Sue in KY
Service Attendant
Back from our trip to Winslow, Arizona’s La Posada aboard the Southwest Chief — not an unqualified success, I’m afraid. When we boarded at Galesburg, IL, on Saturday the 24th, after having driven up from Kentucky the day before in a driving rainstorm, the rain was still pouring and continued to do so until we reached Kansas.
We had great service on the trip out, with star turns by both our SCA, Antonio, and our dining-car server, Shalita, who seemed to be just enjoying the daylights out of both her job and the passengers she served. (How lovely to see such dedication these days!) Food continues to improve aboard Amtrak trains, too, we notice, just since we began taking trains a little over a year ago: The lunch special chipotle beef over wild-rice pilaf and beef barbecue at dinner were excellent.
I never was able to fish out my camera in time to photograph them, but we saw several groups — herds, even! — of assorted wildlife on this trip west: antelope, deer, elk, bison, several red-tailed hawks, and in New Mexico even a few jackrabbits — which I hadn’t seen since my childhood in Texas — played games of chicken with the train. (I’m happy to report that the ones I saw always won.)
Unfortunately, the first thing to go wrong was that our entire sleeping car’s complement of toilets were non-functioning, and had been since the train left Chicago! Work crews at both Kansas City and Albuquerque tried, without success, to fix them. In fact, by the time we’d been on board for an hour, all except one of the toilets in ALL THREE SLEEPING CARS had quit working — so that one (thank goodness it was a “public” one and not one in someone’s private bedroom!) got quite a workout with upwards of 75 people all using it. Henry, the heroic SCA in the car with the one functional toilet, had a non-stop job in constant trips to throw the switch that kept it operating. No explanation for why the train left Chicago with so many non-working toilets — I assume there were just no replacement cars available.
In addition, neither of the electrical outlets in our bedroom worked, nor did the call button.
I felt rather sorry for the poor conductor who came on duty at Albuquerque and who kept coming on the p.a. system to apologize to those of us in all three cars for the sad state of affairs in our sleepers — it certainly wasn’t his fault, and I imagine he was dealing with several very irate first-and-probably-last-time train riders! He wanted to make sure that each of us called Customer Service at Amtrak and give his name and the train’s origination date from Chicago, and he kept assuring us that “Amtrak will make it right with you.” (I’ll call first thing tomorrow, after I’ve unpacked and caught my breath.)
The hotel, while certainly interesting and in some respects very beautiful, isn’t quite ready for prime time, we were disappointed to realize. The owners, a quirky husband-and-wife team, do deserve compliments for their hard work over the past 10 or more years in restoring this last and perhaps best of the Mary Colter-designed Harvey railroad hotels, but their attitude seems to be that guests should be so overawed by the chance to stay there, they shouldn’t expect such a thing as service too. (So, no bell staff, rude and unhelpful reception staff, lackadaisical housekeeping ....) On the other hand, the attached restaurant, owned separately by a talented English chef, was absolutely outstanding — although it was closed by electrical outage from a terrible dust- and windstorm that began just after noon of the last full day we were there, and reopened neither that night for dinner nor for breakfast the next day, leaving those of us without transportation also without a way to get either meal. (The hotel hadn’t regained electrical power by the time we — finally! — left about nine on Thursday morning.)
That freakish dust storm also delayed our leaving. The April 29th eastbound SW Chief was supposed to stop in front of the hotel at 6:09 a.m. — and repeated calls to Amtrak Julie at 4:45 a.m. and 5:45 and 6:15 kept getting us the same message: on time, on time, on time. After spending a VERY windy 45 minutes beside the tracks (sitting on our bags to keep them from blowing away), we finally learned at 6:45 that the poor train had left its previous stop, Flagstaff, at the normal time of 5:11 ... and then was forced to sit on a siding just after the station for the next three hours while a parade roared past of freight trains held up for 20 hours by the storm (which had also closed the nearby Interstate Highway 40 as well as the other roads between Flagstaff and Gallup, NM). That meant, of course, that again there were some pretty surly passengers already on board who couldn’t understand why Amtrak should “allow” freight trains to take precedence over trains with people on them — I heard a distressing number of disparaging comments about “the !@#$%^&* federal government, and the [even worse !@#$%^&*] party in power who wants even more of these stupid anachronisms wasting people’s hard-earned tax money that could be better spent on highways and bridges and keeping out illegal aliens and <mutter, mutter, mutter> ....”
Contrary to some of the complaints we overheard (that the train's staff were keeping everyone in the dark about the delays), the conductors were prompt to explain every slow order or stop we incurred; unfortunately, there were a number of each (including a stop because the crew ran out of hours before Albuquerque).
On top of everything, this eastbound train seemed to be staffed by only one sleeping car attendant, “Simon Jr.,” who, upon our boarding the train, complained that his knees were killing him and then promptly disappeared for the rest of our trip. Luckily, we were able to make up and take down our beds, having watched the process during other trips — but judging from the constant “bing-BONG” of call buttons pushed in other bedrooms and roomettes near us, other passengers were decidedly unable or unwilling to do so. (Don’t know how they managed, because Simon Jr. never reappeared that we could tell, until time to detrain.)
