Trains News Wire
The value of timetablesBy Bob Johnston | May 3, 2024Time to resurrect an old tradition
Train timetables
Information displays like this one at Waterloo, Ind., originally featured timetable pages, but anyone visiting the platform wouldn’t know that they could take trains to dozens of destinations served by the Lake Shore Limited or Capitol Limited. On Aug. 27, 2022, after Amtrak stopped producing downloadable timetables, it only contains a safety poster, a map, and general information in disarray. Bob Johnston
The digital information age has spawned a flurry of welcome advances in rail transportation, such as the convenience of online , ticketing and instantaneous notification of delays. Getting rid of easy-to-access timetables showing stops trains make isn’t one of them. Fortunately, other providers have helped fill the void.
History
From their inception in 1971 and 1978 respectively, both of North America’s passenger rail operators, Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada, published system timetables listing all trains operating on every route. They were continuing a tradition that individual railroads began in earnest in 1883, when uniform time zones were created. For the next 88 years, when hundreds of interconnected rail routes provided essential transportation throughout the continent, timetables showed what times trains arrived and departed from isolated rural stations to bustling connection points.
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Timetables today
Both the Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada websites provide complicated ways to access accurate individual route schedules, which we won’t get into here. But inputting an origin and destination for a selected date on their ticketing platforms will display exact arrival and departure times at fares specific to that train. Once ticketed, passengers should be notified if there is a schedule change.
