Originally Posted by
soitgoes
Originally Posted by
diesteldorf
If you don't mind sharing, I'm just curious. What types of trips did you take to get 5000 Rail Points so soon?
If I had to guess, I would say the Acela Express between Select City Pairs.
In First class, 5000 points can be reached after 3.33 round-trips.
In Business class, you still only need 5 RTs.
Not quite (and I don't mind sharing at all!). I live and work in Glendale, CA, about a mile from GDL. So I carefully crafted the Amtrak equivalent of a 'mileage run':
On weekdays, before and after work, and during lunch, I do as many of the following as my schedule allows (A=Amtrak, M=Metrolink; 'in'=GDL>LAX, 'out'=LAX>GDL):
- M208 in/A763 out
- A774 in/A769 out
- A784 in/M115 out
- M118 in/A785 out
In addition, the past two Saturdays, I went from GDL to SNA, then spent the day shuttling back and forth between SNA and ANA, then back to GDL (including one segment on Metrolink). 7 distinct train numbers on 1/5, 10 on 1/12 (the 10th of which was the 50th this year
).
GDL<>LAX and SNA<>ANA are both $3, before the AAA discount of which I was able to take advantage for some 50% of the tickets involved.
Note that it's not all about segment running; I do actually enjoy trains, and the 1st, 2nd, and 4th weekday turns above give me enough time in Union Station to have a light breakfast, lunch, or dinner, respectively. I also have done a number of longer trips where the destination, rather than the journey, was the point: Oceanside (my first ever Amtrak trip, this past mid-December), Santa Barbara, Oxnard, and several trips to Fullerton to trainwatch.
I also have the following 'real' trips planned, some tentative, some more or less set:
- Simi Valley to the Reagan Library
- AmBus+San Joaquin to Oakland and Coast Starlight back in early February, a long weekend during which I hope to ride as many of Capitols, ACE, CalTrain, BART, etc. as I can manage;
- The Pullman Adventures San Diego trip in March;
- Oceanside again, this time to try the NCTD Sprinter if/when it opens;
- And indeed, eventually, having visited neither Boston nor New York in my life, fly to the former and back from the latter, riding Acela between.
So there it is, in a nutshell (or nutcase, as some of my friends and coworkers think
)
Chris