A couple weeks ago I needed to be in Boston for a big public transportation conference for work. I’m not a huge fan of flying, I’ll do it if I need to, but it’s not my favorite way to get places. I’ll often plan longer driving trips just so that I can see the countryside, experience the cities I’m passing through, and generally feel like I’m living life to the fullest.

However, for this trip, I decided I’d like to try taking the train. I went back and forth on this, because there’s some track outage issues in New York that require a bus trip at the end, but I decided that the train was how I wanted to experience the first part of this trip. The plan was to catch the Empire Builder to Chicago, transfer to the Lakeshore Limited and then (after the bus ride from Albany) end up in Boston South Station.

I was also planning to combine this trip with a visit to Philly to visit friends for a couple days, and as a part of that take the Acela high-speed(-ish) line from Boston to Philly. I had everything lined up, including splurging on a sleeper car for the Lakeshore Limited to really enjoy my trip. I went to bed the night before I was scheduled to leave excited for the journey, but with a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach… what if something is late.

You see, the Empire Builder has a terrible OTP (On Time Performance) rating. Due to congestion with freight trains across the Dakotas and through Minnesota, the average on time rating stands at 55%. That’s truly terrible, but it’s the reality of not owning our passenger rail lines in America. Sure enough, I wake up Thursday morning to see that my train is already two hours late. No worries I think, I’ve got an almost 5 hour layover in Chicago, it should still be fine. We had to shuffle around who was going to drive me to the train station, but it should still work.

As the morning got later, the delay grew… and grew… and grew. By mid-morning it was to the point that I needed to make a decision. I could take a chance (50/50 based on the on-time numbers) or I could just abandon the entire train trip and drive. I did briefly check on flights, but they same-day cost was pretty high and I didn’t want to justify that to my management (plus… flying… ick). Eventually I reached the point where I had to choose and I opted to drive. I swapped into a different car (balancing miles between vehicles) and hit the road shortly before 11am.

This is MUCH later than I normally like to leave on driving trips. I feel like any driving hours before sunrise are free, and any driving hours after sunset are double the cost. But here I was heading out on a 670 mile day, mid-morning, crossing into the Eastern Time Zone where I’d lose an hour as well. Needless to say this caused a big jolt of anxiety in my system and after driving about an hour I had to pull into a gas station and spend some time talking to my wonderful wife to get myself calmed down and back on track.

Driving to Boston is a trip that I’d normally like to take 3 days to do, but now I was stuck doing it in two. That meant that the first night I really needed to get to Toledo to make day 2 more tolerable. With such a late start that meant I was pulling into my hotel close to midnight on day one, and only had a few hours to get some rest before starting over again. Not the most ideal, and not the way I prefer to do my long driving travel trips.

I did manage to get to Boston the next day at a reasonable hour and got a nice snack and a drink, before getting some well deserved rest before starting the conference on Sunday. When I checked to see how my train would have done, and if I made the right choice, I quickly got confirmation. If I had decided to just wait for the train I wouldn’t have gotten into Chicago until over an hour after my connecting train would have left. That would have meant finding a hotel in Chicago and then getting to the conference a day late. Not acceptable at all. In the end, despite the loooong days of driving, I made the right choice.

Oh, and I did briefly consider just parking my car in Chicago and catching my connection there, but that would have resulted in a bunch of cost, and then needing to get to my car at some point on the way back, etc etc.

The upside to this whole story is that Amtrak was one of the participants in this conference (I work in public transit) and they were offering tours of the new Next-Gen Acela trains to conference participants. I headed over, and along with getting a tour of a beautiful new train, I got to complain directly to a couple of their VPs about the situation. I knew there was nothing they could do about it because of the freight rail issues, but it felt good to be able to complain to some of their upper leadership.

So that’s my story of a long driving trip to Boston. I did then drive down to Philly, hang out with friends for a couple days, and then drive back from Philly. Philly is so much further west than Boston that the drive home feels a LOT shorter and easier. However, the moral of the story is that in the midwest, Amtrak is for point-to-point trips that don’t have hard deadlines. This certainly isn’t Europe.