I decided to try out the US railways system today. There are two trains a day from Austin: one to Chicago at 9am and one to Los Angeles at 6.30pm. You can’t really do a day trip by train from Austin and many of the stations are quite remote - away from car hire, airports, etc. The most practical option for getting some overnight US train experience was to book a ticket from Austin to El Paso. This is an 18 hr journey but it does end in a reasonably large city with rental cars, an airport, etc. and looks like it goes through some nice scenery.

I booked my one way train ticket along with a sleeper car reservation. They have couchettes or bedrooms. The bedrooms seem to be couchettes with a bit more space, and extra chair and a shower. I decided to go with a bedroom, then booked and printed the ticket. I loaded my laptop with some TV, a film (back to the future) and the complimentary podcasts describing the views from the windows. The cost was $580 for the train ticket (with sleeper) and $315 on southwest to get back to Austin about 8 hrs after arrival in El Paso. I was excited.

Before heading to the station I looked online to see how the train was doing. It was a couple of hours late, so I waited until it was about an hour away from Austin and was approaching Taylor station. I got a cab to the Austin Amtrak station. There were quite a few people at the station (at least 10-15) along with the lady running the station and the engineer (driver) waiting for the train. At Austin you can “check” luggage in - just like an airline. But I only had an overnight bag so I didn’t bother.

Then the fun started. The train had left Tyler and was about 45 minutes from arriving in Austin. It had to stop and wait for a goods train which was going in the opposite direction (we saw that train go through the station in Austin - the line is single track around here). Some while later our train started to move towards us and got to the dizzying speed of 35 mph (according to the web). 10 minutes before the predicted arrival time: some people heard a train and went outside. Unfortunately it was another freight train, fortunately it was going in the right direction and we thought our train would be right behind it. Our train was "5 minutes" away for about 30 minutes… The lady in the office was on the radio to “control” and found out that there was at least one more freight train waiting to go in the wrong direction and that they were going to send that before letting our train through. She predicted at least another 1hr wait although she mentioned the train had been over 6 hours late a few times that week.

By this point I had gotten a bit bored of waiting. It looked like I would still be on time getting to El Paso as there is a 4hr break where the train just sits around at San Antonio so it could catch up some time there. But I decided to abandon the trip. I called Amtrak and they immediately cancelled my ticket and put the refund back on my credit card - quite efficient, really.

After getting the refund sorted I walked home. I looked online an hour or two later and saw that the train was still 1 minute away from Austin. It finally arrived at Austin about 5 and a half hours late. So it took nearly three hours to go about 15 miles.

I felt sorry for the family from San Antonio who had been to Austin on a day trip and went by train because their son was keen on getting the experience. Over 5 hrs delay on a journey which would have been 90mins by car.

So, my first experience of Amtrak has shown a lot of promise. Shown helpful friendly staff. Shown a website with some useful info, just a bad guess at the arrival time. But, above all, it has shown how bad the railway system can be if it is full of low speed, high priority freight largely on a single track.

Next time I might actually make it onto a train.