Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
I suspect that most of the time, your bike in a bag would pass. But I have met some Amtrak employees with authoritarian complex. Those of us on this forum are not the ones you have to convince, it is the Amtrak employee that wants to show how much power he has that can block you, and they have some of them.
That's a good point. I understand that conductors have broad discretion. A rogue one, I suppose, could refuse to let a person board for any reason, or no reason. But how common is that? I ask that in perfect ignorance, never having run into such a person, although it sounds like you haven't been so lucky. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to regard that risk as roughly comparable to that of an unseasonable blizzard or a flash flood that undermines a stretch of tracks--in short, as one of those unavoidable but low-probability risks of traveling anywhere. Possibly I am a fool.