Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 12,728
Likes: 2,106
From: Madison, WI
Bikes: 1961 Ideor, 1966 Perfekt 3 Speed AB Hub, 1994 Bridgestone MB-6, 2006 Airnimal Joey, 2009 Thorn Sherpa, 2013 Thorn Nomad MkII, 2015 VO Pass Hunter, 2017 Lynskey Backroad, 2017 Raleigh Gran Prix, 1980s Bianchi Mixte on a trainer. Others are now gone.
I have suddenly become much less enthusiastic about Amtrak. I have been talking to an old touring buddy about another tour for almost a year. I was under the belief that all long distance middle-America Amtrak routes had added some form of roll on/roll off service or had dedicated bike racks in the baggage cars where your bikes could be handled my Amtrak personnel at all stops, did realize that this option only worked at luggage stops. Perhaps my mis-understanding was because all of the Amtrak routes I have traveled in the past offered some option for bikes where we wanted to travel.
Got together with my touring buddy to finalize plans yesterday. We were looking at a tour to take place for most of the month of April, roughly 25 days with driving and train time. Got on the Amtrak website to see if the bike racks were available for the days we needed them, and ... ... discovered that we were on a route (City of New Orleans) where Carry On Bike Service is not offered and Trainside Bike Service is limited to luggage stops. And neither of our two train stations offered either option. The third person that was going to drive us half way across a state to drop us off at an Amtrak station would have to double that distance to get to an Amtrak station that that handled luggage, for her it would have become a two day trip to drive us to a luggage station and get back home.
The Amtrak PDF versions of their schedules that conveniently included notations on which stations were baggage stations are no longer published so it took us a lot of effort just to figure out where the few baggage stations were. That resulted in a lot of additional lost time while were trying to figure out which stations were luggage stops.
I have a folding bike but my touring partner does not, so that is not an option either.
So, our plans collapsed. Tour probably canceled unless we can come up with other options, which is unlikely. All we needed was a few bike hooks on one of the cars on this route, but apparently that is too much to ask. Not a happy camper.