lancet said:
There was a sewer problem in the car. The whole car reeked of sewage and there was nowhere else to go. Everyone in the car complained, butto no avail.
Well it does happen from time to time, but I've only had that problem once and even then it was on a Viewliner, not a Superliner. By the way I've covered over almost 40,000 miles on Amtrak in the last 4 years, so if this were a cronic problem, then the odds are that I would have hit many more problems.
Generally if a problem occurs once the train has left it's starting point, it is often difficult to fix the problem while enroute. The crew does not have to tools or the know how to fix it. In fact many times that a problem does occur, it's thanks to a passenger trying to flush something inappropriate down the toilet.
lancet said:
And then there was the constant delays, so the train was 7 hours late. Do freight trains take precedence over passenger trains?? We seem to have had a lot of long waiting time for freight trains to pass.
This is not supposed to be the case, Amtrak is supposed to get priority over freight. However in practice this is not always the case. Since 90% of the tracks that Amtrak uses are owned by the freight RR's, those same freight RR's control the signals. So they often do give priority to their own trains, even though their agreement with Amtrak states that Amtrak must be given priority.
Unfortunately part of the route that the Sunset Limited runs on is owned by UP, one of the worst offendors when it comes to giving their own trains priority. Some routes do much better, since their hosts do honor the agreement whenever possible.
Hopefully your next experience will be better than the one you had.