Amtrak

Last year my youngest daughter decided to go to Loyola University in Chicago. The Chicago area wasn’t new to us. Before we moved to Mahomet, we lived 10 years in one Chicago’s suburbs. Driving to and from Chicago wasn’t a big deal for me. After we moved to Mahomet, we still had family there and I had driven into Chicago using all the major highways and also in all four seasons. But then family moved away and slowly driving to Chicago became less frequent. I slowly lost my ability to drive into the Chicago city. When we first took my daughter to her University, I noticed the traffic gave me a lot of stress and I didn’t want to drive on big highways anymore. I got use to driving in Champaign. My girls noticed and they both drove. Chicago isn’t that far it takes approximately 2 ½ hours. But it’s hard to find parking and when you find it, it can get very expensive. And that’s when we started looking at other ways she can come home without me driving into heavy traffic and getting stress about it.

We found out that Amtrak is the best way to go to Chicago, it leaves from Champaign and the parking is also free at the train station. After doing the math we came to the conclusion that we liked Amtrak’s deal better. She started using the train and many times I went to visit her too by taking the train. It takes us straight to Union Station, the seats are comfortable and it’s less stressful.

But here is the downside; the train is never on time. Every time my daughter comes down or I go up to visit each other we noticed every single time, the train is late. In the January my oldest daughter was home and wanted to visit her sister in Chicago. We decided to take the early train so we can spend the whole day with her and then take 4:00 pm train back. Unfortunately on the day of travel the train was 1 ½ hours late and the Amtrak people didn’t even have any kind of answer. They kept saying train should be here soon. Of course our trip was really short and none of us liked it.  Last Tuesday night my daughter took a train home after finishing her finals. She was tired and very excited to be coming home. From Chicago she left on time and her train was supposed to arrive at Champaign at 10:34 PM. She texted me at10:30 PM “We are still in train. We are stopped but they haven’t announced why”. At 11:28 PM she text me again, “So apparently there is a freight train in front of us that lost fuel”. At 11:45 PM she came more than an hour late.

I don’t like how the trains are always late. I can understand if there are emergencies but every single trip, it is too much. I wonder how others feel about their service. Yes, their tickets are cheap and it is less stressful but what about the time. Their 2½ hours always turns into 3 or 3½ hours. I really hope they will do something about it and consider people’s frustrations in the future.

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