Funny, I was also on this cursed train on Saturday. (My second Amtrak trip in 20 years)
This was really a comedy (tragedy?) of errors. I was flying to VA to buy a new car Saturday morning, and taking the train back to Orlando where I needed to be on monday. Luckily I wasn’t “in a hurry” but it felt like so many things were done poorly.
- I also received an automated voicemail and email around 7:30 am Saturday telling me the train would be delayed, and that I needed to check in by 5:30, not 2:30. This actually worked out great for me as I had time to meet a friend in DC for lunch, so an extra 3 hours in my day was a win.
- Around 11 am I called Amtrak’s customer service line to try to verify the situation. The guy who answered clearly had exactly as much information as I had gotten in that email. I asked specifically when the train would arrive in Orlando, and he said “oh probably by 9 or 10 am Sunday” (HAHA)
- I arrived at Lorton at 4:00 on the nose and was told they had no more room to accept cars as their lot was full. So I got my # and sat in the incoming parking line.
- I will say all of the staff at Lorton were friendly enough - but either didn’t have any real information, weren’t willing to share real information, or just didn’t know what they were doing. For example, at 4:15 I asked if I could leave - they said sure, but to make it back into the car line by 5:30. I also heard them tell someone else 3 times “not to leave the property” as if the train could show up at any moment. In retrospect, this made no sense whatsoever.
- The incoming train arrived around 6 pm - so I’d been waiting at the station for 2 hours at this point and felt like real progress, surely we’d board soon enough. (HAHAHAHA)
- As mentioned above, the car unloading was a bit of a zoo, passengers were angry, and by the 2nd time they pulled up an empty set of cars to unload, they actually had to call in the Amtrak police as one inbound passenger was yelling at the staff. (Keep in mind, their trip from station to station, as mine was, was effectively 25+ hours)
- Sometime around 7pm, what must have been a hundred cheese pizzas were delivered to feed the 300 people in the station.
- What was most frustrating is that everything felt like it was happening incredibly slowly. If you’ve ever watched a late plane arrive, there’s a flurry of activity to turn it around. For whatever reason, it took SIX HOURS to prepare the train. Why? I have no idea. The same people cleaning the train weren’t the ones loading/unloading cars. The people in the station would pop in and out with status updates but it was always “well hopefully” this will happen and “soon” was heard a lot.
- 7 turned to 8 turned to 9:00 with the process just slowly grinding along. They finally unloaded all the cars, and started loading new ones. Again - once this was done we STILL found ourselves standing around for over an hour. This made no sense.
- Finally around 9:30 I found myself on the train. This STILL felt salvageable - maybe they’d be able to go faster. Maybe travelling overnight on a weekend, we could avoid some stops on the route. Maybe I’d only be a few hours late. (HAHAHAHAA)
Nope. As far as I could tell, the train started rolling around midnight. And at 7 am, I was woken up by a 3 minute rambling discussion of times. Breakfast, they said, was going to be served at 7:30 am. Train time. But it was daylight savings last night. So 7:30 really meant 8:30 on your cell phones. But the train doesn’t change times, so it was 7:30 train time. And it would be available until 8:30 train time, which was really 9:30 on your cell phone. Wait no 7:30 on your cell phone. Whichever it was, breakfast was starting in 20 minutes and would be available for an hour. Repeat 3x in confusion.
Anyway, now I’m up at 7:30 train time, or real time, I don’t even know which and I check my GPS thinking surely we’d be in florida by now and make it by lunchtime. Not even close. I think we were in the middle of South Carolina. Actually maybe not even that far, because at 8 or 8:30 we stopped for the crew change/resupply.
To make a long story short(er) the rest of the trip was uneventful, but we rolled into Sanford at 5pm, so a solid 7-8 hours late, and for people who had followed a reasonable schedule, that meant from station to station they were probably on the journey for 27 hours.
Why? I have no idea. If that very first email had said “you know what, we’re not gonna make it on time, please show up at the station at 7pm and plan on arriving in Orlando late afternoon” it still would have been miserable but not AS miserable. I can’t come up with any excuse for the train turnaround to have taken so long - that feels like it could have been reduced to 3 hours with just a little bit of hustle.
Most people on the train lost an entire day of their itinerary at whichever end. The folks arriving in Lorton were hopping mad, the ones on my train seemed to be in slightly better spirits, but I imagine there were a LOT of unexpected hotel rooms booked etc etc.
To be clear - even if I had driven down to Lorton at 4 pm and AT THE GATE they told me the actual schedule of events that was going to unfold - I would have had time to go back to DC, see the monuments, buy a tee shirt, see a movie, and then drive back to Lorton to still catch my train on time.
The Amtrak folks were handing out customer service numbers for irate people to call, claiming they’d “take care of you.” I’m curious if anyone went down this route and what you’d get? I just don’t have it in me to call them today.
PS: Do folks on the train itself really have no idea what the status is? Even as the journey was wrapping up they were announcing things like “we’re passing Jacksonville, this IS A SIGN that we may have about 3 hours to go” - like there was no one in charge who had an actual ETA that could share it with the staff?