Wildfire along Coast Starlight service suspended SAC-KFS 6/29/21-7/1/21 (possibly longer)

electricron wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 11:28 pm Other modes of transportation; air, roads, and sea; almost always have a detour route that can be used on short notice, but not Amtrak. Setting up detour routes often takes Amtrak more time to qualify engineers and conductors on the detour routes than it takes the host railroad to repair the routes Amtrak usually uses.
Of course, since Amtrak has cancelled the trains through the damaged area entirely, the trains will not be considered late.

Rather than qualifying its own employees, could Amtrak not utilize the detour route's qualified engineers and conductors as pilots to directly supervise their Amtrak counterparts?

Ron, I'm sorry, but Mr. Brown has noted a practice that has been in place long before I ever joined the railroad industry fifty one years ago.

Whenever a train, class of service notwithstanding, is operated over a "foreign" road in which the crew is not Rules Qualified, known as a detour, the home road is required to provide a Rules Qualified crew, known as a Pilot, at the expense of the road requesting the detour. Such movement is often subject to availability of home road crews, and either the UP or BNSF may not have such available, as both the Pilot and the regular crew are subject to Hours of Service.

This does not apply where one road has obtained trackage rights over another where that road's crews need be Rules Qualified on the other road. Obviously Amtrak lives with condition ever since the '80's assumption of by Amtrak of passenger Train and Engine employees.

Before we go farther, lets get some news sources here.

Trains: UP service disrupted by fire, weather

In Northern California, the Lava fire, in Siskiyou Canyon and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, is disrupting operations between Redding, Calif., and Eugene, Ore. The railroad is assessing damage to infrastructure including the Dry Canyon Bridge, a major trestle near Hotlum, Calif., approximately 5 miles northeast of Weed, Calif. Traffic is being rerouted around this disruption, leading to delays that could exceed 72 hours. The Los Angeles Times reports the fire, which has burned more than 13,000 acres and led to the evacuation of at least 8,000 people, was 20% contained as of Tuesday.

And some photos from a Twitter user, take with a grain of salt:

LINK: Union Pacific tracks heavily damaged in Lava Fire

Not looking great. Looks like there are entire segments of the bridge that were taken down in need of replacement.

If I were Amtrak, I’d declare Force Majeure on the Starlight and embargo it at Sacramento on the South and Portland on the North for the foreseeable future.

@wigwagfan: Erik, what say you?

Since there are other alternatives between Seattle and Eugene there's no need to run the Starlight between those two points. If there really was sufficient ridership then run it as a coach-only train, but there isn't...

Klamath Falls and especially Chemult don't have enough ridership to warrant a train by themselves, in fact they could probably be accommodated in a 15 seat van or a small bus.

John_Perkowski wrote: ↑Fri Jul 09, 2021 10:51 am If I were Amtrak, I’d declare Force Majeure on the Starlight and embargo it at Sacramento on the South and Portland on the North for the foreseeable future.

@wigwagfan: Erik, what say you?

Should be running to at least Eugene Oregon. Lots of people use the starlight for the 7 hour run down to Eugene and helps supplement the 2x daily Cascades service.

Coast Starlight trains stop in Eugene, Sacramento after Lava Fire scorches rail line near Mount Shasta

Really not looking great for my trip at the end of the month:

“We are certain the outage will extend into some or all of August and are looking at what is the best option for the next several weeks,” Marc Magliari, public relations manager for Amtrak government affairs and corporate communications said in an announcement Thursday.

What I don't understand is if they're so certain of that, why are they still selling tickets starting on July 15?

Mr. Dani, July 15 is #11 to KFS; #3011 (Busteetoot) to SAC

I see that now... no idea why Amtrak hasn't reached out to passengers who already have reservations to inform them of the disruption. If I wasn't actively following this I'd have no idea. At least now I know to book a flight and hotel so I'm not stuck on an overnight bus for 7.5 hours.

My experience from the airline side is you start contacting customers booked within a week, and keep moving out to future dates as those customers are contacted and/or reaccommodated.

It's a balancing act in that you want to do right by customers, but don't want to rebook too far out just in case things move faster and service is able to be restored sooner than expected.

You might ask why not tell everyone at once... there's only so much bandwidth at Amtrak's call centers anymore. Whether or not they could soak up a couple thousand more calls might be a challenge, especially after the week they just had on the East Coast with Elsa.

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I'm not expecting a call but an email would be nice.

Same effect... if you email everyone affected, that's going to drive a bunch of calls to the same call center dealing with Elsa affected customers and anything else that disrupts the system on a daily basis.

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Man I really hope genius thinking like yours isn’t actually running Amtrak. Let’s withhold info from our passengers so they can’t make alternative plans. Great customer service there.

Just watched Amtrak 505 arrive at Albany, Oregon. Just like always, there was more than plenty of room to accommodate anyone, everyone, their extended family, their fourth-cousins, and pretty much anyone within a half mile radius of them, in one of the six completely empty cars.

Thanks to Greyhound curtailing BoltBus and most of its regular service, there were about five or six passengers waiting to board the train to make the 40 mile journey to Eugene.