I recently took the Coast Starlight between LA and San Jose and had a great trip. The weather was crystal clear, and the crew was great. Better still, we encountered no delays of any consequence during the course of our trip.
I thought it might have been a fluke, so I've been checking Amtrak's website a bit lately. Amazingly enough, both northbound and southbound trains have been fairly punctual lately. For the past six days, all northbound and southbound trains have arrived at their final destinations on-time (within 30 minutes), several arriving early, and most have stayed within an hour of schedule throughout the course of the journey. In fact, I think there have only been a couple of late trains in each direction since the start of the new year.
At any rate, I recall that winter on-time performance on the CS is often 40% or worse, but who knows, maybe this will keep up for a while.
[This message has been edited by Charles802 (edited 01-12-2003).]
Posted by Mr. Toy (Member # 311) on :
Yea, the Starlight hit a low in on time performance about a year and a half ago, but the last 6-8 months has been reasonably good. Last June I actually arrived on #11 in Salinas six minutes early! Still it is not as consistent as it should be. I heard #11 on the scanner a couple weeks ago almost 6 hours late.
------------------ Trust God, love your neighbor, and never mistake opinion for truth. -Mr. Toy
I have been checking train status' with #5 and 6 train(CZ) and I have noticed it was alwys about an hour to an hour and half late into EMY but about always 15-30 minutes early into CHI. But when I looked at the schedule the eastbound CZ takes about 3 and a half hours more than the Westbound to get to CHI.
Posted by coach34135 (Member # 1979) on :
If you want to faint, a wekk or so ago I was tooling on the Amtrak site and found the LAX inbound Southwest Chief was 53 min EARLY!!!
Posted by Fumes5 (Member # 1437) on :
I was on the Sunset Limited on Sat/Sun last week (1/4-5/03) and In tucson we had the CPU in the lead die and it took them tree hours to try to fix it when I met afellow from UP who said that they needed to reverse the order of the units, which took an hour and 15 mins. and we were roughly 3 1/2 hours late into LAUPT, what a shocker. However, the service was GREAT.
-Fume5
Posted by The Chief (Member # 2172) on :
In mid-December 2002, I rode WB Calif Zephyr. It was on time Chicago through Salt Lake City. We arrived SLC 12 minutes early, (around midnight Day 2). We lost 40 minutes by Winnemucca, NV (07:41 Day 3), then running later (1 hour 11 min late Reno). Finally we were only 1 hour 20 min late arriving Sacramento, my terminus. A great trip with fantastic scenery - snow in the Rockies and heavy snow in the Sierras! The Chief Posted by RRRICH (Member # 1418) on :
Happy to see the western trains are doing so much better timewise. I was skiing at Winter Park, CO last week, and saw the W-bound Cal. Zephyr come out of Moffatt Tunnel and pass the resort about 10:35 AM -- due in Fraser at 11:11 -- looks like it was pretty close to schedule, even after a snowstorm the day before....
Posted by Kairho (Member # 1567) on :
Yesterday my return trip on the Palmetto from Deerfield Beach to Ocala was 2 minutes early! Makes up for having been 2h 45m late southbound the day before!