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Amtrak, at least on the website, won't even let me book a ticket with just a train number. I'm not sure how it would cause anyone to make a mistake, and outside of us railfans likely would either not be noticed at all, or at most be met with a "huh, that's different."

Amtrak bases the coach point valuations on the "value" fare class, which has went up quite a bit over the past few years on the NEC. Right now it appears to be set at $115. For cash purchases, Amtrak competes on price with their "saver" fare class, but that doesn't help for points redemptions as...

I think the biggest thing that Amtrak needs is more Amtrak. If there's only one train a day, there's a lot more sacrifices that have to be made, either by delaying trains to make connections or by having connecting passengers risk a full day's delay if there's a misconnect. However, if there...

If we're going with unstaffed stations my nomination would be Elko, NV. Yes, the platform is okay (has a bus-style shelter and standard platform) but there's no way (that I'm aware of, and I visited the station in 2012 and have tried to parse something out with Google Maps) to get between the...

There's been one report on the Empire Builder Facebook group where a connection to the Cardinal was rebooked by Amtrak onto the LSL. If they were actively working on restoring that connection, I don't think they would've rescheduled people who were booked on it already.

Currently the guaranteed connections to both the Michigan trains and the Cardinal eastbound have been severed. Without the guaranteed connection the connection simply doesn't exist for most people. That's a pretty big loss - though if the Empire Builder could run reliably on-schedule I would...

Or they'll be used to it because the airlines do the same thing, especially if you book more than a couple months in advance.

Personally, I think this is too tight to comfortably do, especially with a 99%+ success rate (which, given you're connecting to a cruise, is what we'd probably want to aim for.) Over the past two months, 9 out of 50 westbound Zephyrs have been at least 5 hours late into SAC (or 18% of the time.)...

I'm not sure how the standard refund policies get applied. Unfortunately I can't find this policy "written down" on the website anymore, but historically if a short-distance train is more than an hour late, or a long distance train is more than two hours late, any passenger can cancel for a full...

Only if I would use all five of them before they expire. I aim to get at least 2.5 cents per point, so 5000 points would be $125, or $25 per pass. They do allow one travel companion or a family, so if I'm traveling with someone that can be useful. But my home station of MSP only has an extremely...

Same. There's even some banks that will refund ATM fees - I keep a Charles Schwab checking account just for my travel money because they'll refund any ATM fees worldwide at the end of the month.

Many places would be willing to break a $20 or two, though, or it's easy enough to buy something for a dollar or two and pay cash for it to break a $20. I'd also generally expect that most tipped staff would be happy to break a larger bill for you if they have the smaller change available, at...

The testing requirement seemed rather superfluous anyways, and even moreso once the mask requirement was dropped. It didn't seem to stop any of the recent variants from hitting the US, and I question whether it even slowed down their arrival (and, if it did, it didn't seem like that additional...

304 became 318 and runs on the same schedule. 306 still shows for me on Wednesday, 6/15 from SPI to CHI, along with 318.

The Hiawatha hasn't had business class for at least the past 10 years, and while I'm not sure if BC on Hiawatha was anticipated in the order, I would be surprised if they plan on adding it, except perhaps on the frequencies that go to St. Paul in the future (as they're planning on having the...

The new QuikTrak machines appear to not be able to print out the open sleeper tickets - there was a thread a few months ago where someone struggled mightily to get their open sleeper ticket because their local station only had the new QuikTrak machines which wouldn't let them print out the open...

At least in 2018 when I missed my connection from the Capitol Limited to the Empire Builder (sleeper all the way through,) the default option given was a hotel room and a sleeper on next day's train, despite there being a Greyhound Thruway available that evening to MSP (my final destination.)...

It should be. The sleeper fare is made up (on the back end) with both the accommodation charge (the cost of the room) and a flat "rail fare" (I forget the exact terminology) per person in the room. An open sleeper ticket is essentially paying that rail fare separately on an existing sleeper...

Not anymore - it's second bucket if I remember correctly. Easiest way would be to do the search for one person and price out the roomette/bedroom, then run a second search with two people in one roomette/bedroom. The difference should be the same as the open sleeper ticket cost.

Depends on whether they have any claims that would've been covered, and what the potential loss that they'd cover might be. Based on TEREB's post, I got the impression that it's primarily to cover paying for a hotel night and/or some sort of alternate transportation out of Penn instead of Port...