Good Morning,
It has been a few years since I posted any details of our annual round trips on the auto train. I stopped posting because there seemed to be zero interest in anything that I wrote, however, I was given some information by one of the crew members on this trip that I thought was very interesting.
First, just a bit of history. Two years ago we stopped using the auto train to come back north in April. The fare charged for the bedroom ( sleeper) that we always got was just out of control and we decided to try making the I-95 drive to see how it would actually be. Bottom line is that it was fine. We decided to leave our home in Naples, FL on a Friday morning and stop for the night in Brunswick, GA. If we were still using the auto train that would be a 4 hour drive to Sanford. Going to Brunswick,GA was a 7 hour drive . The rest of the trip back to our home in Massachusetts was done on a Saturday and Sunday and the traffic really wasn't bad at all. We plan to continue doing this.
We do really like using the train to go south. This year we booked our travel to leave on Monday December 10. This turned out to be a very good plan because Amtrak cancelled the trip the day before ( it may have actually been a couple of trips a couple of days before) because of the impending snowstorm that really hit Virginia and North Carolina very hard. We were busy making a " plan B " incase the 12/10 trip was cancelled, but it wasn't.
Usually our December trip isn'r very heavily booked. This train had some extra cars put on to accommodate some of the people that were cancelled in the previous couple of days. So Train 53 had 15 Passenger Cars, 26 Auto Carriers, 376 passengers and 236 automobiles. 2 Conductors, 2 Engineers, and it was Crew #1. The train left about 15 minutes early at 3:45 PM and we arrived in the Sanford station at about 8:30 AM. We sat and didn't move for about 45 minutes before we were able to pull into the station about 1 mile away because CSX had other traffic to move through before we were allowed to go that last mile. Our priority offloading made us car #3 off the train and we were driving off at 9:18 AM. Quite good.
The trip itself was also quite good. Our room attendant, Rob, was excellent. The food and the service in the diner keep getting worse. Really, the food is barely edible and the server was totally disinterested in being there. The coffee machine in the diner broke down so no coffee could be served in the diner at either dinner or breakfast. The coffee machines in the lounge and in the sleepers were working fine and people were told to bring their own in the morning.
Now, the interesting part... We were told by one of the crew that the "new" CEO for Amtrak was going to bring back some if not all of the amenities that there were when we started taking the train 10 years ago. Wine tasting, comp. wine with dinner, cheese and crackers, and littlenecks in the lounge when you boarded, etc. We are told that these should be back early in the new year. I'll believe it when I see it. It would be great if other people would let us know about it if it does actually happen.
I'll be happy to answer any questions or clarify anything that I wrote that didn't make sense.
HJ
