Doug Clark: More dispatches on the adventures of riding the rails

My recent Amtrak odyssey to Montana with my lovely wife, Sherry, resonated with a carload of readers who called and wrote to rail about their subjective train tales.

Some of the stories are simply too much fun to not pass along.

So hop aboard the Doug Train today as we take one more gander at the rigors of riding the rails.

“”Two and half days of hell.”

That’s how Marie Heeren described the Amtrak journey that derailed her desire to ever again try train travel.

“I don’t even want my dead body on there.”

Her saga took place about a decade ago. Heeren said she booked passage from Spokane to Los Angeles. “My mother decided she wanted to go on an adventure,” said the Airway Heights woman in a sarcastic tone.

Everything went wrong, she added, from lousy food to surly service to delays. The bottom line, however, was in having to use those legendary nasty train toilets.

Done with that, Heeren said she booked a flight back to Spokane. Then she wrote a letter to Amtrak seeking a refund on the unused half of her round trip ticket.

Amtrak sent her a $50 coupon good for future travel. She sent it back with another letter. Amtrak, she said, sent her a $75 coupon. Heeren sent it back with yet another letter.

Back came a $100 coupon.

Her fourth letter finally got her an acceptable $100 refund check, she said.

Based on what I saw, I told Heeren that Amtrak had obviously made many improvements in the last 10 years.

Heeren wasn’t buying any of it.

“Why would I ever want to take a train to hell when I could die and go there easier?”

“Speaking of those fabled locommodes, my buddy Tom McArthur wrote to tell me that he learned something while riding the Empire Builder recently from Minot, N.D.

“I discovered no one can hit the small, moving target of an Amtrak toilet, it seems, whether the task be No. 1 or No. 2.”

Thanks for sharing, Tom. And no marksmanship merit badge for you.

“Bill Lesley let me know what a kick he got out of the travails we encountered on the way to Essex, Mont.

“While my experiences were not as exciting as yours, I could see how a person not properly schooled in the Adventure of Train Travel could be taken aback,” he wrote.

“Of course, it also helped that I was heavily sedated at the time.”

“Shirley Hooper was only too glad to respond to Amtrak’s request for rider comments. She e-mailed me an outline of what she told the company.

“I departed Williston, N.D., headed for Spokane. To begin with the train was two hours late. En route, the engineer had to stop the train twice because the engine was overheating.

“Then there was an apparent computer signal problem along the track route, and the train had to travel many, many miles at approximately five miles an hour until that problem was corrected.”

OK, Shirley. Is that about it?

“Although probably beyond the control of the train crew, the air conditioning temperature in the car I occupied was set so low that we all nearly froze.”

What, there’s more?

“…We asked the employee assisting us if we could please have blankets and he informed us that there weren’t any on board.”

Well, at least things couldn’t get any worse.

“One older lady wrapped a large garbage bag around her legs as a barrier from the cold air.”

Hooper sent her frigid prose to Amtrak. She said the complaint eventually yielded her a full refund on her ticket and an apologetic telephone call from a nice official.

“I won’t ride the train again if I can help it,” wrote Hooper in her e-mail to me. “But Amtrak is doing something right – they have a good PR Department.”

“Tom Evans, an Amtrak engineer, sent me an e-mail to extol the virtues of his employer and to let me know the railroad’s on-time performance actually “hovers in the 89-percent range.”

I believe him. I’m also betting that, as with most things in life, the Amtrak good news outdistances all the juicy horror stories by miles.

Evans suggested that I contact the Amtrak media moguls to see if I could tag along for a ride up front in the actual locomotive. Great idea. Hmm. I wonder if they’d let me smuggle in some of that “sedation” Bill Lesley was talking about.