Bikes on Amtrak

[Eric Nichols]

Hi NERds -

I'm planning a couple of bike adventures near Washington DC and NYC later in the year. I would really like to get there without driving.  Studying the Amtrak rules and schedules for the Northeast Corridor, it looks like there are two options:

1. Unpacked bike: they offer a train-side checked bike service on one train per day.  They take your complete bike (stripped of bags) and place it in the baggage car, on one of 6 available (reserved) hooks.
2. Packed bike: if the box or bag exceeds their (rather small) carry-on size limit, it must be sent as checked baggage, where they take the item and place it in the baggage car.

Disappointingly, these options are only available on the same train, which runs once per day.  Worse still, it is the slow red-eye overnight train in both directions. 

Has anyone done this, or had success with an alternate strategy for taking a bike on a Northeast Corridor train (rinko-style?) or other public transit option?

Tailwinds,

Eric Nichols

[David Lafferty]

Amtrak isn't very bike friendly, but many of the long distance bus companies are. It looks like Bolt, Go Bus, and Concord Coach are happy to accept bikes as luggage.

I took a bus back from NYC to Boston a few years ago. I rolled my [complete, unbagged, unboxed, non-coupled] bike into the baggage area under the bus. It was either free or $10 to bring the bike. To be honest, I don't remember which bus company that was, though. The whole thing was relatively inexpensive and uneventful.

By contrast, Amtrak makes you feel like you're really putting them out to bring a bus on board -- even after you've reserved a spot for it. 

Cheers,

David

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[Ted Shwartz]

Plus 1 on Concord Coach from my Portland to Boston experience. The driver even let me load the bicycle myself into the luggage section

All the best,

Ted Shwartz

On Jan 28, 2020, at 10:20 AM, David Lafferty <laff...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:



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[Andy G]

Does Amtrak still let you "ship" a bike? I helped someone with that once after RAAM. They had brought two bikes for the race, and wanted to ship one home but fly with the other to another race elsewhere. We packed up the bike in the Ginormous Amtrak Bike Box(TM) where you just turn the bars and remove pedals, and sent the bike on its merry way for about $75 cross country. It gets held at the destination station for (I believe) up to two weeks. Then you can ride the train any time you please and hopefully the bike still exists at your destination.

Andy

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 10:01 AM Eric Nichols <ericni...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Amy Lippe]

Seconding bus option - have brought unpacked bike for free multiple times on Bolt and Go - just goes underneath with other luggage. Recommend some padding if you can for the side that’s down. Ready to ride as soon as off the bus! Also have found that buses have more obscure destinations than Amtrak. 

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[Neal Lerner]

I've done both Amtrak (last summer) and bus (the summer before) bicycle transport in the last couple of years. The first was Boston to DC, and I opted for the one Amtrak train that allowed unpacked bicycles to be checked: the overnighter! It left South Station at 9:30 pm and got into DC Union Station at 7:30 am the next day. It was quite easy to arrange for the bike, and they just hang it on a hook in the baggage car (though I had to wait a fairly long time in DC for the proper baggage handler to appear), and actually called me early the day I was scheduled to leave to make sure I knew where to take the bike. I also had to remove any bags. I read somewhere recently that Amtrak is now relaxing its rules on carrying bikes on some of its lines, but that info is hard to come by on Amtrak's website.

In terms of bus, a buddy and I took Megabus from Riverside T-station to Manhattan a couple of years back and stowed our bicycles underneath where the luggage goes. It was a bit frightening to see the driver toss our bikes into the storage hold, but they emerged fine. We were told, however, that priority goes to "real" luggage and that during more popular times, if the hold fills with bags, we would have been out of luck. Not sure if that's true for the other bus companies or how much it's up to the discretion of the driver.

Neal Lerner

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[Charles Coldwell]

Just ride the bike there.

Problem solved.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 10:01 AM Eric Nichols <ericni...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Charles M. Coldwell, W1CMC
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"Turn on, log in, tune out"

[Andy G]

I just saw that Amtrak is planning to replace the cars around 2026-2031 with the new "Airo" style. I reached out to ask if bike storage is included and was given a generic response that basically was "who knows". So that's fun.

The new trains are capable of 125mph. My only experience was from Dover to Portland was more like 60mph max. Apparently the Downeaster speed will depend on the tracks/crossings, but hopefully it can at least go slightly faster than the highway someday.

Not much detail here: https://www.amtrak.com/amtrak-airo

Andy in NH

[Jas Dembinski]

Why am I envisioning cyclists jumping onto trains like the mujadin (or whoever they were) who rode the great worms in the fantasy novel Dune?  Anyways, those trains will be a certain step backwards in human evolution if they don't have plentiful bike storage!  All then we can hope for is the one-step backward two-steps forward scenario.  Meanwhile, looking forward to 2023!