Cheapest Amtrak Ticket Ever
June 12, 2008
One of my earlier postings detailed a trip to Paoli, PA I took last year on Amtrak which was extremely inexpensive for an Amtrak trip (the ticket was $6 from Philadelphia). I recently found what probably is the absolute cheapest Amtrak ticket possible (other than free tickets earned through Amtrak Guest Rewards) — a trip from St. Louis, Missouri to Alton, Illinois. The base fare on this run varies from $2 to $7, and with discounts such as student advantage, military, etc. the price can be even lower.
Here’s a photo of an actual ticket to prove that it’s real.
Obviously, earning points should not be the only reason to take a train trip. But it’s not a bad thing to earn points on a meaningful trip, such as one for business or to visit friends or eat dinner.
Yesterday, Septa announced a new promotional fare for travel on its regional rail trains on weekends and major holidays. It’s not really as much of a savings as one might expect.
Septa trains are broken up into a system of 6 zones – higher zones require a higher fare. Furthermore, fares are broken up into peak, off peak, on-board peak, and on board off peak… and there are also round trips and one ways.
Here is the complex pricing matrix of one-way tickets:
When all six zone and ticket type combinations are tallied, that’s a total of 30 different fares… and that’s just for one way tickets.
Now let’s look at the round-trip discounts.
Four fare types for each zone times six zones equals 24 round trip fares. We’re up to 54 so far. We also have to consider the inevitable combination of a trip that is half “peak” and half “off-peak”, say, someone who goes from Philly to Wilmington on a Friday during rush hour and comes back to Philly the next morning. These fares aren’t even listed.
Now, the new weekend discount fares.
Four more prices. Sigh!
Let’s study how much of a savings these weekend fares really are. Since they are weekend fares, they are really a special case of off-peak fares, which are already lower than the peak fares. They’re also advance purchase fares. So let’s compare these to the third column in the chart above – Off-peak round trip (A).
In zones 1 and 2, the weekend fare is 75 cents lower than the regular off-peak fare, a discount of about 12%. Ok, cool. A zone 3 off peak round trip is $8.25, and the new weekend price is $8, a whopping 25 cents….3% off. Zones 4 and 5 normally would be $9.25, and the weekend fare is $9… another mighty 25 cent discount, about 3% discount. The most insulting is the non-discount for zone 6, which is a $15 round trip regardless of whether it’s a “weekend” or “off-peak round trip” ticket.
What Septa really needs to work on is simplifying these complicated fares. They could get by with three fares. Center city Philly to somewhere else within the city, somewhere outside the city but still in the State of Pennsylvania, and somewhere out of state ( NJ or Delaware ).
Defective Patco Train Faregate
May 7, 2008
Last night one of the fare gates at the 15th street PATCO train station was malfunctioning in a pretty bizarre way. Here’s a video.
Same Money on Amtrak rides between NYC and Philadelphia
April 29, 2008
While playing around on Amtrak.com, I noticed some peculiarities in the pricing of tickets from New York City. If your travel plans involve travel from NYC to Philadelphia, it might be worth looking into the price of tickets to cities west of Philadelphia to see if they are cheaper. You’d just get off the train in Philly. Some possibilities to try include Paoli ( PAO ), Lancaster ( LNC ), and Harrisburg ( HAR ).
Here are two screen shots that show an example of the pricing oddity.
NYC to Philly pricing
Amtrak Trains are Fast!
April 24, 2008
I played with a Garmin GPS unit on my Amtrak ride from Philly to Harrisburg and was amazed at the speeds our train was hitting, especially in the rural areas near Lancaster, PA. The highest speed recorded on the journey was 111 mph, and the speed at the instant this photo was taken was 108 mph!
