Tove Danovich didn’t think she had cause for concern as she boarded the Portland-bound train Wednesday evening. She settled into her seat after a day at a bookseller’s conference in Seattle, expecting her husband would pick her up at the train station around 9:45 p.m.
That’s not quite how things turned out.
And while she says she understands nobody’s at fault for the inclement weather that caused delays and cancellations across transit systems, she does feel like Amtrak could have done a better job preparing for the storm or, at the very least, communicating with its passengers.
“Things just happen, and it sucks for everyone,” Danovich said of Wednesday’s snowstorm. “I just feel it would’ve been so easy for them to communicate things to us.”
Amtrak representatives did not immediately provide comment on Danovich’s description of her experience.
Danovich said her train got delayed twice, first shortly after 9 p.m., about 20 miles north of Vancouver. Over the intercom, Amtrak staff told passengers the train had to go back north several miles because they had missed a stop where they needed to drop some people off, Danovich said. That mission completed, the train got to Vancouver around 10 p.m. and stopped again, this time for much longer, she said.
Conductor Sergio Loza makes a check of Oregon’s new Amtrak Cascades in 2014. The Amtrak service is the only rail connection between Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. (Thomas Boyd, Thomas Boyd)
The train still hadn’t moved about an hour later because, Danovich said passengers were told over the intercom, the signal lights needed to be cleared of snow.
By that point, her husband was waiting for her at Portland Union Station, having braved the snowy roads from their home in the suburbs south of Portland. She told him to go back home when, from an announcement on the intercom, she learned the train now had to wait for a fresh crew to come from Portland because the existing train crew had maxed out how much time they were allowed to work.
Around quarter to midnight the train started moving again, and Danovich was soon at Union Station. But as she tried to figure out how to get home, she said station staff told her to go outside because the building was closing.
No Uber or Lyft cars were available, as far as she could tell, so she texted her husband to come get her. She waited about 20 minutes for him to get there and they were home shortly before 1 a.m.
The 33-year-old newly published author and freelance journalist was happy to return home. But she’s not happy her husband had to risk the roads two times, or that Amtrak seemed to keep her and others in the dark for too long about the reasons for the delays, or that Union Station kicked her and several other waiting passengers out into the cold.
“As a mode of transportation, it’s great,” Danovich said of trains. But “this was not an awesome time.”
— Fedor Zarkhin