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A Delayed Amtrak Journey in July
The older my vehicle gets, the less I trust it to survive road trips. Luckily, the Amtrak train routes are convenient for most major cities that I care to visit.
The train is convenient if you’re not in a rush. My train was supposed to arrive at my station at 12:30 PM, but shortly after sunrise, I received a message that there was a delay. If you’ve ridden on an Amtrak train more than a handful of times, you know that delays are par for the course. You can gauge how bad the delay will be by how early they tell you about it. A delay an hour before the train might not be so bad, but a warning several hours before the train arrives… we might see trouble there. When I checked in on the train, it was in Georgia, and had arrived at that stop three hours late. In the morning, it was still projected to arrive at my station only an hour late, under the presumption that they would be able to gain speed between stations and make up some of the time. And sure, it can speed up, but the projected time did not account for anything else that can go wrong: debris on the tracks, mechanical malfunction, or an issue with a passenger.
I checked a couple of hours later, and the 1-hour delay had changed to 2-hour. As expected. Thankfully, I was checking from the air-conditioned comfort of my living room. It would’ve been something different if I had found out about the delay while at…
