'Potential'
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
Amtrak, in my experience, has sucked in customer service, cleanliness, and reliability.
The Downeaster from Boston to Portland is quite nice, but it does take 2 3/4 hours. However, perception-wise even the most efficient bus trip on the same distance, which is around 2 hours, feels twice as long.
Plus - bar car and the beers aren't priced much more than they would be at a bar.
I routinely took the Cardinal from Indiana-DC and the Montrealer from DC-White River Junction in college. Unfortunately, that was 20 years ago and neither route now exists; the Cardinal goes far north and the Montrealer is mostly by bus due to track conditions.
I want high-speed trains, too, but the conventional wisdom in Congress seems to be that trains are a boondoggle while roads and airports are an infrastructure investment. Sigh.
I want high-speed trains, too, but the conventional wisdom in Congress seems to be that trains are a boondoggle while roads and airports are an infrastructure investment. Sigh.
That's because Amtrak owns the trains but not the tracks, which is akin to having the government running the bus companies while someone else owns and maintains the roadways privately.
I was upgraded to the Acela on my trip back up to NYC (much nicer than last year's solution to post-Thanksgiving overbooking, which was to shunt us onto a NJ Transit train that they'd hauled down to DC -- 4 hours on a commuter train with no bathrooms or cafe car = HELL), and it was incredibly comfortable. Go go team business class.
I want high-speed trains, too, but the conventional wisdom in Congress seems to be that trains are a boondoggle while roads and airports are an infrastructure investment. Sigh.
Bah. Bullet trains rock! Thus sayeth I.
So say we all, but the problem is that bullet trains make more sense in a smaller country. *Everybody* needs to go from Tokyo to whatever; millions of Americans will never use Washington-New York, LA-San Francisco, and so on.
I rode Amtrak last May from Boston to Washington. It was essentially on time, but price was twice what a flight taking a third of the time would have been (up from the 133% price I'd been quoted in an unpleasant little surprise) and customer service was abominable.
Then again, I flew over Thanksgiving, and the customer service was consistently wretched except in first class (which I got at a normal fare, don't ask me how.) Rotten customer service is the American way.
Rotten customer service is the American way.
Hee. In Israel people always complain about the lousy customer service, usually ending it up with "in the USA it would never have happened. Why can't we be more like them?".
Favorite flight attendant comment of the weekend, on a Delta flight showing March of the Penguins:
"I didn't even know penguins laid eggs!"