My son uses Amtrak to commute back and forth from college and home on the weekends often. He returned back to school last night and ran into problems one after another with the connecting bus and train and ended up at school 8 hours later for a scheduled 2 hours ride. He arrived so late (11:00PM), there is no more school shuttle bus to take him back from the train station to the dormitory. Luckily he found a classmate to get him. There is definitely a safety issue if he was to be left alone in the down town station late at night.

This is not the first time. It beats the last record of 5 hours journey. One to two hours delay consider is "normal", which is still a big delay for a two-hour journey. There is even one time the connecting bus never showed up and we ended up drove him back to school. Customer services are definitely no help as they can't even track where their buses are.

We don't have any experience with Amtrak prior until last September when my son started to go to college and uses the train/bus regularly. Do we have extremely bad luck or this sounds familiar?