June 1, 2004 -- With the summer travel season coming up, you may want to dodge that choked traffic and those high gas prices by taking the train. It's been a few months since we've run down train fare discounts. The bad news is, Amtrak hasn't come out with any new editions of their marvelous discount codes recently. The good news is, some of the old codes are still active.
To use an Amtrak discount code, start booking your ticket online. On the screen with the list of trains, you'll see a space for "Promotion Code." Enter the code there and watch your fare shrink.
The best code at the moment is V822. It will knock fares down by 20% on all unreserved trains as far north as Albany, as far east as Boston, as far west as Harrisburg and as far south as Virginia. There are no blackout dates, and you can travel as late as Dec. 16 on this code. When you're picking your train on Amtrak's site, look for trains with a "U" symbol under the "Accommodations" column -- those are the unreserved trains.
For the high-speed Acela train, V745 is the code to use. It'll knock 20% off Acela and Metroliner fares on weekends (except Sunday 1-6 pm) from now through June 22.
If you're traveling between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, you can take along two kids under 16 for free between now and Sept. 2. Use code H414 for Monday-Thursday trips, and code H405 for weekend jaunts. July 4 weekend is blacked out, of course.
Travelers over the age of 62 can also get 15% off most Amtrak fares by asking for the senior citizen's discount. Even better, the senior discount works in combination with the discount codes for a super-discount.
If the codes don't work for your trip, always check Amtrak's Rail Sale page (https://tickets.amtrak.com/Amtrak/railsale), which has a swiftly rotating collection of deeply discounted tickets.
At press time, Amtrak's rail sale page was showing one-way tickets from New York, Washington or Boston to Chicago for around $40. Jaunts between Chicago and St. Louis -- a comfortable five-hour run -- cost a mere $11.80. What's best is, these fares also apply to intermediate points, so you can get Pittsburgh-Chicago tickets for $27, for example.
To see a complete, downloadable map of all Amtrak routes, go to www.amtrak.com/pdf/national.pdf.
A Dandy Canadian Discount For Saturday Trips
The best rail discount we've found is north of the border. For Saturday trips through Oct. 8 costing less than C$70 each way between Quebec City and Windsor, VIA Rail will knock 50% off the usual adult or child fare. You don't have to take a round trip to get this discount -- it'll just apply to whichever leg of your trip you're riding on a Saturday.
This discount automatically applies to any trip you book on www.viarail.ca. You don't need to enter any special codes, and you don't even need to be Canadian.
The discount applies to trips of about 3-4 hours: Montreal-Quebec City, Montreal-Ottawa, and London-Toronto are all included. However, you can't get this discount for longer trips such as Montreal-Toronto, Ottawa-Toronto and Windsor-Toronto.
We asked VIA what would happen if you tried to break a long trip up into shorter trips to get this discount -- say, buying Ottawa-Kingston and Kingston-Toronto tickets on the same train, to travel from Ottawa to Toronto. They said a special message has gone out to reservations agents and conductors warning them against this, and that the second ticket would be useless. Bummer.
Confidential to Chicago
Before writing this column, I noticed a post on our message boards asking whether there was any way to take the train from Chicago or Michigan to Ontario now that Amtrak has cancelled their International service.
The short answer: No, not easily. While Amtrak and VIA Rail serve the parallel border towns of Port Huron, MI and Sarnia, ON, and Detroit and Windsor, there are no decent public transit connections linking the train stations in those cities.
If you insist on traveling by train, you can take Amtrak to Detroit, and then a Detroit public bus or taxi to the Tunnel Bus to Windsor. On the other side of the Windsor tunnel, you'd take a Windsor taxi or the #2 Windsor city bus to the Windsor VIA station.
That's way too hard-core for most people. Looks like if you don't want to fly, you're stuck with Greyhound for that trip.
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