California Zephyr suffers 13-hour rain delay; Northeast Corridor Boston service disrupted

CHICAGO — Eastbound California Zephyr passengers crossing eastern Nevada late Sunday suffered the same fate as an estimated 70,000 Burning Man Festival attendees 100 miles north of Reno over Labor Day weekend: they couldn’t go anywhere.

Heavy rains had turned festival grounds into a highly-publicized sea of mud, making all roads impassable. Further east, debris flows would block Union Pacific’s main line to Salt Lake City. Sunday’s eastbound Zephyr departed Emeryville, Calif., slightly more than an hour late and lost another hour into Elko, Nev. But it was held more than 13 hours in the area until after 1 p.m. PDT Monday, until tracks were cleared.

Following an overnight run between Salt Lake City and Denver, the delay had ballooned to more than 16 hours off the advertised by Tuesday, setting up a nocturnal journey from Omaha to Chicago with a Windy City arrival projected just before Wednesday’s morning rush at 6:11 a.m. — 15 hours and 21 minutes late.

A rain-laden western storm also forced track closures between Barstow and Needles, Calif., and east of Yuma, Ariz., Friday night. As a result, two days’ worth of Southwest Chiefs were short-turned en route over the weekend, and the Sunset Limited was canceled Sept. 1 from Los Angeles and Sept. 2 from New Orleans.

In the east late Tuesday afternoon, a summer storm downed trees across Amtrak’s electrified New Haven-Boston main line, stranding passengers onboard trains and at Boston’s South Station for up to 5 hours, as described by NBC Boston.

The challenge: Keeping customers accurately informed

Unpredictable service disruptions due to track closures such as those over Labor Day holiday most severely impact travel plans for customers attempting to board trains on Amtrak’s multi-day long-distance routes.

In the case of Sunday’s eastbound Zephyr, the 105 passengers stranded at Elko had no choice but to wait until the track was cleared. Perhaps more than twice that many had planned to board at the 22 stations from Salt Lake City to Princeton, Ill., on Monday and Tuesday.

During the 13 hours it was stopped, “train status” on the Amtrak app and website only showed “scheduled arrival” times at stations further east with a “service disruption” symbol. The extent of that disruption was not revealed. From an operating standpoint, which would involve predicting how on-duty times should be adjusted at crew change points, it may make sense to not suggest a revised schedule until the train actually is cleared to move.

Once the tracks were cleared early Monday afternoon and the train started to head east, “train status” at all stations then reflected estimated arrival times. Amtrak says the Zephyr’s ticketed passengers with the Amtrak app were given push notifications on their phones. Email and text alerts that the train was delayed were also sent.

However, while the train was cooling its heels, prospective passengers looking to buy tickets on this Zephyr prior to the scheduled departure time at their city had no way of knowing from Amtrak’s website that it was stuck in eastern Nevada. A 7:10 p.m. departure time for the eastbound Zephyr was still showing at Denver until about 3 p.m. local time Monday afternoon, when it was changed to 6:55 a.m. Revised departure times were not listed for other stations Trains News Wire investigated.

Login required

“AmtrakAlerts” and “AmtrakNECAlerts” on X, formerly known as Twitter, have been one avenue Amtrak has used to keep passengers informed about delays when train status information is incomplete. Previously, there have been links to both of these sites under “Service alerts and notices” in the “Site tools” section of www.amtrak.com, but now there is only a link to the Northeast Corridor site.

The apparent reason, according to an Amtrak spokesman, is that Elon Musk’s X, the rebranded Twitter, recently changed its “terms of service” so that users must have an X/Twitter account and be logged on to view the alerts. Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari tells News Wire, “the new owner has made some recent changes in how the system works,” and he is awaiting additional information. Magliari adds, “We have more and better direct communication to customers than when our Twitter time began.”

Twitter may have been an expedient and inexpensive notification method when a login by the user wasn’t required, but utilizing this third party vendor now is clearly a liability. Amtrak needs to design information flow that concurrently provides service disruption details directly through both the train status and ticketing portions of its website.