Amtrak

It seems that the new fare system took effect yesterday. In addition to changes to the availability of full refunds per fare type, a lot of routes got cheaper. I just got $32 back for an upcoming trip to Buffalo and back on the Lake Shore Limited by going to Modify Trip and reselecting the trains I had already booked, which moved my trip to the new fare system at the lower available price. If you have an upcoming trip, definitely double-check if you can get some money back as well.

Amtrak’s website is a godawful mess. It’s hard to search, hard to book, and hard to follow train updates.

Fortunately there’s a number of good tools out there:

https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/resources.php - one of the most comprehensive websites for Amtrak data. The most valuable part of this website is the on-time performance data. You can look at historical on-time data for any train and get a sense of how late you’ll be (because, really, is Amtrak ever early?).

https://railrat.net - The answer to the perrienial problem that Wi-Fi sucks on trains and no one ever tells you how late you are. This is a train status website that is optimized for quick loading. It is stripped down to the most basic text elements so you can get the info you need even with one bar. There’s even a QR code link so you can share it with folks you meet on the train.

https://amtraker.com - a very nice map based train tracking tool. Lots of good visualization here about how late a train is running, and if you click a train number you can zoom in for more info.

https://railforless.us - An attempt—and a very good one at that—to try to make viewing a range of dates on Amtrak easier. The developer discussed the challenges and limitations in the About link on the page—basically Amtrak has very sophisticated bot detection software on its website, which, frankly, is shocking given how horrible their website is otherwise. Anyway, if you want to go somewhere on Amtrak and it doesn’t exactly matter when, this is a good site.

I’d love to hear about other tools people use with Amtrak!

Came across this pretty cool site