wait... Amtrak trains arriving
early?
won't that cause space-time continuum disruption?
It happens alot more than people think. Because of the padding built into the schedules, any train that is on time before reaching the terminal station (or a service stop like El Paso on the SL or Denver on the Zephyr) will be significantly early.
I'm in the east and most Amtrak trains that I've been on since 1981 has been late.
Seems to be getting worse in the last 5 years. I've experienced 1, 2, even 5-hour late arrivals. A couple of trains never made it into my departing station 6 hours after scheduled departure time and I ended up taking Greyhound....
The most memorable one was when the train stopped in the middle of the town. Can't remember the name of the Virginia town... the railroad tracks were in the middle of the road in the downtown area. We stopped there for almost 50 minutes because of freight train delays up ahead. The conductors allowed us to get off the train to walk around the town(within sign of the train, of course)