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?

It seems to depend a bit on the routes--could you post which route your son is traveling?

For example, since last summer, the Coast Starlight route up and down the West Coast has been delayed up to 12 hours (!) due at least partly to freight congestion. I understand that the California Zephyr (Chicago - Oakland through Denver) has been experiencing delays for the same reason, and of course there were some service interruptions due to Hurricane Katrina. It seems that the Coast Starlight and California Zephyr delays are likely to continue indefinitely, as there is an advisory about delays on Amtrak's web site.

Today, there were brief afternoon delays (~20 min) for Capitol Corridor (Sacramento - Oakland) trains due to Union Pacific's track work on the viaduct at the (flooded) Yolo Bypass outside Sacramento.

You can check train status on the Amtrak web site. I've found it to be fairly up-to-date. Just enter the train's information under "train status" at the bottom of their home page.

Overall, I've found the shorter routes to be pretty reliable--the ones I have experience with are the intra-California trains, the Hiawatha service (Chicago - Milwaukee), and some of the intra-Illinois service. Re: connecting buses, I haven't missed a connection in Bakersfield or Emeryville/Oakland--usually the buses have been coordinated even for late trains. As the routes get longer (e.g., up to several days for the trans-con routes), delays of up to several hours don't seem unusual at all.

-Hayden

My son travels between Fremont and Merced via Stockton. It is bus service between Fremont and Stockton, train service between Stockton and Merced.

Got more detail of the delay for his trip on April 2. He got on the bus at Fremont on time around 3:00PM. Shortly after he left, I got a call from him about bus broke down. They waited at Livermoor for a replacement bus. When they reached Stockton with the replacement bus, the scheduled train just left so he has to wait for the next train. The next train was late for an hour+ when he got on. The story continues that the train had to stop twice on its way due to (1) there was a car stuck on the train track so they needs to wait for the car to be removed (2) the gate at cross road some where does not come down (mechanical problem?) so the train has to stop before the cross road to bring down the gate manually and bring up the gate after passing. When he arrived, it was 11:00PM;-(

It is unfortunate there is one thing after another to cause this major delay but seems these problems are not totally unavoidable. For example, the mechanical problems for bus and signal/gate seems maintenance issue that can be prevented. Beside this major delay, his freqent trips mostly ended up with delay, some up to 3 hours. It is significant delay for a short journey as such.

We also learned (the hard way) that the bus/train is not so reliable so my son never take the last schedule service to prevent from stuck in the train/bus station without connection service. In this case, he missed the schedule train but at least he has the next train to catch. If not, he will be stucked in the train station for over night or call us to drive him back to school.

Thanks for the pointer for train status information lookup. I'll check it out.

I took Amtrak from Milwaukee to St. Paul a couple of months ago (I couldn't get to the Columbus stop-nearest Madison. My folks were looking forward to having a late dinner with me. While in Chicago, there was some problem with the brakes and long story short, the train ended up being 4.5 hours late. Never took Amtrak again.

Wendy,

While unfortunate that your son was so delayed, here's a few other things to keep in mind.

First, Amtrak does not actually run the buses that connect to the train. They contract that out to a local bus company. Hence the reason that none of the Amtrak customer service reps could tell you what was going on.

Second, Amtrak does not own the tracks that their train runs on. Those tracks are owned by BNSF freight RailRoad. That means that BNSF is responsible for the broken gates and it means that Amtrak doesn't always get priority. There are times that Amtrak gets stuck behind a slow moving freight train.

As a former Amtrak rider during my college years in the 80's in the Northeast Corridor (BOS/PVD-Stamford, CT), I see that NOTHING has changed! If I just had a one hour delay, I considered myself lucky.

As a previous poster mentioned, AMTRAK does not own the tracks. AMTRAK trains have the lowest priority. The track owners let their own freight and commuter trains go by and shuffle AMTRAK off on a side track for 30 minutes. I had it happen a number of times in the NE (the "best" part of the country for riding trains).

One time a commuter train caught on fire in the Stamford station and the stupid Conrail people wouldn't tell the AMTRAK people what was going on. I actually overheard the conversations and, trust me, it wasn't pretty. Meanwhile, we sat just outside the station for 90 minutes. In retrospect, I'm lucky my relatives just didn't give up and go home!

One option on the Fremont-to-Merced route that avoids the bus would be to take BART from Fremont - Richmond (~1 hour), and make the quick transfer to the Richmond Amtrak station. This adds an extra 20-30 minutes to the trip, but you're getting the San Joaquin train earlier in the route, so the chances for it to be delayed are less. Plus, then you can avoid the congested 580 traffic and spend more time on the train & less on the bus, always a plus.

An alternative would have been for UC to put the campus somewhere easier to get to, but that subject was talked to death after Merced was announced.

-Hayden

Thanks to you all for sharing your experience and knowledge.

Understand better the operational difficulties of Amtrak, but still hold them responsible for the delays. Looks like the problem has been there for a while and it is not unique to the route we use. Seems it is not realistic to hope the problem to be improved soon.

Look into other alternatives and see greyhund bus could be another choice. Thanks Hayden's suggestion to use Bart and transfer at Richmond. We'll check it out.

Agreed. Plus there was a lot of behind the scene politics going on with that decision before it was made. I know people in both the Fresno and Visalia areas who felt the deck leaned toward Merced early in the selection process and left them out of consideration.