We are considering booking a bedroom on the City of New Orleans from Chicago for Mardi Gras next month. This would be our first Amtrak trip. An innkeeper in NOLA advised against this, saying that the train is always at least 30 minutes late and sometimes 6-10 hours late due to being second priority to freight trains. The train is supposed to arrive in NOLA at 3:30 pm, but the innkeeper seemed quite certain that it would be late and therefore we would miss the Muses parade (perish the thought!) which begins a few hours later.
Any opinions or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.
Common perception is that Amtrak is "always" late, but that is hardly so, and has improved significantly in the last few years. My one trip on the City of New Orleans (CONO) arrived early into NOLA, and I arrived early several times when taking the Capitol Limited between Chicago and Washington. That said, long distance trains such as CONO
do run mostly on the tracks of the freight railroads, some of which are more accomodating of Amtrak in their dispatching than others.
However, rather than limiting ourselves to generalities, there are two resources for checking how late the CONO, or other Amtrak trains, have been running.
One is from Amtrak itself, where you can check on a
particular train's status on either the website or "Julie," the robot operator on the 800 number (1-800-872-7245, which is "800-USA-RAIL").
The other is amtrakdelays.com, where the status of various trains over a period of time (up to four weeks) can be checked at one time.
Checking the CONO at NOLA (the Amtrak code for NOLA is, not surprisingly, NOL) for the past four weeks on amtrakdelays.com, we see an average delay of 6 minutes. However, this average results from several days where it was
early as 45 minutes -- early days seem to dominate -- a few days where it was late by an hour or less, and three days where it was several hours late. Please note, however, that the days with multi-hour delays were ones in which the Midwest, and Chicago in particular, were socked in with storms and below-zero temperatures. In short, while the innkeeper was
dead wrong that the CONO is always late, he was correct that it
can be subject to long delays.
If you look at the amtrakdelays.com results for the CONO and don't feel comfortable, consider waiting a week or two and rechecking for another four-week span. However, don't delay making your decision
too long because, like the airlines, most Amtrak fares go up as you get closer to travel time. Not to mention the prospect, for something as popular as Mardi Gras, of an outright sell-out.
Hope this helps.
