An Ill Desert Wind : Vacationers Describe Their Experience on the Amtrak ‘Train From Hell’

“It was a horrible experience--the train from hell.”

That was how Suzann Lynette Jaure, 24, of Riverside described a recent round-trip on Amtrak from Los Angeles to the Colorado Rockies.

She and eight Southern California friends had booked a mid-January ski trip on the train that Amtrak calls the Desert Wind. The idea of taking the train sounded like fun, she said. It wasn’t.

Twice, locomotives conked out, leaving passengers stranded for hours before the crippled trains could be towed into distant stations. At one point, they were kicked off a train by an angry conductor. On the way back from Colorado, their train was delayed eight hours by a derailed freight and mechanical problems.

When it was over, Jaure and her group had spent five of their nine vacation days just trying to get there and back.

A look at Amtrak’s track record shows such misadventures are not that unusual.

Nearly two decades after Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corp. to rescue the nation’s fast-disappearing passenger rail service, the 230 daily trains in the federally subsidized Amtrak system are carrying record numbers of passengers--but not without serious problems, including frequent breakdowns.

Ten years of budget cutbacks and operating deficits have left Amtrak with a third fewer passenger cars than it had just a few years ago and rail officials report that the shortage of locomotives is even more serious. Often, there is no time to properly service or maintain the aging engines between runs because they must be pressed into service to replace locomotives that have “gone belly up,” as one Amtrak spokesman put it.

Those trains that reach their destinations without help run behind schedule at least 25% of the time, reports show. The Desert Wind’s on-time record is 47%, according to the most recent report.

“Unfortunately, we are becoming victims of our success,” Amtrak President W. Graham Claytor told Congress in 1989, when he was asking for money to buy more rolling stock. “The growing demand for Amtrak service nationwide is outstripping our capacity to provide it.”

Running a railroad with short crews, one-man stations and an overtaxed reservation system can be hectic and, as Jaure and her party found out, it sometimes turns into a rude experience. Their trip offers a glimpse of what train travel on Amtrak can be like.

Jaure and Masoud (Danny) Razipour, 31, a Harbor City businessman, organized the trip after seeing a promotional Amtrak ad on TV. They were ticketed to Glenwood Springs, Colo., west of Denver, a 24-hour trip from Los Angeles. They were to ski at Vail and Copper Mountain for seven days.

“I had looked forward to that train trip; it was to be the highlight of the vacation,” Razipour said. “What makes me so mad is that we took a nine-day vacation . . . but we spent five of those days fighting Amtrak.”

The journey started at noon on Saturday, Jan. 19. Along with 200 passengers, Jaure and her friends boarded Amtrak’s Train No. 36 at Union Station.

Somewhere east of Barstow the locomotive lost power, the lights went out and the Desert Wind rolled to a stop. There they sat for two hours, while Amtrak officials scrambled to borrow a freight engine from Union Pacific.

Freight locomotives have no auxiliary electrical systems to provide lights, air conditioning or other amenities in passenger cars. The train was dark for the trip into Las Vegas; there was no food service and the toilets were locked.

In Las Vegas, the passengers were told to board charter buses for a 10-hour ride to Salt Lake City, where they could catch another train to their destinations. Jaure’s group declined, saying they would wait for the next day’s train. Sorry, Amtrak said, Sunday’s Desert Wind was booked full.

Actually, there were plenty of seats on the next train, but not at the special fares that Jaure and her party had paid, Amtrak officials later told The Times. It was the discounted fare seats that were booked solid.

Jaure and her friends persisted, were finally given reservations and Amtrak put them up in a hotel for the night.

Sunday evening’s Desert Wind was nearly 40 minutes late arriving in Las Vegas. When the group boarded the train, the conductor immediately took umbrage at something somebody in the party said or did. The whole group was ordered off the train.

Razipour contends that it was racial prejudice that triggered the conductor’s actions. He and several other members of the party are Iranians who have lived in Southern California for years. Razipour said the conductor swore at them and said he would not put up with any trouble from “you Arabs.”

Amtrak officials denied there was anything racial about the incident.

Upon boarding, the group “apparently was aggressive and angered by their experience from the day before,” said Amtrak spokesman Clifford Black. Black said his information came from Brian Tuttle, the train’s conductor. Tuttle reported that some members of the group were rowdy and appeared intoxicated, Black said.

Tuttle summoned two Las Vegas police officers and had the nine passengers ejected from the train. Black said Tuttle was not available for comment.

A police spokesman said no one in the party was drunk, although several of the men were loud and angry. He said the conductor has the right to eject anyone from the train, and explained that the police were there only at Tuttle’s request.

Another passenger who was not with the party, but who witnessed the confrontation, said in an interview that the group was neither intoxicated nor rowdy.

“They were nice friendly people,” said William Stewart of Hermosa Beach. “They were jovial . . . having fun, but they were not causing any kind of disturbance whatsoever.” He said the group was “treated wrongly.”

Ernie Bello, the lone Amtrak station agent at Las Vegas, agreed with Stewart’s assessment. Bello had booked the group into a hotel Saturday night and assisted them in getting seats on Sunday’s train. He also saw them immediately after they were kicked off the train.

Bello said the group had not caused any problems in the station. “They were just a lively bunch, having a good time. . . . They weren’t doing anything other than having a good time,” Bello said. “But then, I have no jurisdiction on the train. The conductor is the boss. But I can tell you they weren’t drunk and I didn’t see anyone drinking.”

By now, they were 36 hours out of Los Angeles and had gotten no farther than Las Vegas.

Late Sunday night, Jaure and her friends, at their own expense, caught a plane to Denver, rented a car and arrived at the ski resort at dawn Monday.

They skied through the week and were scheduled to board the westbound Desert Wind on Saturday, Jan. 26. The train was four hours late arriving at Glenwood Springs because, somewhere in Nebraska, it had lost an engine and had to be towed in by a freight engine.

During the return trip, there was another four-hour delay when the train was held in Salt Lake City while a derailed freight was cleared from the tracks. The Desert Wind finally arrived back in Los Angeles nearly eight hours late that Sunday.

“We not only lost several days of skiing and had to spend an additional $3,400, but we also got home so late we missed the Super Bowl,” Razipour said.

Amtrak officials said they regretted the inconvenience, but said the breakdowns were unavoidable because of the heavy demand being placed on the short supply of old equipment.

“We’re the first to admit there’s a terrific shortage of locomotives,” said Amtrak spokesman Art Lloyd. He said the situation will improve in the not-too-distant future.

Amtrak’s 1991 budget includes enough money to order 52 new locomotives.