First stop, Salinas

The train arrived five minutes early into San Jose and left right on time. We’re now in Salinas, and are 15 minutes early. Amtrak? Early? A refreshing change, to be sure. Amtrak has greatly improved its onetime performance since my sabbatical trip–on that trip, one of my trains was a whopping 14 hours late–but I would still recommend that you schedule very loose connections when traveling by train. We are scheduled to arrive in LA’s Union Station at 9:00pm tonight, and the Sunset Limited (our next train) doesn’t leave until 10:00pm. An hour, however, is a bit too risky in my experience; better to spend the night in LA and head out the next day (which is indeed what we are doing). It does help having family in LA.

[update: we got to San Luis Obispo about 40 minutes ahead of schedule. We’re holding at the station until the scheduled departure time, though.]

As it is, they are anticipating that we’ll get into LA a bit early tonight, which is just fine by me…