Travel plans

It looks like Yours-Truly will spend most of the next month bouncing between Michigan and Texas like some kind of demented ping-pong ball. I'm off to Texas for the happy occasion of The Wedding Of The Great Yam next week. Then I'm back in Michigan for the final week of the semester. Then back to Texas for the family Christmas festivities, which will probably include a highway trip up to Missouri and back to visit various elderly relatives (who after all, will want to meet the Bride of Yam). Then back to Michigan. With any luck, I may be able to meet up with Pablo and Carlos and other friends of yore sometime in this frenzy.

Since I'm interested in railroads, and since for the first time in two years I live within reasonable local driving distance of an Amtrak depot, I thought I'd try Amtrak for this year's Christmas travel. Sadly, it was not to be. When I told the ticket agent that I was interested in travelling from Michigan to Texas, his first suggestion was that I go by air instead. After being assured that, yes, I really was interested in finding out about train travel between those two points, he checked for availability of coach seats. The result: a fare price higher than an airline ticket, with the only available fare under $400 being on a train that arrives back at my departure point at 11:38 p.m. the evening before I have to be back at work.

Oh, by the way, he mentioned, we probably won't have any place for you to park a vehicle at the depot, thanks to an ongoing construction project. Apparently I would have to hail a taxi or have a friend come and pick me up at midnight, or whenever the train managed to arrive.

The schedule presented also depended on making a key connection at Chicago between the Texas Eagle and the Michigan train, with a three-hour layover. The Eagle, Amtrak train #21/22, has been reported to frequently run several hours late, thanks largely to hostile or indifferent treatment by Union Pacific dispatchers and crews:

"AMTRAK TRAIN DELAYS ON THE UNION PACIFIC RIGHT OF WAY - September 16, 2002. Friends of Amtrak has learned of some rather alarming statistics regarding delays of Amtrak trains on Union Pacific tracks.

In August 2002, UP-attributable delay to Trains 21 and 22 totalled 20,381 minutes, or an approximate average of 339.7 minutes per train; that's an astounding 5.5 hours of UP-attributable delay for each and every Train 21 and 22."

From Friends of Amtrak, Archived News 2002

I figured that my chances of making that connection at Chicago were about as good as my chances of getting a taxi or a ride from the depot to my apartment at midnight. It would still be fun to try Amtrak one of these days, but only when I can afford a more relaxed schedule. Or they adopt a less relaxed one, and find some way to make Union Pacific honor it.