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happy2meetu

Train Attendant
Joined
Apr 19, 2016
Messages
26
Location
Cincinnati, OH
My wife and I have tickets travelling from Washington DC to Toledo on Saturday November 5. The train arrives in Toledo at 5:08 AM Sunday.. Daylight saving time ends during the night meaning the clocks go back one hour. 5:08 AM is the normal arrival time for this train on a daily basis. Why is the schedule not adjusted? Do they use the extra hour to pad the schedule? The train leaves DC at the regularly scheduled time as well.
 
The train will sit at the first station it reaches at/after the time change till the scheduled departure time.
 
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There are a few reasons the train's schedule isn't adjusted to take advantage of the time change.

The first is that folks downstream from the point of the time change are still used to the train arriving and departing at their station at a certain time.

It's too much trouble to publish a one day schedule.

The trains are allocated track time in a window. In other words, most of the time the host railroad has scheduled their own (freight) trains to mesh with Amtrak's trains. All of a sudden the Amtrak train would be early, and therefore out of its "slot". Thereafter, it probably would be delayed due to conflicting movements anyway.

It's an extra chance to recover from prior delays.

jb
 
This came up on a popular travel blog a few years ago. It was clear that simply waiting in the next station for an hour seemed silly to many, at least at first glance. When the author was asked what he would change and why he had to think about it a bit. Eventually he came to a similar conclusion that the value/effort ratio of making special scheduling changes for trains that were suddenly early/late twice per year was questionable at best. Based on the growing anger and frustration many people seem to have over daylight savings time I would imagine that it will eventually become the new standard time year round. Time changes don't seem to bother me as much as most people I know, but I do wish auto-update was a feature more time keeping devices would support. For instance my current vehicle does just as bad a job of keeping accurate time as my very first car way back when. It can self-update many details from my extremely accurate phone, but not the current time for some reason. Seems like a pretty glaring oversight to me.
 
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If the train did not sit at the first station it comes to after 2 am, as said passengers at stations down the line may miss their train because it came and left "an hour early".

This could be very confusing if the station has an arrival time before 2 am (say 1:55 am) with a 10 minute stop and a departure time after 2 pm (say 2:05 am). So after 10 minutes, it leaves at 1:05 am. A passenger shows up at 1:30 am to board, only to find his train has already departed. I'm sure he will not be very happy!
 
Just one more item on the long of things not benefiting from the twice a year time change. Some states have tried to get out of the time change, but the law is written in such a way it is very difficult. I think Texas tried a couple years ago, but the voters were confused by the language of the proposed change, so it did not pass.
 
I used to work on communications systems that had date/time programmed in for many reasons. Some had settings to allow/disallow automatic switching, that was a problem when the gov't changed the dates for the switch and they would automatically switch on the wrong dates.Updating system software in some cases was a pricey option, if available. Some systems allowed you to set specific dates and times for the update, that was much better. Had a few large hotels that had systems that didn't switch automatically, because of the automatic wake up call feature we had to go in and reset them at the appropriate time. Cha-ching, a good OT job.
 
Taking the Southwest Chief on the Saturday night of time change would be quite interesting since CA will be on same time as AZ when the train starts, and while the train is in AZ, they are now in a different time zone, but wait, when they move to NM, it will have same time zone as AZ now although it did not have when the train departed LA and.... oh well, screw that. I am confused now.
 
I used to work in AZ and live in NV (just across the Colorado River). Since they were technically in different time zones, it was very interesting. For part of the year, AZ was 1 hour ahead, the rest of the year had both on the same time.
 
IIRC, the eastern half of Indiana also did not observe daylight time....Indianapolis was on eastern time in the winter, and central time in the summer, as a result.

What really was confusing, was when Amtrak made its some times semi-annual general schedule changes to coincide with the time change dates....

Even now...when a long distance train departs Chicago, and enroute the times are adjusted...does the train attempt to change to the new schedule if possible, or retain its old schedule until its completion of run?
 
I think Indiana was even more complicated than that. Northwest Indiana in the Chicago area was in Central Time and observed DST; Southeast Indiana in the Cincinnati area was in Eastern Time and observed DST; and the rest of the state was in Eastern Time and did not observe DST. Now the entire state observes DST, whether in Central Time (Chicago area and Evansville area) or in Eastern Time (rest of the state).
 
And Indiana counties still fighting over whether to be in those regional enclaves or not (depending on whether they want to be part of Metropolitan Chicago or Cincinnati).

There has been talk in Chicago about going 1/2 hour off but that's never been truly serious, but it sounds like there is some movement for actually doing that in the far northeast. Iirc Newfoundland is already 1/2 hour off the standard time zones.
 
The time change screws one important connection, the LA-Bakersfield one on the San Joaquins, during the spring. My friend once boarded the 1 AM bus and the train had already left, on time so they had to wait in Bakersfield another two hours for the next train. There were about 30 other people in the same predicament. I don't know if they still do that or not, or if buses in November wait an hour for no good reason because it functions as the overnight replacement for the Surfliner.
 
Was on an overnight European train many years ago on the night the clocks rolled back. Train stopped at a station around 2 am and waited one hour before continuing on.
 
This year I remembered a conversation that member acelafan and I had about Amtrak's time adjustments when Standard Time becomes Daylight Time, so I'm adjusting schedules accordingly.

This is not about the Arizona or Indiana time zones. It's about the missing hour. As you know, on Sunday, 3/12/2017, at 2.01 a.m., time instantaneously jumps ahead to 3.01 a.m. Consider train 48 which normally arrives at Toledo at 2.50 a.m. and departs at 3.20 a.m. Within ARROW, the heart of Amtrak's reservation system, time is, for the lack of a better word, "undefined" between 2.01 a.m. and 3.01 a.m. Therefore, ARROW does not allow any train to be scheduled to arrive or depart during that period. On the morning of the twelfth, that arrival time cannot exist within ARROW. So, what to do? Well, Amtrak rescheduled the train to arrive at Toledo at 3.50 a.m. and they left the departure time as 3.20 a.m. In other words, the train is scheduled to depart 30 minutes before it is scheduled to arrive.

This wreaks of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity thought experiments such as when trying to capture a car traveling at nearly the speed of light when it attempts to drive through a building with entrance and exit doors closing instantaneously and simultaneously as soon as the car enters the building. The car isn't captured - it's already gone.

There are other examples like train 48 this weekend. So if you call up Julie to find out where your train is, and time has changed for that train, you'd better be very careful, or else you'll miss it.

jb
 
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