Amtrak is ending daily service to hundreds of stations outside the Northeast, and you can blame the coronavirus pandemic, the railroad said this week.
Starting Oct. 1, most Amtrak long-distance trains will operate three times a week instead of daily, the company said in a memo to employees Monday.
Among the routes getting cut: My beloved Southwest Chief, which I've taken several times from the Kansas City area to Chicago. The last big trip I took before the pandemic, in fact, was a long weekend to the Windy City -- I gifted my dad with the trip. He had once worked on a track crew, and his father retired from Amtrak, but he had never taken a long train trip before. We spent the entire ride there in the observation car, kind of zen experience of meditating on the countryside in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times.
It beats the hell out of air travel, that's for sure.
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