Amtrak fares to Wash DC
I am thrilled to find this site and am hoping to learn from all your train travel experience. My travel experience has been mostly via flying so I am quite ignorant about train travel.
1) Is the Amtrak schedule pretty reliable for travelling from Connecticut to Washington route on a Friday evening & Sunday morning ? (I read the posting on this forum about punctuality of Amtrak -- though I realize that was in discussion regarding a much longer distance cross country travel.)
2) Is it pretty safe for an 18yr old girl to travel alone from 5-10pm on that route ? The alternative would be to fly. I am more familiar with air travel and surprisingly the price is comparable for the times I'm interested in. It's much cheaper if compared to the express trains. However, the train travel time is probably more productive than the air travel. But maybe the work space is less ??? I don't even know what the seats are like on Amtrak !
3) How do the fares work on Amtrak (like airlines) ? I ask because when I first looked at fares over the weekend - I saw prices of $94 & $111 for the 2 travel legs. Then very late Sunday night, the $111 fare dropped to $71 and stayed there till Monday morning. I decided to book the trip ~3pm but when I tried, it disappeared...... What I expected was that from the $71 price, it would have gone to $94 before $111 in an instant. Needless to say, I was very disappointed that I didn't get the $71 fare.
4) If one books train tickets and then a discount code comes along - can that be applied to the existing reservation ? Or does it take cancelling the original reservation and rebooking ? I ask because the fares / ticket class availability could have changed in the mean time - correct ? I also ask because if one is applying for an ISIC card, it takes alittle while but I do want to risk not getting a seat by waiting.
Any insight you all could offer me would be greatly appreciated !