Buffalo, NY To Sandusky, OH On Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited

Trip Planning:

I decided for my big trip for 2011 that I wanted to go visit the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, MO and also ride the California Zephyr out west so as to go ride the Napa Valley Wine Train, visit the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, as well as drive and walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. I booked this trip using a combination of Amtrak Guest Rewards Points as well as booking the rest of the tickets through Amtrak.com. I would be riding Train #49 - The Lake Shore Limited from Buffalo-Depew Station to Sandusky, OH to visit Cedar Point. This would be my 20th straight year visiting this world class park and my 14th year using Amtrak to get there! I planned to stay at a Fairfield Inn by Marriott in Sandusky (same hotel as last year's trip) and would rent a car from Enterprise. After spending 3 days at the park and getting in some railfanning in Deshler, OH. I then planned to ride Train #29 - The Capitol Limited to Chicago, then take Train #3 - The Southwest Chief to La Plata, MO to visit the Depot Inn & Suites along with the Trainweb.com headquarters and the Silver Rails Gallery along with the Exhibition of Amtrak History. I paid for a Superliner Roomette on the Chief from Chicago to La Plata after having rode coach on #49 and #29. The total cost for those tickets was $263.00 booked through Amtrak.com . I booked from La Plata on Train #4 - The Southwest Chief to Galesburg, IL where I would connect with Train #5 - The California Zephyr and take that to Emeryville, CA where I would pick up a rental car from Enterprise at the San Francisco Airport and would be staying for 4 nights at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel in Vacaville, CA (a more central location between Napa, San Francisco and Sacramento). The tickets on Trains #4 and #5 were booked through Amtrak Guest Rewards at a cost of 20,000 points and I had a Superliner Roomette on both trains. This would be a huge trip and I couldn't wait for the 7 months to pass so as to take it! Well, things don't always go as planned and something would occur in early September 2011 that would render a portion of this trip as almost not happening…

Though the above newspaper clipping was fake (included here for "dramatic effect"), the suspension of the California Zephyr was real! Over the summer, the California Zephyr was having incredibly terrible issues with getting across its route on time due to trackwork, flooding and freight delays due to the flooding. In late August, the train was involved in a derailment in Benkleman, NE due to farm equipment fouling up the mainline. Amtrak then decided to cancel the train for 3 days in both directions to try to get things in order. Well, 3 days turned into a week, and that turned into Amtrak making the decision to not run the train between Chicago and Denver until further notice with a tentative restart date of October 1st. This would mean that I would now be stuck having to find an alternate routing for this portion of the trip as I was booked to ride it on September 29th. Knowing now that this wasn't gonna happen, I started looking at different itineraries that would allow me to still visit La Plata and still get to the west coast. I looked at flying out of nearby Kirksville, MO to St. Louis then flying to Denver but decided against that idea because I really can't stand flying to begin with (and I'm flying home on this trip anyway) and I really didn't want to fly on a "minivan with wings" from Kirksville to St. Louis!!! I looked at taking the Southwest Chief to Raton, NM and the bus to Denver but decided against that as I really didn't want to take the bus (but would end up doing so later on, please read!). I then decided to try to take the Chief to Los Angeles then the Coast Starlight to Emeryville. The sleeper space was available but I had to wait until Amtrak Guest Rewards opened at 5:00am to call and change my reservations. By the time I called, they tried to put that itinerary together only to find out there was no sleeper space available on the dates I'd be travelling between Albuquerque, NM and Los Angeles. Knowing I didn't want to "downgrade" to coach halfway through the trip, I decided to change the routing altogether which would unfortunately mean I wouldn't be able to visit La Plata at all. My "Plan B" was to take the Texas Eagle from Chicago to San Antonio, TX, then the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles, then an Amtrak Thruway Bus to Bakersfield, then a San Joaquin train to Emeryville. It's a bit out of the way, but it worked! Amtrak Guest Rewards took care of everything (involving the tickets booked through them) and got the reservations set up so all I had to do was go exchange the tickets at the station. I also ended up returning 1 ticket I paid for myself as I wouldn't need it (From Chicago to La Plata on the Chief) and was refunded the purchase price minus the standard 10% fee.
In the end, I would get to Emeryville a day earlier than plan so I ended up getting a hotel near the San Francisco Airport, The Hampton Inn South San Francisco and planned to pick up the rental car earlier on the day I was scheduled to arrive and would continue the rest of the trip as planned. On a side note, a couple weeks after I made these changes, Amtrak decided to restart service on the Zephyr out of Chicago!!! By now, I had already rebooked once, and thus wasn't gonna do it again!!! I definitely plan to visit La Plata next year. I'll be flying home out of San Francisco on American Airlines and will change planes at Chicago O'Hare and take American Eagle back to Buffalo. If I've learned anything with this experience, its that you need to be patient and flexible with your travel plans in case something like this should happen. The re-routing of a big portion of this trip will be the same as my trip on the Eagle and Sunset back in 2009 and thus I know this is going to be a fantastic trip. I now just had to wait 3 weeks for the day to arrive that I would begin this cross-country odyssey by rail!!!

