Amtrak plans to resume normal operations today, following two days of cancellations and other schedule changes in advance of the winter storm that moved through the Northeast over the weekend.
The passenger railroad had cancelled some long-distance trains into and out of New York and Boston on Saturday, as well as a number of trains in the Northeast on Sunday.
Another storm is making its way across the northern U.S., but is not expected to generate as much snow as the previous storm, according to weather.com. Watch the Amtrak website for train-status information.
Great story, Carl!
The headline..now that’s an oxymoron!
I agree with Amtrak in this situation after recently being stranded on a train on a clear but frigid night trying to get from Boston to Brunswick, ME. This was not Amtrak’s fault. The delay was due to a “track defect”. The on board crew was great and we received compensation (a free one way Downeaster train ride) while we waited. But it took the track foreman 1 hour to just get to the area of the defect and then another 1 1/2 hours for the defect to be repaired. This on a clear night with no precipitation. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken had their been a blizzard raging. Probably not until the next day. It took us 6 hours to get to Brunswick, a trip that normally takes the train 3 hours and 20 minutes but can be driven in about 2 1/2. I would much rather spend an extra night in a warm hotel room than being stranded on a train in East Ovwershoe, Wisconsin during a blizzard with the toilets overflowing and the locomotive running out of fuel because someone in the yard “forgot” to fuel the thing. This is not to mention the HOS laws. Takes an awful lot of time to evacuate a train using snow machines.
I am telling you……Given the opportunity not to run trains, Amtrak will take it every time.
This was a truly major storm, but Amtrak’s recent habit of cancelling service–especially on the long-haul network and on the NEC north of New York is very unfortunate. The “All Weather Mode” claim was central to railroading’s superiority argument. I suspect this is being driven by the contemporary terror of “liability”, but it remains very unfortunate.
The trains used to run in snow–late perhaps–but unlike air they ran. Now anything over a four inch snowfall seems to cause paralysis.
In March, 1993 a huge ice-storm struck the northeast, but Amtrak ran. I was booked on the MONTREALER that day from Philadelphia to St. Albans. The train lumbered north, but we actually saved multiple stranded motorists as we slowly bucked the drifts. North of New London (this was in the era when the train ran on the Central Vermont Railway all the way from New London, CT to St. Albans) we made repeated stops to pick up stranded motorists at rural grade-crossings. Ultimate arrival was 10 hours late, but we got through and there wasn’t a single passenger on the train who complained that we were late. Nevermore in the era of Richard Anderson and Stephen Garner!