We made it back to Los Angeles, only three hours late. It was an interesting trip home. On Saturday, we left Houston only 18 minutes late and seemed to make that up, that is, until yesterday morning, when a train ahead of us a few miles hit a car at a crossing out in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, the train didn't derail but we had to wait better than an hour before they cleared the tracks. Never heard if anyone was hurt or what. When we went by the accident site all we could see was that the crossing signal/gate mechanism had been knocked over.
They also had electrical problems yesterday, a short in the connection for the power to the cars in the train. The engines were OK, just that there's a separate generator that feeds power to the rest of the train and it keep dropping out. Finally, after about three stops not being able to fix it, they switched the power lines for the cars over to the power from the engine(s) themselves, which is a sort of backup scenario. After that, everything was OK, but it did delay lunch for about an hour.
And then this morning, as we were coming through Palm Springs, they apparently had had a sand storm overnight and all of the switches were jammed with sand. Now that didn't stop anyone as they had both East and West bounds tracks, but since trains couldn't switch tracks to get around slower trains, we were stuck going only as fast as that slowest train ahead of us. While we were three hours late into Union Station, we were able to catch the next Metrolink to Orange County, so in the end, we only ended-up getting home about an hour later than was the original plan.
All in all, it was a new adventure for us.
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