These "extreme railfans" occasionally make the already atrocious Amtrak service unbearable for the rest of us. Case in point: we once tried to take the Coast Starlight from Oakland to Los Angeles. The train was delayed out of Oakland by more than 3 hours, and into LA by about 5 hours (the difference between a 7 PM arrival and a midnight arrival). The crew had to change in an unexpected location, and conductors left the train unstaffed toward the end of the route.

The train had had two extra private cars tucked on to the end of it in Portland. When we looked at this particular train's schedule, we found that it started to fall behind schedule when it stopped to hook up those private cars (conductors confirmed this to us). That schedule gap started at 2 hours and grew to 5.

I know I'll never ride that Amtrak route again, and this experience soured me on all of Amtrak in general (except maybe for the NW Corridor - I know it's run differently).

We took the trip before the March 2018 memo that the article quotes: "These operations caused significant operational distraction, failed to capture fully allocated profitable margins, and sometimes delayed our paying customers on our scheduled trains ... one-time trips and charters are immediately discontinued." To us, that's too little too late, Amtrak's brand is ruined.