joelkfla
Engineer
Works for me, but only shows fare on direct trains, not connections. Did you use the exact wording shown?
Amtrak Price Tracking Tool
- Thread starter PluckyMongoose
- Start date
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trimetbusfan
OBS Chief
Its also a beta feature, might not be available in all markets.
Scroll down the results Google gives you and you should see it. It’s not a website, but Google results.
If you use his search (with the quotes) it should show up and then you can change the start and end stations and date.
I just did that and changed his search to Washington USA (DC) for the start station and left King Street alone and changed the date to a random one. I got 29 to 7 with times, but no fares.
Check back on March 1st for the official launch of the new version of Railforless!
Over the past 6 months, we have spent countless hours redesigning RailForLess from the ground up. RailForLess is the spiritual successor to Amsnag, a service which makes planning Amtrak trips much more convenient with flexible scheduling and interactive visualizations. Since last fall, the site has been plagued with CAPTCHA issues which severely limited the capabilities of the service. These issues have been mitigated through a fundamentally new approach to the scraping process since Riley joined the project in October. This new powerful backend has expanded the capabilities of the site far beyond the functionality provided by amtrak.com. Some of the most exciting improvements include:
We hope you have as much fun using the site as we have had creating it. We’re always open to developing new features—feel free to reach out here or at [email protected] or on our subreddit with any suggestions.
Sean & Riley from RailForLess
- Larger search date range (90-day one-way, 45-day roundtrip)
- Faster search times (30-60 seconds on average)
- No concurrency restrictions (many users can use the site at once)
- Interactive map with station/route selection
- Flexible date selections (date range, month, weekends, etc.)
- Price chart (more charts to come in the future)
- Average departure/arrival times courtesy of ASMAD
- Direct integration with Amtrak for booking and station/route information
- New modern UI with custom vector art and MUI styling
We hope you have as much fun using the site as we have had creating it. We’re always open to developing new features—feel free to reach out here or at [email protected] or on our subreddit with any suggestions.
Sean & Riley from RailForLess
trimetbusfan
OBS Chief
Wow, I'm blown away, this is amazing! It tells you exactly how many spaces are available at the current bucket!! And it's so fast!
Looks like there are some bugs to work out (had trouble using this on my phone, and specific searches would always fail). Regardless, great work done so far, this is amazing to see!!
@trimetbusfan I've had similar issues on mobile - the UI is @tikkisean's department so I will leave that to him to work out.
As for specific searches that failed, do you mean that they failed after multiple retries or did they fail after a single attempt? The former would suggest an edge case that I need to handle, and the latter suggests an error on Amtrak's side that I can't avoid.
As for specific searches that failed, do you mean that they failed after multiple retries or did they fail after a single attempt? The former would suggest an edge case that I need to handle, and the latter suggests an error on Amtrak's side that I can't avoid.
Thank you so very much for this valuable tool
sporksradiant
Train Attendant
Love the new site. A few issues though -
1. When I'm trying to view different sleeper options beyond the lowest, it displays a white screen that requires a refresh to go away. Never was able to compare roomette to bedroom or family bedroom because of that. Could we get a options breakdown for sleepers with the price chart?
2. If doing a multi-train trip, you have to select the second train as well which wasn't made clear as it gives results regardless. Maybe asking a desired route question would help?
1. When I'm trying to view different sleeper options beyond the lowest, it displays a white screen that requires a refresh to go away. Never was able to compare roomette to bedroom or family bedroom because of that. Could we get a options breakdown for sleepers with the price chart?
2. If doing a multi-train trip, you have to select the second train as well which wasn't made clear as it gives results regardless. Maybe asking a desired route question would help?
Trimetbusfan. You are an absolute star. From the hard work that you've put in, you've saved me MANY hours on the Amtrak website trying to find the information that I'm looking for, PLUS, you identified the days where Family bedrooms were heavily discounted
trimetbusfan
OBS Chief
Not able to search up fares for the City of New Orleans route. I've tried numerous date ranges, none of them work. It searches as normal but after searching for all the accomidations it gives an error message (most of the time, when I get an error, it's early on in the process).
However, the City of New Orleans WILL Show up when doing searches involving a connection to/from it, i.e. searching from New Orleans to Milwaukee. Just CHI to NOL (and reverse) city pairs do not work.
I used Rail for Less last year to pick the least expensive travel dates for our trip to Kansas City on the Lincoln Service/Missouri River Runner. The hubby would like to try the Texas Eagle at about the same time this year, so I tried a search for Pontiac, IL - San Antonio, TX roundtrip for 2 seniors in a roomette in October. After I figured out how to have the Amtrak site show the AGR points cost for the proposed trip, I quickly saw that we don't have enough points for the trip (and aren't likely to have enough AGR points by October for anything but coach, which we wouldn't want to deal with for an overnight trip). We should have the spare funds to pay for the trip within the next month or two, though.
EchoSierra
Train Attendant
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2017
- Messages
- 73
Outside of an API or web scrape, another approach that I would suggest (if current options fail) is to see if you can find an old school travel agent with access to the airline Global Distribution System Sabre and potentially hook into that. Sabre has a native interface with Amtrak's ARROW. The Sabre command to connect with ARROW is [[AMK
Just got word from Sean that he and Riley have redesigned railforless.us and it is now up an running. This is a tool for checking and comparing fares over a few weeks . https://railforless.us
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Devil's Advocate
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The front end looks nice and speed was surprisingly fast. My first few searches showed all dates at the same price but I'm pretty sure that's accurate since Gardner-era LD trains are the shortest I've seen and they rarely discount unsold sleepers outside of gambling with the clumsy bidding process. I did notice some city pairs claimed no service despite Amtrak.com offering tickets (SAS-LMY). Firefox is my browser of choice so I hope the warning refers to a minor issue or one that is resolved soon.
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