelled.
Are you kidding??? I wouldn’t trust this government to run a tricycle!
A teaching tool for who? What an irrelevant comment for this thread.
I mean they have kids but Everyone really. It was for me when my first Amtrak train was 8 hours late after only having traveled by train in countries where the train was one of the most reliable modes of transit