If you are like most people, when you think about travel destinations and the best way to get there, you probably do not give much thought to traveling by train, especially if you are in the Midwest. I know that in my family, and this is also true of friends I have talked to, the train just does not seem like a good choice for getting from point A to point B. In fact, most people would rather spend more hours in a car than try the train.
I thought it might be a good idea to take a brief look at why this might be the case, so I will start with experiences I had with one of my children traveling by passenger train on a trip that would come within an hour of our hometown. The bottom line is that after two or three tries at this method of getting my college student close to home by train, I decided it would be more efficient to drive for half a day or have someone meet us halfway. The train option quickly became no option at all. Why? Because a trip that was scheduled to take a few hours ended up taking, about three times that long.
Although my son once arrived within about an hour of what was scheduled, that happened only one time. A more typical experience found me waiting at the train station up to 12 hours after the train left its original point. This was eight hours longer than the mileage and schedule called for! Let me just say that after two similar experiences, I just did not use the train for travel anymore.
Since that time, I have heard from friends and family that traveling by train from Chicago to St. Louis, for example, was actually a good experience in that the train arrived on time and the trip was quite smooth. However, going from Kansas City to St. Louis, across Missouri, was nowhere near the same experience. In fact, I eventually got a letter from Amtrak that explained the problem.
Apparently, the freight train companies, which include boxcars, coal cars, chemical cars, and so on, own the tracks and passenger trains crossing Missouri. Therefore, the train actually had to stop, sometimes for an hour or more to wait for a train that was using the same track or crossing on another track in front of the passenger train. On one trip, my son waited with a few other people on a siding for two hours to let freight trains pass.
While this explained the problem, three years later I still have not thought seriously about using the train for travel. If you want to travel by train or have a family member or friend travel to meet you, ask about this so you will know exactly what to expect.