Last week, my family and I traveled from Omaha to Salt Lake City on Amtrak. It was quite an adventure. I highly recommend it on a few conditions. You must be very flexible with your travel schedule because delays, significant delays, are common. You must be patient. (see previous.) If you are traveling through amazing scenery, it negates the other two.
After a ton of people boarded the train last Sunday at Glenwood Springs, Colorado - a picturesque mountain resort if there ever was one - we started on the trek to Denver with the plan to arrive by 8:30 a.m. Unfortunately, just past Winter Park, a freight train in front of our train broke down. It's a single rail up there and we had to pull off until the freight train could be moved. We rolled into Denver at 2 a.m. Those passengers who had not planned on spending the night on the train were in the middle of a bad dream. And that's unfortunate because they won't be riding the train again any time soon. Improving Amtrak is a chicken and egg kind of thing. More people need to ride to garner the funds to improve but more people won't ride if trains end up delayed so significantly. The orginal timetable brought us back to Omaha at 6:15 a.m. on Monday morning. We didn't arrive until 4 p.m.
I'll ride again though. It was relaxing and so very different from airline travel these days. No one assumed I was a terrorist because I had shampoo in my carry on bag. No one interrogated me about my plans and I was allowed to walk around the train from car to car. No seat belts, no getting show-horned into my seat and out. It was actually a very pleasant adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment