The Worst Travel Experience of My Life

Over the weekend I took a small bit of a holiday, with my wife joining me on a trip up to DC. We’re close enough that we could have driven, but it’s just long enough that a train trip up felt like a nice little bit of self care. Instead of spending two-and-a-half hours in the car, battling other drivers, their stupidity, and traffic in general, we could hop on a train, spend four hours sitting back and not thinking, and we’d get there only a little later than we would have otherwise. That was the plan, anyway. Amtrak, it seemed, had other ideas in mind.

Well, okay, let’s be fair: it’s not that Amtrak was maliciously trying to make the experience bad for all involved, just that their incompetence meant that what should have been one problem that could have been fixed with some reasonable measures (such as have redundancies in place in case of train issues) instead became a cascading series of self-manufactured problems that left a train full of people stranded for several hours. It was just not smart at all.

To begin, my wife and I hopped on a train about twenty minutes from where we live (obviously not sharing the full details since I don’t feel like doxing myself). Everything seemed fine at the time with the train arriving more or less on time (and we give credit that a few minutes either way isn’t a big deal). Train pulls up, we get on, and we immediately encounter the first issue of what would become several, even though this first bit was pretty minor. We were sent to a coach car specifically for people who were traveling together, but the car didn’t have air conditioning. It was broken, just not working.

It was fine, no big deal. The day was nice, in the high 60s to low 70s, so while the car could be a little stuffy if we were stuck sitting around for any length of time (ominous foreshadowing included here) as long as the train was moving and air was flowing in, everything was fine. And it was, for the first forty minutes of our expected four hour journey. We’re traveling along, making a decent clip, and while there was one brief stop to let a freight train pass (because the section of railway we were traveling down only had one set of tracks for both the “up” and “down” lines and they had to share) that was an expected pause. No problem.

But then, five minutes later, the train slowed to a stop again. Soon after the power in our car went out and, as we soon learned, it had gone out in the rest of the train. But no one actually said anything to us about it for another twenty minutes, and even then we were told, “oh, it’s just a minor mechanical issue. We’ll get it fixed and get moving again.” Needless to say that minor mechanical issue was not so minor because, after a full hour from the time we stopped, the tech crew on the train (which I think was really just the one conductor we had) eventually threw up their hands and said, “nope, this can’t be fixed.”

So the next step they took was to get a new engine over to us that could tow us to the next stop (which, at that point, we were about fifteen minutes away from). That new engine had to come from one of the other stops, so we had to wait for that to happen, which took about an hour, and then some extra time for them to hook it up. And then they towed us backwards. Not towards the next stop, as they said they would, but back along the track and away from where we were going. Then they dropped us in a different spot and left us there for more time while they figured things out.

Keep in mind we’d died in the middle of a town, with a housing development off to one side, and then they towed us back to a different section of town. At this point we’ve been waiting two hours, and Amtrak has sent us a message saying, “we’re working on arranging buses to get you to your destinations.” Those buses, if they even had existed, could have come to pick us up from either place we were stopped. But they never arrived, and Amtrak eventually said, “oh yeah, we’re getting you a different engine, and that will tow you to your destination. Three hours have now gone past.

Eventually a new engine does come in, from a diesel train, and they pull it off and send it to us. But it’s still two more hours before they tell us we have the all clear to finally move. Five hours after the train stopped, and a two hours past when we were supposed to arrive at our destination, they were only then finally towing us in the right direction to get us just to the next stop. Not where we were supposed to go, just fifteen minutes further down the rails. We were told, “a train will be waiting for you there to pick you up and go.”

The train wasn’t there. It was further down the rail line, waiting. As it turned out, when this whole fiasco happened, Amtrak held the next train traveling down our line and made them wait. That train, which was already practically filled to capacity, was made to wait two hours for us, and their passengers were also grumpy. In all that time, could rides or other transport have shown up to get us to that next train earlier? Yes. Did Amtrak promise that would happen? Also yes. None of it did, and they managed to anger two whole trains of people by not managing any of their resources.

And bear in mind that because there were two trains of people packed onto one train now, it was standing room only for most of the people that had been waiting for, at this point, five hours for us to even get to the next stop. We were tired and angry, with Amtrak never giving us a straight answer about anything. Communication was sparse, and frequently contradictory. No word was made that day early on about how this was a major mistake and they were actively working to make sure we were efficiently moved to the next stop, the next train, the destinations we were getting to. Hell, one worker even said we’d likely have to wait overnight at the next place if the second train left without us.

Overnight. After getting only forty minutes into our train ride. Suffice it to say I called customer service around that point to try and make it clear just how displeased we were. And that led to me finding out that past 6:00 PM on a Friday night they don’t have anyone in to take care of customer problems. No supervisors that can get on the problems. No one in customer care to actually see what’s going on. We were told that we’d have to wait until Monday to file our issue, which feels pretty shitty when you’re standing in a middle of nowhere podunk town for five hours waiting to get anywhere.

Fact of the matter is that if Amtrak could have told us anything in a reasonable period of time, we were close enough to home that we could have arranged for someone to come pick us up and get us to our car so we could drive to DC. It would have sucked to lose some time, but it was still early enough we’d get in at a reasonable hour. Instead, because they slacked for so long in telling us what the final plan was, we ended up having to wait for the second train, which got us to our destination a full eight hours past our original arrival time.

All of this is to say that Amtrak, unsurprisingly, has lost a customer. During this whole ordeal I looked at my wife and stated, quite plainly, “never again.” There were plenty of places where Amtrak could have made it right, at the very least communicating what was going on and making sure people understood that it would be faster and better if they found alternate transport and escaped. “Yes, this is an issue that will, at a minimum, take four hours to solve.” That alone would have been enough for us to at least get moving and get out. Other people could have called for Ubers and gotten to rental car places. Things were still open early enough that people could have found a way to get at least to the next stop and board the next train at a reasonable time. Amtrak dicked around and dragged it all out, in the process pissing off two sets of trains for absolutely no reason.

Needless to say, if you have an option to travel via any means other than Amtrak, take it. When the train system works it’s smooth enough (although even our return trip, which we took because it was paid for, came in twenty-five minutes late), but if there’s a problem Amtrak makes it worse and worse and worse until you never want to ride them again. Save yourself the trouble and just don’t.