Amtrak Delays

It’s not surprising but our train is late. Scheduled to depart the Greenville, South Carolina Station at 10:58 PM, it’s running three and a half hours behind! We’ve been aware of this fact all evening. We’ve been watching the status on the Amtrak app. Then again, we just checked the Check Your Train website and it now looks like The Crescent is running five hours and twenty-four minutes behind schedule. It’s not unusual for Amtrak passenger trains to run behind schedule. They travel on tracks owned and managed by freight lines and often the passenger trains must wait on a siding while freight trains take priority. The Crescent runs on Norfolk Southern lines and apparently Amtrak trains wait longer on Norfolk Southern tracks than on most other freight tracks nationwide according to the 2017 Amtrak Report Card. In our own experience, it’s not unusual for The Crescent to run one to two hours late and it can usually make up the time between Greenville and New York. This time we’re wondering if we will be able to make our connection to The Northeast Regional. It was supposed to be an almost four hour layover! For now we will just have to enjoy watching the freight trains here in Greenville as we wait and figure out some way to turn this into an adventure!