It was eerie watching the skies and seeing only military jets patrolling. Beyond that, nothing was in the air.
The meeting was not held. The Oregon contingent had planned to fly from Portland to San Jose but found the skies locked down. The California contingent was at their emergency stations.
We had tickets on the Coast Starlight on the 12th to go back to Seattle. I had expected San Jose Diridon Station to be a madhouse with weeping and wailing travelers lined up at the ticket counter, out the door and down the block. I had expected to hear cries of, “Amtrak, save me!” But it was a normal day at Diridon.
On the train, I had expected Amtrak to be selling space in the dining car, lounge car, transition sleeper, and floor space in the engineer’s cab. But it was a normal day on the train.
We missed every dispatching window on the Union Pacific and were held for five hours on a siding in the mountains of Northern California due to a terrorism scare in Utah. It turned out to be nothing more than an engineer running a red block signal.
We were 15 hours late into Seattle, but Amtrak had a full contingent of people there to help us. The lights of King Street Station never looked so welcoming.
I wondered why Amtrak played so little a role in getting people home when the skies were closed. A few weeks later I found out why. One of the major daily newspapers published an article on the fate of stranded travelers.
The first place they went was the rental car counters at the airports and downtown hotel sites. People sorted themselves into destinations, assigned driving duties and determined whose credit card had the most juice.
When all the cars were rented, stranded travelers went to the intercity bus stations and left the driving to Greyhound.
When those seats were sold, they went to the dumpsters of supermarkets, wrote their destinations on sheets of cardboard and stationed themselves at freeway entrances with right thumbs extended.
Only 1% of stranded travelers turned to Amtrak because few Americans knew it existed. The lesson I learned was that rail advocates like myself are very small in numbers.
Wow. Amtrak could have made a huge difference if people had been more aware of its services. I hope you have gotten the chance to change that perception.