kevin_standlee | Good Thing We Didn't Extend Our Stay

As I mentioned a few days ago, we left Chicago a couple of days later than we originally planned because we'd been unable to get a bedroom on the California Zephyr. We got relatively lucky and our train was less than an hour late into Reno, which is effectively "on time" by Amtrak's standards. Now it looks like we got even luckier. The US freight railroad unions are getting close to a strike/lockout deadline in a few days. All of Amtrak's routes other than the Northeast Corridor run on the freight railroads' lines, and thus if the railroads shut down, those routes can't run. Amtrak is, rather sensibly, winding down all of its operations outside of the Northeast Corridor, starting with the long-distance lines, so that if the deadline passes without an agreement, all of their equipment and crews will be at terminals, and neither they nor the passengers on those trains will be stuck mid-route. As we get closer to the deadline, the most routes will shut down. This is of course bad news for anyone planning to travel by train during those date, who will essentially be stuck. I'm glad we're not among those people struggling to get to their destinations.