Sounds good... but imagine being 1500 miles from home, midway through a rail pass trip, standing at the station with wife and all your luggage.
We came close to being in this situation on our 2023 trip while we were in Toledo, expecting to catch Capitol Limited No. 29 to Chicago where we were to catch SWC No. 3 to LA. At 3:00 a.m. we got a “changes to your trip” message saying that No. 29 had been cancelled due to “mechanical issues.” The cancellation message provided a phone number to call for assistance, and we got through to an agent right away. When asked to book us whatever was available on that day’s Lake Shore Limited No. 49, she did some checking and said that the only thing available was Roomette 2 in Car 4910. With seemingly no other choice available to us, we took it, saying that we would pay for our ticket at the station. An e-mail confirming this reservation arrived almost immediately.
Arriving at the station, we immediately went to the ticket counter to pay for our roomette. Peter, the agent in charge, said that Roomette 2 wasn’t available because the tracks had been washed out. Being unfamiliar with the Lake Shore Limited, we didn’t realize that Car 4910 was in the Boston section which is added to No. 49 before it reaches Toledo. We assumed that Train 49 had been cancelled, leaving us stranded in Toledo.
After Pat explained that we needed to get to Chicago to catch that day’s Southwest Chief, Peter talked on his phone, typed on his keyboard and came up with two coach tickets for us on that day’s Lake Shore Limited No. 49, which was due in shortly. Those tickets didn’t even cost us anything since they were replacements for our Capitol Limited No. 29 coach tickets.
This might be a good question to throw out to the AU membership: what would you do if you were 1500 miles from home, midway through a trip, standing at the station with wife and all your luggage and it was announced that your train had been cancelled?
In our case, we now pretty much require a bedroom for a long-distance train trip. A bedroom reservation “in the hand” is not something we’d give up if we could help it, so, we’d reschedule it to some future date in the distant future with the idea that we could always revise it. We'd then use our Amtrak Guest Rewards card to pay for whatever was available. In an emergency we could probably make do with a roomette. In an extreme emergency we might even consider spending the first night in coach if we knew that we could move into a bedroom that would become vacant the next day.
Hopefully, we’ll never be in that situation, but it always pays to have a contingency plan or two in reserve.
with the result being any future train travel out of the picture - no matter how many vouchers Amtrak provided 
