"Amtrak Bike Service: What Is It & Where To Find It"

Where to find Bicycle Service Information

Amtrak provides information about bringing bikes on board, but Adventure Cycling has augmented that with our Multi-Modal Travel page where potential passengers wanting to bring bikes on board can find a spreadsheet listing the timetables and services. We also provide an instruction sheet on how to sort this information for easier use. In addition, there is a link to our interactive Amtrak map. Scroll over the map to see what line, station, and service is provided.

Expanding Carry-On Bike Service

There is a good deal of potential for expanding carry-on service. With the growing number of U.S. Bicycle Routes and the Adventure Cycling Route Network, cyclists could really benefit from having more carry-on capacity.

But there exists a good number of challenges to getting this done. With carry-on service, there are many differences in fees, bike capacity, and station service. Equipment differences explain the capacity differences: some trains have dedicated bike cars with racks, some have café cars with floor racks, some can take one bike per coach car, and some have bi-level coach cars that use the lower level for bikes. But bi-level cars can’t be used in the Northeast Corridor because tunnels and bridges don’t have enough height clearance.

State-controlled, short-haul routes (less than 750 miles) choose their fees (or lack of fee) based on their own service goals. Some stations don’t have carry-on bike service because the train runs on such a tight schedule that it can’t afford loading/unloading time (“dwell time”). Some stations have short platforms, making it impossible to load bikes into the baggage car without “re-spotting” the train and therefore, adding too much dwell time. Other platforms are too low relative to the height of the bike-baggage car and so there is no service at those stations because the reach is too high for customers to hand up their bikes.

Full Article:

https://www.adventurecycling.org/resources/blog/amtrak-bike-service...