The Columnist Manifesto

Is Amtrak Ruining Train Travel? For me, yes.

Until this weekend, I’ve always loved train travel. For years, I’ve nearly always taken trains when traveling anywhere not by car between Washington, DC and Boston. I’ve taken sleeper cars three times, including the 19-hour Chicago to New Orleans journey on the historic "City of New Orleans."

I'm the kind of person who likes the journey almost as much as the destination. I find transportation a fascinating process in itself, and I like it for the way it can build delicious anticipation of getting there. I love thumbing my nose at air travel, with its constant lining up and its surly or facetious TSA workers ordering you to take your shoes off. I love the rocking motion of trains. It relaxes me, helps put me to sleep, and ... well, let’s just say it adds to the romance of holing up in a small compartment with your sweetie.

So B and I were excited about booking a round trip sleeper on the Lakeshore Limited, from Chicago to Albany, New York. From there, we would be driving to Saratoga Springs, where I’m attending a conference. Sure, there would be a price compared to flying – 15 hours instead of 5 hours travel time and about 30% more in price. And since no car rental agency operates near a train station on weekends, we’d have to take a $30 cab ride to the Albany airport to pick up our rental car. But we thought the fun of train travel would be worth it.

It almost was. I could have lived with the two hour departure delay, and the additional two hour loss of time en route. Four hour delays aren't that uncommon in air travel. Nor was I particularly bothered by the fact that the promised free Wi-Fi in the First Class departure lounge simply did not work.

I was understanding about the slight seediness of the interiors of the train cars: It’s overly challenging for Amtrak, which doesn’t get nearly the levels of subsidy poured into air transportation, to keep its equipment sparkling and new.

I was more than willing to overlook the down side of the dining car experience – the food which tasted like reheated fare from yesterday at Denny’s and took unreasonably long to serve – since we had interesting conversations with the people we met at meals. (They seat you with strangers to fill up the 4-person booths).

I was not even particularly put out by the hassle of chasing down our sleeping car attendant to make up our beds so that we could lie down after we returned from two hours in the dining car at midnight, or chasing her down again next morning at 9:30 to convert the beds back to seats so we could sit up after returning from 90 minutes in the dining car at breakfast.

I’m not generally a whiner or the kind of person who demands being treated like an aristocrat. But I have to say, I was put out by what happened at the end of the trip.

We were on target to be well over four hours late into Albany – basically, killing half a day of touring around Saratoga Springs – and realized that we would save an hour if we were to get off the train one stop before Albany, in Schenectady. We could make our way to the Albany airport (for the car rental) from there. However, since we had luggage checked through to Albany, we asked our trusty sleeping car attendant if there was a way we could get our bags unloaded in Schenectady. She said she would check with the conductor, and returned shortly, saying this would be “no problem” – once the train stopped in Schenectady, we would just have to go down the platform to the baggage car to make sure the baggage attendant took off our luggage during the very brief stop there.

At the Schenectady station, the sleeping car attendant changed her mind about directions, pointed us up the platform to the front of the train, and changed her mind again, redirecting us to the back. B and I went off in two different directions. I went to the back of the train, where the conductor was closing the door about to signal the departure. I tried to explain about our luggage, but he kept cutting me off, insisting that I should pick up my bags inside the train station. But I could tell he thought I was scheduled to de-train in Schenectady and that he was unaware that my luggage was checked through to Albany. I kept saying, "no let me explain," in a rising tone of voice. By the time B joined me – upset at having been told by a conductor at the front of the train that “you’ll just have to pick up your bags in the Albany train station” – my conductor was screaming at me that the train was four hours late and he was “tired of taking shit from people.” He finally demanded my tickets, looked at them, got the point, and radioed our baggage claim numbers to the baggage car, telling us to go up front. When B asked if he would promise not to let the train leave until we got our bags – the train was very long and the slightly curved track made it impossible to see one end of the train from the other – he cursed at us and slammed the door.

We did finally get our luggage – though not before the baggage compartment guy berated us for not giving him advance notice that we needed off at Schenectady.

How bad was this, really? Bad food, rudeness, a four hour delay – this is nothing you can’t get over in an hour or two, after a good meal or a nice, stiff drink.

And yet, reflecting back on the whole trip, I realized that pretty much the entire crew of Amtrak passenger-service employees associated with this particular train had had a collective melt-down. If the train had derailed in some unpopulated area, with passengers seriously injured and the food supply running low while everyone awaited rescue, it would certainly be reasonable for the Amtrak personnel to get snappish with passengers whining about food service or luggage. But this was just a garden variety delay. And from the beginning, the Amtrak workers were treating us like we were the haughty aristocratic patron in the disaster movie who demands gold-plated service even while the Titanic is sinking.

This attitude -- which is, at bottom, a form of contempt -- started, subtly, during the two-hour delay in the departure lounge back in Chicago. It’s understandable that the Amtrak staff couldn’t tell us when the train would leave – it was one of those “please stand by” delays that drags on indefinitely – but they were unable or unwilling to tell us whether there would be food service on the train, as we had been counting on, or whether we’d have time to go forage for food in the train station without missing the train’s departure. And they seemed annoyed we even bothered them by asking.

Once the train was in motion, the personnel exuded a pervasive irritability – as though we passengers had dropped in like a bevy of unwanted guests. When we asked our sleeping car attendant to fold our beds down at midnight, she said, “Everyone wants everything at once!”

But all that was nothing to the feeling of having to plead for our luggage.

Last Thursday, I was a confirmed train lover, with future ideas about booking cross-country sleepers. Today, B and I are looking for a refund of our return train trip, and a one-way airfare. If this is in any way typical of Amtrak’s performance, they have a major employee morale problem that is also a major customer service problem. More expensive and slower than air travel may be a built-in feature of trains ... but more degrading than air travel?

I realize that all of this pales in comparison to the experience of being a refugee. Hey, maybe that should be Amtrak’s new advertizing slogan!