Tom Peters said it all about 30 years ago. If you make excuses for a company that gave you bad service, YOU become part of the problem!
You see, the fundamental difference here is that only you believe that you got bad service regarding the issue of the EB's detour. You seem to expect that good service entails someone at Amtrak's CNOC located in Delaware first noticing that a river in Minnesota, more than a 1,000 miles away, was going to flood and close a rail line that they don't own. Then, after they figure out how to detour the train and get permission to do it, you seem to expect that they should send someone with a gun over to the head quarters of the detour host RR and hold the CEO hostage until he personally ensures that they have an employee standing by the tracks to guide the EB's engineer over the detour route. An employee that I might add, has to be fully rested under FRA rules in order to work. And no doubt that host is dealing with the repercussions of other trains being detoured, maxing out their available employees.
And then after all of that is done, you want that employee in CNOC to call up the train and make sure that the conductor personally comed to your room to explain all of what's been done and to seek your approval!
I'm sorry, but we live in the real world here.
I am truly sorry that things didn't work out for you and that you lost money on that hotel. I really am sorry!
But there are so many factors in that delay that were totally outside of Amtrak's control that you either just don't wish to understand or do care about, I'm not sure. Yes, I'm sure that the crew probably could have done better at telling people just what was happening. But quite frankly I'm sure that they didn't know, because Amtrak didn't know.
Amtrak could not have known for sure that river would flood. Amtrak definitely could not have known that the host RR would elect to close the route. And it is NOT Amtrak's decision to close that route.
Amtrak then did the next best thing that they could do, they may arrangements to detour the train to get everyone where they needed to be. But under FRA rules, Amtrak's engineers are not qualified to operate the train over the detour route. That means that the host RR must provide what's called a pilot. A pilot is another engineer who regularly works that route. Amtrak does NOT control the scheduling of the pilot; the host RR controls that. And even the host RR must still comply with the FRA rules on hours of rest for engineers. It is quite likely that the host didn't have a properly rested, qualified engineer available and had to wait an hour or two before they could call someone who had just completed their required hours of rest.
Contrast that with what happened on the NEC this weekend. Amtrak does own and control the NEC. While they may not have known the full extent of the damage until the light of day on Saturday morning, they knew Friday night that they were in big trouble. The 9PM overnight run, train #66 never left Washington DC because of the storms.
Yet the first tweet didn't even happen until 3:30 AM Saturday morning. And it took until around noon, IIRC, to post anything on Amtrak's website. Yes, I'm sure that calling let people know that there was a problem. But, regardless, that to me is inexcusable. Yes, I'm sure that some people still would have shown up at a train station to catch a train that wouldn't run because they didn't check the website. But anyone aware of the power problems in MD & VA due to the storm, might well have checked, only to find nothing.
But these are vastly different events. Amtrak is the only entity involved on the NEC and the event affected dozens of trains. In the case of the EB, it affected only 1 train, involved several entities, and we don't even know when the host closed the original route. It may have been only a hour or two before Amtrak was to start down those tracks that they closed things.