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Coast Starlight isn’t only Amtrak train with on-time problems
Not yet a new heyday for rail
Column by Steve Ford
Raleigh News & Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. – Perhaps the notion of arriving at the airport hours ahead of departure and then hurtling through the sky among the company of who knows whom has for some reason lost its appeal. Aha – we’ll take the train!
Now, when do we leave and when do we get there ... you mean you can’t really tell? So just what kind of railroad are we running here?
That’s a question doubtless being asked more often these days by exasperated riders on the Amtrak trains servicing the Tar Heel State. Ridership has been building steadily, while on-time performance, at least on one route, has been deteriorating toward levels suggesting that the schedule just can’t be taken seriously.
That train is the Carolinian, which runs between Charlotte and New York by way of Raleigh and Washington. The N&O’s transportation writer, Bruce Siceloff, reported the other day that the Carolinian this summer has managed to arrive as scheduled only 13 percent of the time.
A northbound traveler whom my wife and I put on the train in Cary a couple of months ago, departing close to the scheduled 10:43 a.m., was a couple of hours past the advertised time of 5:08 p.m. getting into D.C. And the edition of the Carolinian heading back here each day from the Northeast – it’s due in Raleigh at 4:42 p.m. – isn’t one to set your watch by.
Experience also points up problems with the other long-distance train through Raleigh and Cary, the New York-to-Florida Silver Star. We recently spent a peaceful extra couple of hours waiting for the Silver Star to pull up by the new platform on the south side of Cary’s downtown depot. Another person there, needing to make it to Camden, S.C., that evening, out of desperation called a cab. (He finally decided to wait for the train after all, and his patience was rewarded.)
The finger of blame for these frustrating delays tends to point not at Amtrak but at the freight companies whose rails Amtrak uses.
Coast Starlight isn’t only Amtrak train with on-time problems
Not yet a new heyday for rail
Column by Steve Ford
Raleigh News & Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. – Perhaps the notion of arriving at the airport hours ahead of departure and then hurtling through the sky among the company of who knows whom has for some reason lost its appeal. Aha – we’ll take the train!
Now, when do we leave and when do we get there ... you mean you can’t really tell? So just what kind of railroad are we running here?
That’s a question doubtless being asked more often these days by exasperated riders on the Amtrak trains servicing the Tar Heel State. Ridership has been building steadily, while on-time performance, at least on one route, has been deteriorating toward levels suggesting that the schedule just can’t be taken seriously.
That train is the Carolinian, which runs between Charlotte and New York by way of Raleigh and Washington. The N&O’s transportation writer, Bruce Siceloff, reported the other day that the Carolinian this summer has managed to arrive as scheduled only 13 percent of the time.
A northbound traveler whom my wife and I put on the train in Cary a couple of months ago, departing close to the scheduled 10:43 a.m., was a couple of hours past the advertised time of 5:08 p.m. getting into D.C. And the edition of the Carolinian heading back here each day from the Northeast – it’s due in Raleigh at 4:42 p.m. – isn’t one to set your watch by.
Experience also points up problems with the other long-distance train through Raleigh and Cary, the New York-to-Florida Silver Star. We recently spent a peaceful extra couple of hours waiting for the Silver Star to pull up by the new platform on the south side of Cary’s downtown depot. Another person there, needing to make it to Camden, S.C., that evening, out of desperation called a cab. (He finally decided to wait for the train after all, and his patience was rewarded.)
The finger of blame for these frustrating delays tends to point not at Amtrak but at the freight companies whose rails Amtrak uses.
