CHICAGO — Two planned and two unplanned bus bridges are occurring over the Fourth of July holiday weekend to keep passengers moving on Amtrak’s long-distance network.
Coast Starlight equipment will spend the night of July 4-July 5 at Sacramento, Calif., and Klamath Falls, Ore., while Seattle-Los Angeles passengers are bused overnight between the two stops as a result of Union Pacific trackwork that evening.
In the east, work continues at least through the end of July between Albany-Rensselaer, N.Y. and Pittsfield, Mass., to repair damage from a sinkhole that opened up under the tracks. This has affected the seasonal weekend Berkshire Flyer and the daily Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited; buses are substituting for the duration. Trains News Wire is attempting to get more information on the extent of the track outage.
Other disruptions involving bus substitutions were hastily arranged. In the late afternoon of Wednesday July 2, a brush fire erupted adjacent to BNSF Railway’s Scenic Subdivision east of Everett, Wash., after the eastbound Empire Builder already left Seattle. The train was annulled at Everett and passengers were bused overnight to Spokane, where the westbound train was halted to become the continuation of eastbound No. 8. It departed for Chicago more than six hours late from Spokane Thursday morning. The Portland, Ore., section of both trains operated normally. A BNSF spokeswoman tells News Wire that the resulting track outage was restored by 4:20 a.m. Thursday and remains open.
The eastbound Empire Builder that left Seattle a day earlier on July 1 encountered lengthy unspecified delays, losing more than five hours between Glasgow, Mont., and Williston, N.D., and as of 7 p.m. today (July 3) was running sevens hours late into Chicago.
Meanwhile, Floridian timekeeping problems continue. The northbound train leaving Miami on July 2 was delayed more than four hours between Winter Park, Fla., and DeLand, then lost more time, departing Raleigh, N.C,. eight hours late on Thursday. It will terminate at Toledo, Ohio, on July 4; westbound passengers will be bused from there to Chicago, and Friday’s eastbound Floridian passengers will board the same equipment there after it is turned.
When a bus substitution occurs, Amtrak freezes the inventory in the ticketing system by showing a train as “sold out” to keep passengers from overbooking the bus segment.
Mechanical issues discovered at terminals also continued to delay departures this week. Among trains affected, were the southbound Silver Meteor, leaving New York more than two and a half hours late on July 1 and 2 (the equipment arrives from Florida the previous day). The eastbound California Zephyr averaged three-hour tardy departure from Emeryville, Calif., for three days (June 30-July 2). And Thursday’s westbound Borealis left Chicago an hour and a half late. Also on July 3, Acelas Nos. 2168 and 2170 both were delayed out of Washington, D.C., by more than an hour and a half.
Elsewhere, higher prices as trains get booked up is keeping sellouts to a minimum over the holiday weekend, except where capacity is severely constrained and demand high. Most notable is that all Seattle-Portland, Ore., Amtrak Cascades trips are sold out in both directions on Sunday, July 6, as they are on most weekends. The Vancouver, B.C.-Eugene, Ore., corridor operates with two Talgo Series 8 trainsets, along with six Amfleet sets with only two coaches and a café/business class car. Those abbreviated consists, as well as capacity constraints elsewhere, reflect the ongoing equipment issues resulting from the withdrawal of Horizon railcars [see “Examination of Horizon corrosion issues …,” Trains News Wire, April 3, 2025].
Other sellout segments caused by limited capacity on July 6 are Los Angeles-Oakland, Calif., on the Coast Starlight (the train has been operating with two coaches); Chicago to Battle Creek, Mich., Bloomington-Normal, Ill., and Champaign, Ill., in the Midwest; and Albany-Rensselaer-New York City in the east.
Please, no more pictures of that hideous Talgo front end that was designed with “ample input from the engineers union members”. It has as much industrial design excellence as the new US Mail delivery vehicles, also designed “with ample input from postal workers”
We need a new Raymond Loewy, like soon.
Much agreed, that ugly locomotive looks like something out of a PBS childrens’ cartoon. I wonder though if that locomotive was designed by the employees with ergonomics in mind, and that was the end result??
The ‘Coast Starlight’ had three coaches until early this year (2025). The ‘Sunset Limited’ operates with only one coach east of San Antonio. (An additional coach and sleeping car are transfered from the Chicago – San Antonio ‘Texas Eagle’ for Los Angeles.)
40 is late northbound because we hit a vehicle that went around the crossing gates at a crossing in Florida last night. Set it back about 5 hours and delays added on to that. We’re now past 8 hours late.