Enjoy your evening in Chicago Charlie! :hi: I'm one of those that has made the Platform Dash in Union Station from #6/#8/#4/#22 etc. to make a Connection East or to NOL! The Amtrak Staff in CHI is Very Experienced when it comes to Juggling Trains/Busses/Hotels etc. since they get So Much Practice! Think I'll skip the EB for awhile till the Oil Boom Mellows out and the Trackwork, the Heat Slow orders and Flooding goes away on the High Line!
If 8 is late, do they ever bus people who are trying to connect to 30? I don't see how it would help, but I know Amtrak has bussed people in stranger situations.
With the current average on time performance for #8, what would the most likely course of action be for #50 connecting passengers that are only going to central WV? Bus to Indianapolis, next day #30 in coach and connect to #51 back, or bus all the way from CHI? I know of atleast 4 first class (not that it matters) passengers that will be making this connection.
or something else. a couple years ago we got to chi on the eb at 6:30 am(instead of 3:55 pm the previous day). we were headed to was. were told by conductors and an amtrak person who got on in msp that we would be put up and fed in chi and be on that evening's cl. when we got to chi, we were told we would be on an 18 hr bus trip to was and the busses were outside and "all aboard"
I will be in Chicago on July 4th, but arriving on the LSL and leaving on the SWC. Should see fireworks on the SWC that night and maybe the night before on the LSL
Thanks!
i seem to remember last year that the trains that went through n.dakota on the weekends seemed generally to do better and i assumed this was because of less trackwork. that doesn't necessarily apply in this case but, iirc, the weekend trains did better than the trains during last week
:lol: As for light, about 4-4:30 it begins to lighten up, particularly if the idiots who misforecast our weather here are actually right, as it's supposed to be clear tomorrow morning. I'll keep checking the status maps. This is Amtrak we're talking about so plenty can happen in the next few hours but as I said before if the same pattern holds, I should get into Portland an hour to hour and a half late, plenty of time to peruse Powell's Bookstore and grab lunch at Jake's Famous Crawfish. I hope! I catch Cascades 516 to Seattle at 2:45 tomorrow afternoon (I think; they've changed the departure time so many times) but hopefully have plenty of time to do what I wanted to do in Portland first.
Yeah, 52 minutes late into WFH isn't bad for this week - #7 is currently running 2 hours 42 minutes crossing into Montana right now. At this rate will probably arrive in WFH around midnight.
I know when I was on #6 in May we picked up about an hour btwn DEN and LNK - my question is: how much room is there to make up time? Clearly the way one makes up time is by going faster... just how much faster can an engineer get away with? If a section can nominally be traversed at 60, can he do 65, 70? When does he get into trouble, either with superiors or reality, ie, train hops track etc?
0MPH over speed limit. If a track is rated for 79MPH, he can get in trouble for doing 80MPH. I don't know how much leeway they give, but it's 1-2MPH at most.
Thank you for the reply. Is there a difference btwn the track speed limit, and normal traversal speed, ie, as a margin of safety does a train or schedule have trains travel somewhat below the speed limit? ... so when we picked up the hour btwn DEN and LNK, he was probably pushing right up against the limit, whereas the normal speed might have been somewhat slower? Likewise, I'm assuming GPS is used to report train locations back to OMA or wherever - is that how it would be found out he was over the limit?
If track is rated for 79MPH, engineer will go at 79MPH all the time unless there are slow orders or signals slowing them down. The way long distance trains "make up time" is due to padding. Their schedules are laid out liberally. If traveling from station A to B actually takes 3hrs if done at 79MPH all the way, the time allocated for this run would be, say, 3.5hrs. So now if you got a clear track, you have "made up" 30 minutes of schedule without doing anything extraordinary.
