GARDEN CITY, Kansas — An apparently minor BNSF Railway derailment has led to cancellations of Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.
Images on the KSNW-TV website show a small number of covered hoppers, perhaps as few as a half-dozen, involved in the derailment. The viewers who provided the photos said the incident was 15 to 20 miles east of Garden City, which would place it near Charleston, Kan., on BNSF’s La Junta Subdivision.
As a result, the westbound Southwest Chief which departed Chicago today (July 24) will be cancelled between Kansas City and Los Angeles, and the eastbound Chief that left Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 23, will be cancelled between La Junta, Colo., and Kansas City, according to the Amtrak Alerts feed on X.com.
I was on #3 from Chi to New. The brilliant plan for ANYONE traveling beyond Kcy was to get off in Galesburg and go back to Chi on the evening train from Quincy. And then the phrase “no alternate transportation” What bs!! I went on to Kcy where a relative from New came and got me. Still no word on any type of refund. If Amtrak doesn’t get you to your destination and there’s no alternate transportation. Isn’t that a contract of carriage violation? This is the 2nd time for me this summer. They gave me a full refund the first time. Hummm
Well (tongue in cheek), the really ironic thing is that 2018 Amtrak wanted to truncate the Southwest Chief at Albuquerque and Dodge City and provide a bus bridge between the two cities (to avoid the PTC-free and freight-traffic-free railroad between La Junta and Lamy). Today they have a chance to show us how that would work, but they can’t……
I honestly think that if a switch engine split a switch and put two wheels on the ground, and Amtrak was scheduled to roll through the area 10 hours later, Amtrak management would cancel the train. Especially if it was an LD route. If you can’t do it right just hang it up, ok? Watching the slow death of passenger trains (outside of the sacred Northeast Corridor) is sickening.
That is 4 in the past 10 days?