chartle
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
Thanks for the pics! Why, oh why can't we have one in our area? Chicago is a major Amtrak station!
Tell me about it...Wishing they'd offer one from the NY metro area (and I do think there'd be a good market coming from NY). Ah, I'll just keep dreaming
As stated on other threads, the Autotrain is marketed to people who would normally take a 2 day drive to WDW.
The further you go out from WDW the less likely you are to drive. We live in Pittsburgh and I think we are about as far as Amtrak expects you to comfortably come from i.e. a 200 to 300 radius to the Lorton Station. Many people drive further, but any further than us you would either have to start very early in the morning or stay overnight somewhere which now adds another day to your journey.
Also the 17 hr trip that it makes is perfect for this kind of train. Arriving at the scheduled 9:30 gives them enough time, with some wiggle room*, to turn around the train and get it ready to go back north.
Any further and it doesn't make sense. Right now they use two trains per day and I think 5 rotating car crews (not the people who "drive" the train but the car attendants). A longer trip would require a two day instead of a one day turn around.
Chicago would be great maybe they would add a Pittsburgh stop since the train would most likley come through here.
* We didn't have enough wiggle room for our trip back the Saturday after Fay. We found out 9:30 in the morning that our train was cancelled because it was going to be very late getting in that morning 7:00 PM!! We drove back and in reality the train back wouldn't have saved us any time at all. If we would have known about driving back we would have started earlier. Now on the way down it saved us a day. We got in the station in FL at 8:00 am and were at DQ by 11:00 AM so we had almost a full day for DQ and DTD.