Has anyone done a study of how likely it is for any of the western long-distance trains to be interrupted, bus-bridged, or annulled now? Given the bridge and tunnel outages on UP, the common weather outages on the Empire Builder route, and annulments-bus bridges I've experienced myself with 3-4, the chance of this is pretty high. So high, in fact -- an annulment at Needles for 3 a couple years ago, a cancellation of a Starlight trip last year due to the UP bridge outage, that my wife and I have decided booking Amtrak for vacation trips is no longer a reliable option.

Past a certain point, I'm not sure if Amtrak has a serious product to sell. There are basic technological issues at work -- Greyhound can supply a new bus and take a highway detour; Southwest can find a new plane after several hours. The product is the same. Getting sleeping car passengers off the train at 1 AM and putting them on a bus with bad shocks is a different product, and Amtrak crews are not trained to deal with this sort of occurrence. Yeah, if you call Amtrak later, they'll refund part of your sleeping car fare as credit for a future trip. Big whoop.

Not sure if this is worth it for any but the most pain-tolerant railfan traveler.