Illinois schedule changes at end of daylight savings time?

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AudenHoggart

Service Attendant
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
218
I notice that Illinois trains between St. Louis and Chicago have been arriving consistently early lately. There has been previous reporting that schedules would be adjusted with shorter travel times because of the "high speed" rail work.

Does anyone know if there are likely to be changes like this when schedules are adjusted at the end of Daylight Savings Time?

Thanks!
 
Amtrak doesn't use Daylight Saving (not plural) Time as a guide for schedule changes anymore (except for the LD trains that travel through Arizona). Part of the reason they stopped printing the national timetable was because so many schedules change in between the print dates that the book was out of date almost as soon as it went to print.

If you check the current Amtrak timetable page, you'll see that very few timetables have an effective date coinciding with the start of DST in March (only the Sunset and Chief, which serve AZ, the Eagle, which has AZ times for its through cars, and the Heartland Flyer, which actually shares a timetable with the Eagle).

So, if the schedules get adjusted around the end of DST, it will be more a coincidence than anything. It's more a matter of when Amtrak, the state of IL, and Union Pacific can come to an agreement on what the new timetable should be.
 
The Saluki/Illini (CHI-CDL) trains have also had a schedule adjustment in the past couple of weeks, although it looks like the only train affected was 391. It was moved to about two hours earlier, departing CHI @ 6:15. It still runs an hour late into CDL per the new schedule, doubtless again due to CN's bottleneck at Champaign.

I didn't see any publicity at all about the change - normally the local news media are alerted about stuff like this. It must have been a couple of weeks ago - we've seen the train a couple of times around 11:00 or so in the past several days and were left wondering.

Conjecture about the "why" is given the later and later southbound arrival in CDL there was too little time to turn around the 391 train set to make 392's schedule.
 
If anybody cares... correlating the amtrak.com schedules to day of week, apparently the "change" on #391 is M-F only, and I am pretty sure it's for a track maintenance window. CN has been replacing ties. Haven't seen a bulletin on amtrak.com about the variable schedule, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

However, the schedule for 391 and 393 amount to "...whatEVER...", anyway. No track work going on, but 391 was three hours late today, on a five hour trip. With an on-time departure from CHI. Impressive.
 
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