A few years ago, I was in the railroad station in the Italian town of Lucca, waiting for a train to Florence. An Italian gentleman sitting on a bench near me shook his head in disgust and pointed to his wristwatch. The train to Florence was eleven minutes late! I remember wondering what he would…
I’ve seen some Facebook chatter lately that’s made me think—right or wrong—that a lot of people are taking long-distance train rides for the first time. Maybe it’s because they’ve heard about the Trump budget that would eliminate all federal funding for Amtrak’s long distance trains. Could be that people hearing that think they’d better take…
Amtrak has had a lot of problems over the past couple of years with missed connections, or “misconnects” and they’re called within the company. The problems were especially bad back a couple of years ago when the North Dakota oil fields were booming and the oil trains were clogging the rails. But the reality…
Brief recap: Because of a demonstration at the entrance to the Chunnel in France last month, Eurostar trains stopped running for several hours and, as a result, I was a no-show for a hotel room in London I had reserved weeks earlier through Booking.com. After consulting one of the ombudsman-types on Christopher Elliot’s web…