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Trust me—you really don’t know what you’re missing.
In response to the gentleman who tried to correct my statement that it took 17 hours to get from SoCal to the SF Bay Area, he was correct in stating that the scheduled time for the Coast Starlight is only 10 hours (10:00am departure in LA, 8:27pm arrival in San Jose). But I had to leave my hotel in Anaheim at 7:15am to make sure I got myself and bags checked on the 8:07 Surfliner train to LA. And since the Starlight didn't arrive in San Jose until 9:08pm, missing the last Caltrain for 1½ hours. I got home about 15 minutes to Midnight. OK, so that’s only 16¾ hours. You can read a full account of my first trip on Amtrak. (IE 5.5 or higher required)
A caller the first hour recited some numbers about Amtrak/plain travel that I doubted. While total daily passenger trips on all trains in the U.S. are in the hundreds of thousands (Penn Station alone handles 400,000 daily passengers), Amtrak itself carries about 60,000 (2001 statistics) passengers a day. Peanuts compared to the roughly 1.75 million passengers that travel by airline each day (2000 statistics).
This page was last modified on Monday, 19-Feb-2007 06:02:18 PST.
