We wound up our California Zephyr train ride yesterday by chugging through Roseville, where the largest rail yards in the western U.S. are located, and then through Sacramento (the yellow/Golden bridge seems to have been the highlight…at least from the train), and eventually down to San Pablo Bay and the northeastern part of San Francisco Bay that fronts Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland. The East Bay is very much the working side of this great bay and it shows in the vestigial pilings all along the shore. Just the fact that the rail line runs directly along the water is very telling of the area’s industrial origins and is very reminiscent of the north shore of Staten Island and the Bayonne portion of New York Harbor. What’s also reminiscent of those heady days we spent living on Staten Island is the distant and Emerald City like views across the water to the great and mighty OZ of San Francisco. The Emeryville Station, where the train dead ends, is a bit less urbanized than I expected and is certainly not the grand marble Union Stations of the Northeast, but rather a small and tidy station that says less about the grandeur of the Bay Area and more about the fact that the city (technically the cities) have largely abandoned train travel in favor of driving and flying wherever they need to go. As we detrained, we were headed for the nearby Hyatt to overnight for two nights while we went to visit with old pal Frank, who is working his way through various health issues. We got to the Hyatt via an overpass and a parking lot, which was actually quite convenient, but hardly regal in terms of arrival grandeur. When we checked into the relatively modern and uncrowded Hyatt lobby, we were told that the restaurant offered “small bites” for dinner (defined as a reduced menu of five items that the waiter could prepare by himself in the kitchen) and that Uber was the best way to get into the City (assuming we meant San Francisco, versus Berkeley or Oakland…which I suspect are the more operative cities for Emeryville).
While pondering the selection of small bites for dinner (hummus for Kim, chicken Caesar for me), I got a text from Amtrak that said, “AMTRAK ALERT: Due to an unplanned equipment change, train 11 will have reduced capacity. We are recommending passengers to modify their reservation to prevent standing conditions.” Hmm. Kim and I had already discussed our train ride while heading south from Sacramento in our 6’x7’ luxury bedroom suite that we sat in for the last half of the ride through the Sierras. We had decided to stay the course and carry on in two days from Emeryville down to Oceanside as we had booked and planned. It was scheduled to be a long 16 hour train day, but we said we could handle it. We were thinking of possibly upgrading from the roomette accommodations to another full bedroom based on what we experienced of the the comforts of Amtrak, but this text alert suddenly threw all of that into a cocked hat, as they say. I went on the Amtrak website as instructed and called up my reservation to see what options they were offering. There were actually many alternative paths from Emeryville to Oceanside for Friday (ones I had not seen for some reason when booking). They were rerouted through the less scenic spots (like the San Joaquin Valley through Bakersfield) and they these little small print notions on various legs of each of them that implied (notice I did not say “clearly stated”) that there would be some bus transitioning involved. I am a man of the people and I can handle a train ride with the working folks of the world, but communal bus rides are not something I will do. I am not John Candy enough to sing, “Meet the Flinstones…” like he does in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. That’s when the planning fun began.
It seems that there were upgrades to a bedroom available on our scheduled train, which didn’t completely reconcile with Amtrak’s dire warning. But when I clicked through to the cost (which I did twice as I fumbled around with the options), I noticed that the cost of the offered upgrade was rising. I checked with Claude, who told me that Amtrak does, indeed, use dynamic pricing now, so it seems that the demand for bedrooms on my train were rising as their text started scaring people into not wanting to end up standing for 16 hours in the coach car. Then I also noticed that the value that Amtrak was offering for me to cancel and give me a partial refund on my bedroom was also rising. I had no idea that cancelation breakage was also subject to dynamic pricing, but that seems to be happening real time on Amtrak during this Train 11 capacity squeeze. Now, I worked on a trading desk on Wall Street and I am nobody’s fool. I see market action for what it is and I am a big believer that you cannot fight the market, but that you do a lot better by going with the market flow. I then shifted markets to check on flights from SFO back down to San Diego. That’s called arbitrage on Wall Street. That would involve an added Uber to SFO and a slightly longer Uber from SAN home versus the midnight Uber from Oceanside home. This was getting complicated…I should have had Agentic Claude handle this for me…
With the train, we would be getting up and out for an 8:30 departure…walking back over the overpass to the station and boarding the train in whatever fashion they operated on these tracks (presumably somewhere between the Union Station and the SLC rail siding experiences). We would spend 16 hours on the train including a one hour transfer in Los Angeles at 9pm (anyone know how safe LA Amtrak Station is at night???), only to get off at the lonely Oceanside station at midnight for our Uber home. With the plane we would take our time in the morning and catch an Alaska Airlines flight at SFO at 10:30, fly premium economy (I have credit on Alaska to fly First, but it is booked) for an hour and a half to SAN, arriving at noon. With the Uber home we would get home a full 12 hours earlier, which has less to do with needing to be there and more to do with being at home versus traveling on a giggling train during that time. The logistics strongly favored the fly home program.
Alaska also has dynamic pricing protocols and I could see that there were plenty of seats available still in premium economy, and even more in regular economy. Those are dwindling assets, as we know, so waiting to book those probably works in my favor to a certain extent. But then Uber might go up, because they dynamically price too, right? Damn, where is Claude when I need him? I didn’t even bother trying to check the other airlines since I favor Alaska for some reason, and I don’t think I have the mental capacity to expand this dynamic pricing journey. So, I got Kim’s go-ahead and I booked the flights and cancelled the train and after the dust settled, the whole broken play cost me a net $300 to save 12 hours of Amtrak agony. That’s $25/hour times two, which is what the guys standing outside Home Depot get these days. However, since my expert witness billing rate is very high and I would have spent a lot of those hours on the train doing work, I have no idea if I gained or lost money on the trade. I really do need AI to do all my dynamic trippin’ as it turns out.