Amtrak is celebrating fall early with a flash sale that has 30 percent off Flex fare tickets across the country.
17.07.2024 - 15:37 / nytimes.com / Hudson River
On June 20, after millions of Americans had suffered through a sweltering heat wave for three days, Amtrak sent an ominous warning over social media: Trains connecting the largest cities in Northeast could face up to an hour of delay from high temperatures.
Later that afternoon, after the temperature peaked at 96 degrees in Newark, Amtrak lost electricity near the New Jersey side of the Hudson River tunnels. The power failure soon shuttered a 150-mile stretch of the busiest rail corridor in the United States for more than three hours. The impact reverberated until the next day, when trains chugged through with hours of residual delays.
As the planet rapidly warms, train delays and breakdowns are becoming more frequent as America’s antiquated rail infrastructure struggles to remain functional during prolonged extreme weather events that were not typical when the system was constructed.
A New York Times analysis of Amtrak data found that the rail service’s passengers have faced record delays in recent years caused by inclement weather such as heat waves, storms, floods, high winds, low temperatures, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires.
Extreme weather events bogged down Amtrak trains for more than 4,010 hours in the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October 2022 and ended in September 2023, according to a Times analysis of more than 313,000 individual train delay data dating to September 2003. That was the highest number of weather-related delays in at least 20 years.
Amtrak is celebrating fall early with a flash sale that has 30 percent off Flex fare tickets across the country.
Picking a seat on a plane can often feel like a Goldilocks dilemma to me. That aisle seat that's way up front, so I can get off quickly and not miss my connection, but will likely mean my shoulder gets knocked against each time someone passes by. A window seat that's too far back but is also on the right—and I know I sleep better when I lean in that direction. From the minute I book a flight until the final seconds before boarding, I find myself pulling up the airplane seat map to reassess my options for finding a seat that is “just right.”
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While weather-related travel delays are typically saved for the winter, the summer's record-high heat is sparking potential disruptions around the country on Amtrak. “High temperatures during warmer summer months can impact Amtrak operations. Extreme heat can cause rail, bridge and overhead wires to expand,” Amtrak shared in an advisory this week. “As a precautionary approach, Amtrak may enact heat restrictions which require locomotive engineers to operate trains at lower speeds and can result in possible delays.”
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