Thursday Night - September 22nd, 2011:

I drove to the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, and parked my car at the Long Term B Lot as I would be flying home and wanted my car waiting for me when I got back. I then waited a good half hour for a shuttle van to pick me up to take me to the terminal where I could get a taxi over to the Amtrak Station. I saw at least 3 vans near where I was but none of them stopped to pick me up and I had the flashing strobe light on over the shelter I was waiting in that is designed to get the attention of the driver. I decided to walk to another shelter and finally, a shuttle van picked me up. I then took an Airport Taxi Service cab to the Buffalo-Depew Amtrak Station where I arrived around midnight. They charge a flat fare of $15.00 for that cab ride. Tonight's Train #49 - The Lake Shore Limited was running over an hour late and was scheduled now to arrive at 1:15am. I chatted briefly with the ticket agents at the station then bought a couple bottles of Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi then walked out to the platform and chatted with a passenger who would be riding this train to Chicago, and eventually to Las Vegas, NM on the Southwest Chief to visit a friend there. I also chatted with another passenger whom I gave the name of this web site to. A few freights went by including an eastbound grain train with 2 BNSF units for power! Oh how I wish this train ran through here in daylight!!! At 1:01am, running 1 hour and 6 minutes late, Train #49 arrived with P42DC #140 on the head end. The consist for tonight's train is shown below:



140	P42DC		Power
61	P42DC		Power
1736	Heritage Baggage		Baggage Car (From Boston)
62045	Viewliner Sleeper	Tower View	4920 - Sleeping Car (From Boston)
25113	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From Boston)
25095	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From Boston)
28005	Amfleet II Diner-Lite Car		Cafe/Lounge Car (From Boston)
25000	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From New York) (My Car)
25063	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From New York)
25123	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From New York)
25076	Amfleet II Coach		Coach (From New York)
8505	Heritage Diner		Dining Car (From New York)
62013	Viewliner Sleeper	Harvest View	4911 - Sleeping Car (From New York)
62033	Viewliner Sleeper	Scenic View	4912 - Sleeping Car (From New York)
1236	Heritage Baggage		Baggage Car (From New York)

  After following the route through my old neighborhood (Angola/Derby/Town of Evans) using VZ Navigator GPS app on my Blackberry, I took a walk through the train to take down car numbers before eventually heading to the cafe car with the computer to start writing this travelogue. We had a stop signal for unknown reasons near Dunkirk, NY. The train continued on shortly thereafter. I chatted for a bit with the crew. The Conductor was the same one I rode with on my trip last year. I showed the crew this web site and discussed trains in general with them. We passed 1 freight west of Dunkirk which was the first of this trip and the rest of the ride to Erie was relatively uneventful. We did slow down however for a few miles outside of the Erie Station. We arrived at Erie at 2:46am. One CSX Freight was passing us going east as we sat in the station at Erie. At 2:51am, we departed Erie running 1 hour and 15 minutes late.
  Eventually, I went back to my coach seat and listened to the scanner. There was little freight traffic this morning so not much was in our way. A freight passed us around Painesville, OH and another near Wickliffe, OH. As we got closer to the Cleveland Station, I could see the track next to us and how CSX abandoned it (road crossings appeared to be paved over the tracks), and it eventually no longer exists thus the Water Level Route is only single track through the Cleveland Station! I very much wonder what the former president of the New York Central, the late Alfred Perlman would think about the Water Level Route being single track in Cleveland??? We arrived at Cleveland at 4:27am running 1 hour late due to a little schedule padding. A quick smoke break was permitted and there was a rather large crowd boarding the train there. There also appears to be a fair amount of work being done on the platform in Cleveland to rehabilitate it. One of the crossings over the RTA (Cleveland's light-rail rapid transit system) tracks to the platform was completely roped off and there were a lot of cracks that had markings painted around them which likely means they're being fixed soon. I took down the last 2 car numbers during the Cleveland stop and we departed at 4:34am now running 49 minutes late. We crossed the drawbridge over the Cuyahoga River as we were now on Norfolk Southern tracks. All of this track was under the ownership of Conrail until its buyout and breakup in 1999. Both CSX and NS require the crews to call signals so that made it easier to figure out where we were. Somewhere near Olmstead Falls, OH, Amtrak's eastbound Lake Shore - Train #48 passed us and an NS freight passed shortly thereafter. We made our next brief stop at Elyria, OH at 5:12am and departed at 5:14am running 56 minutes late.
  Shortly after departing Elyria, an Amtrak coach attendant told me I needed to move to the next coach as the crew would be unloading passengers in Sandusky from that coach. I was not the only passenger who was told to move. In fact, one other passenger was told to move TWICE! I'm sorry, but from a customer service standpoint, this is not the best way to handle something like this. Now, I don't have issue with being asked to move to another car if its shortly before my stop so as to more efficiently handle that stop. I have been asked to do this in the past and have never had issue with it. That said, if it was me making the decisions, I would have told passengers when its close to the said stop, that we would be unloading from the next coach and that you should get your things together and move there at that time, verses possibly waking somebody up from a sound sleep only to tell them, no, you're not at your stop, rather, you need to move to another coach and your stop is 1/2 hour away! I was already awake and thus this didn't have a negative impact for me (nor would it), but for someone who is sound asleep which is generally the case at that time on this train, I can see that upsetting some passengers. At 5:46am, running 51 minutes late, I arrived at my endpoint for this leg of the trip in Sandusky, OH. A taxi was actually staged at the station and waiting for any passengers that may need one so I didn't even need to call for a cab to get to my hotel. After the quick cab to the hotel, I checked in at the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Sandusky and eventually called it a day, and so ends a relatively uneventful Day 1. And now, it's time to visit the most incredible amusement park on the face of the planet! For the 20th straight year (and second time this season for me), let's go to CEDAR POINT!!!!!!!!!