Any Amtrak Trip Can Go South At Any Time

I'm starting to think it's become railfan conventional wisdom that even if you think you're having a good trip on Amtrak, it can go south in a big way at any time. Via Trains.com, over the July 4 weekend,

Heat-related delays already had the Chicago-bound Floridian five hours late when it reached Washington on July 4 during severe weather that caused cancellation of that evening’s holiday events. But after arriving at 8:30 p.m., the train didn’t depart Washington until 9:45 a.m. on July 5, nearly 18 hours late. It arrived in Chicago at 4:14 a.m. on Monday, July 6, some 19 hours, 29 minutes late.

The westbound equipment is supposed to flip back east the same day, but with no trainset available, the Sunday departure for Florida was canceled, as was Monday’s departure from Miami. Equipment availability should be back to normal for the Chicago departure today (Tuesday, July 7).

Meanwhile, the southbound Floridian that left Washington two hours late on Sunday departed Jacksonville, Fla., more than eight hours late on Monday after a three-hour delay there. It also encountered heat restrictions and freight train interference, according to Amtrak alerts. It was due to arrive in Miami at 2:44 a.m. today, more than 8½ hours late.

Another Florida-bound train, the Silver Meteor, was stuck at Washington Union Station from 7:03 p.m. Sunday until 4:47 a.m. Monday, waiting for operational locomotives. It lost another hour at Florence, S.C., because of a CSX signal outage. The train was almost 12 hours late leaving Jesup, Ga., on Monday evening and was projected to reach Miami at 5:58 a.m. today, not quite 11 hours late.

I notice that the popular YouTube channel Grounded Life Travel, which used to hype Amtrak sleepers extensivley, hasn't featured Amtrak for over a year, and not long before they dropped the Amtrak hype entirely, they posted this:

Riding long-distance trains on Amtrak is likely to be a retirement activity for most people, especially since you can't rely on scheduled arrival and departure times if you have to be back at work the day after you get back. Beyond that, there's definitely a non-trivial chance that the heat or A/C will go out, or you can simply be put off the train in the middle of nowhere for any number of reasons. Here's another reality check:

Originally, I looked forward t riding Amtrak a lot more during my retirement, but the experiences turned out to be more stressful, not least due to boisterous fellow passengers, than they were worth.