How Do You Track an Amtrak Train?
July 25, 2018
Passenger trains are expensive and vulnerable to delays in most countries. Riding trains in the UK can be darned exciting. Amtrak, the outfit responsible for passenger trains in the US, has made it easier to figure out where a train is on its route. No more futile calls to the Amtrak 800 number or, if one lives in a city where there is an easy-t0-access train station with a human attendant, and no more visits to the Amtrak Web site for information. Forget Bing, Google, Qwant, and Yandex queries.
Navigate to Track a Train. This is an Amtrak service which answers this question:
When will a train arrive?
Here’s what the site looks like:
I clicked on the blue icons with arrows. These reveal information about a particular train. I selected North Dakota because there were two dots in the vast expanse of that region.
I also figured that unlike the Northeast corridor, the trains would be able to zoom along. Here’s what I learned when I clicked on the left hand east bound blue icon:
The train, which departed from Seattle, appears to be running a mere seven hours and 26 minutes behind schedule.
The purple dots which look like this provide one click views of trains in the heavily used north east corridor:
Click one of these purple icons and you see:
I used to ride the train between Washington and New York when I lived in DC. What’s notable about this information is that it does not provide the date and time of the information. But a tiny green flag explains that this train is on time. That’s a plus.
Several observations:
- The train track data is from July 23, and I clicked on July 25. Not exactly semi real time or remotely useful.
- Most of the Amtrak blue icons report that trains are running behind schedule. This begs the question, “Why not adjust the schedules to real world performance or, as some might suggest, non performance?
- For a big country, there are not many trains; for example, there is no service connecting Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis. Options worsen as one moves west. South Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho? Better fly or drive?
Net net: The information on the map does not paint a particularly positive picture of Amtrak on time performance. The wonky date information makes it difficult to determine how fresh or how stale the information on the map is.
Maybe those super coach rides are worth checking out?
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2018
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