So this third time for us aboard the Southwest Chief wasn’t the proverbial charm. But even though we never made up any of the three hours the train lost outside of Flagstaff, and we’d actually lost another hour by the time we detrained at Galesburg late Friday afternoon ... hey, the toilets worked the whole way back! (And we have two more train holidays planned for this summer and next fall ....)
We had great service on the trip out, with star turns by both our SCA, Antonio, and our dining-car server, Shalita, who seemed to be just enjoying the daylights out of both her job and the passengers she served. (How lovely to see such dedication these days!) Food continues to improve aboard Amtrak trains, too, we notice, just since we began taking trains a little over a year ago: The lunch special chipotle beef over wild-rice pilaf and beef barbecue at dinner were excellent.
I never was able to fish out my camera in time to photograph them, but we saw several groups — herds, even! — of assorted wildlife on this trip west: antelope, deer, elk, bison, several red-tailed hawks, and in New Mexico even a few jackrabbits — which I hadn’t seen since my childhood in Texas — played games of chicken with the train. (I’m happy to report that the ones I saw always won.)
Unfortunately, the first thing to go wrong was that our entire sleeping car’s complement of toilets were non-functioning, and had been since the train left Chicago! Work crews at both Kansas City and Albuquerque tried, without success, to fix them. In fact, by the time we’d been on board for an hour, all except one of the toilets in ALL THREE SLEEPING CARS had quit working — so that one (thank goodness it was a “public” one and not one in someone’s private bedroom!) got quite a workout with upwards of 75 people all using it. Henry, the heroic SCA in the car with the one functional toilet, had a non-stop job in constant trips to throw the switch that kept it operating. No explanation for why the train left Chicago with so many non-working toilets — I assume there were just no replacement cars available.
In addition, neither of the electrical outlets in our bedroom worked, nor did the call button.
I felt rather sorry for the poor conductor who came on duty at Albuquerque and who kept coming on the p.a. system to apologize to those of us in all three cars for the sad state of affairs in our sleepers — it certainly wasn’t his fault, and I imagine he was dealing with several very irate first-and-probably-last-time train riders! He wanted to make sure that each of us called Customer Service at Amtrak and give his name and the train’s origination date from Chicago, and he kept assuring us that “Amtrak will make it right with you.” (I’ll call first thing tomorrow, after I’ve unpacked and caught my breath.)
The hotel, while certainly interesting and in some respects very beautiful, isn’t quite ready for prime time, we were disappointed to realize. The owners, a quirky husband-and-wife team, do deserve compliments for their hard work over the past 10 or more years in restoring this last and perhaps best of the Mary Colter-designed Harvey railroad hotels, but their attitude seems to be that guests should be so overawed by the chance to stay there, they shouldn’t expect such a thing as service too. (So, no bell staff, rude and unhelpful reception staff, lackadaisical housekeeping ....) On the other hand, the attached restaurant, owned separately by a talented English chef, was absolutely outstanding — although it was closed by electrical outage from a terrible dust- and windstorm that began just after noon of the last full day we were there, and reopened neither that night for dinner nor for breakfast the next day, leaving those of us without transportation also without a way to get either meal. (The hotel hadn’t regained electrical power by the time we — finally! — left about nine on Thursday morning.)
That freakish dust storm also delayed our leaving. The April 29th eastbound SW Chief was supposed to stop in front of the hotel at 6:09 a.m. — and repeated calls to Amtrak Julie at 4:45 a.m. and 5:45 and 6:15 kept getting us the same message: on time, on time, on time. After spending a VERY windy 45 minutes beside the tracks (sitting on our bags to keep them from blowing away), we finally learned at 6:45 that the poor train had left its previous stop, Flagstaff, at the normal time of 5:11 ... and then was forced to sit on a siding just after the station for the next three hours while a parade roared past of freight trains held up for 20 hours by the storm (which had also closed the nearby Interstate Highway 40 as well as the other roads between Flagstaff and Gallup, NM). That meant, of course, that again there were some pretty surly passengers already on board who couldn’t understand why Amtrak should “allow” freight trains to take precedence over trains with people on them — I heard a distressing number of disparaging comments about “the !@#$%^&* federal government, and the [even worse !@#$%^&*] party in power who wants even more of these stupid anachronisms wasting people’s hard-earned tax money that could be better spent on highways and bridges and keeping out illegal aliens and <mutter, mutter, mutter> ....”
Contrary to some of the complaints we overheard (that the train's staff were keeping everyone in the dark about the delays), the conductors were prompt to explain every slow order or stop we incurred; unfortunately, there were a number of each (including a stop because the crew ran out of hours before Albuquerque).
On top of everything, this eastbound train seemed to be staffed by only one sleeping car attendant, “Simon Jr.,” who, upon our boarding the train, complained that his knees were killing him and then promptly disappeared for the rest of our trip. Luckily, we were able to make up and take down our beds, having watched the process during other trips — but judging from the constant “bing-BONG” of call buttons pushed in other bedrooms and roomettes near us, other passengers were decidedly unable or unwilling to do so. (Don’t know how they managed, because Simon Jr. never reappeared that we could tell, until time to detrain.)
So this third time for us aboard the Southwest Chief wasn’t the proverbial charm. But even though we never made up any of the three hours the train lost outside of Flagstaff, and we’d actually lost another hour by the time we detrained at Galesburg late Friday afternoon ... hey, the toilets worked the whole way back! (And we have two more train holidays planned for this summer and next fall ....)
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