This review is not specific to the Tomah Amtrak station, but rather to Amtrak in general. I booked a train ticket from Tomah, WI to Chicago, IL for December 31st. Less than 24 hours before my train was scheduled to depart, I received a phone call that the train was experiencing delays and that I’d be taken to Chicago on alternate transportation. GREAT! I contacted Amtrak and they assured me that my arrival time in Chicago would still be the same as if I were taking the train(how is that possible)? My train(now bus!) was scheduled to depart at 12:26PM. I arrived at the train station at 12:00PM and finally boarded the bus at 12:50PM…only to find out the bus was over capacity by almost 10 people. After a lot of finagling and rearranging of passengers, the bus finally left Tomah at 1:15PM! 45 minutes after departure we stopped for lunch. Seriously, you’ve already stuck me on a bus that’s now almost an hour behind schedule and now we’re stopping for lunch?! We finally entered into the suburbs of Chicago around 4PM when the traffic and bad weather hit. Obviously traffic and weather are outside of anyone’s control… but the whole reason I booked a train ticket in the first place(instead of driving) was so that I didn’t have to worry about rush hour traffic on New Year’s Eve and bad roads in Wisconsin/Illinois in December. Had I been on the train like I originally planned… neither of these two things would have been an issue. The train(now bus!) was scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 3:55PM. The bus actually arrived closer to 6:30PM. I will say that the bus driver was very apologetic and tried his very best to get us to Chicago on time. This whole mess was in no way his fault and he handled the situation in the best way that he could. Needless to say, I’ll think twice before ever booking with Amtrak again.
