I do realise it was a complex operation to organise but something I would expect Amtrak to have contingency plans in place for when such situations arise - indeed, they'd dealt with a similar situation within the last couple of days.
It's virtually impossible in the transportation industry to have contingency plans for every conceivable service disruption. The best you can do is to draw broad contingencies and adapt as required by the scenario. In this case, Amtrak has relationships (sometimes contractual, sometimes not) with various bus and taxi companies across the US (some are part of the thruway operations, others are there only as backups in the case of service disruptions). In this case, the Denver company was contracted to take care of your train, but there is no way to have the company "on-call" 24/7 365 days a year with contingency plans for what to do when a train is stopped at Winter Park, CO, with any given number of passengers, given any time of the day, obviously. These things have to be worked out on the fly.
Amtrak staff may well have been working feverishly elsewhere but on site at Winter Park the staff seemed less than interested in the welfare of their passengers.
That's something that would be worthwhile to bring up with Customer Relations at 800-USA-RAIL. They actually do pay attention to feedback like this and it would be worthwhile for them to hear from someone that can speak first-hand about staff problems that day.
I don't understand your reference to "both trains" - on Monday afternoon there was just the one train, at Winter Park. The westbound wasn't due in to Denver until Tuesday morning. Also don't understand your reference to express or intermediate stops - there were no scheduled stops between Winter Park and Denver. On Monday they just needed to get everyone from Winter Park to Denver.
I should have given some more context. Arranging the busses from Winter Park to Denver was a small part of a more complex issue in planning for the days ahead. The operator Amtrak chose to handle the bussing from WIP-DEN would also be responsible for the next day's bussing of the westbound train's passengers from DEN-GSC, and ultimately part of bussing passengers DEN-PRO and points inbetween. All of that had to be worked out before an agreement could be reached on how many busses would be provided, where they would go, etc etc, and that had to happen before the first bus could be dispatched to WIP.
The conductor could easily have found out where the bus was going, as some of his passengers did, by walking across the road and asking the driver. I was not suggesting he co-ordinated with Greyhound, simply that he could have informed his passengers that there was an option for getting to Denver earlier, if they wanted to pay for it.
True. Again, something to tell Amtrak Customer Relations. Although, again, from Amtrak's perspective, that technically wasn't his duty. That crew's duty was to make sure the passengers got safely off of the train and onto the chartered bus. If he had gone the extra step to find out where the Greyhound bus was going, that would have been great. It's the way employees should be thinking. But again, that wasn't required of him, so it's hard to necessarily fault him.
Rafi
