Disregarding all of the travelling I did while in each city, I made a total of 15 inter-city journeys. Legs 3 & 4 and legs 5 & 6 had only an hour stop in between so each felt like only one journey. Likewise 10, 11 & 12 Washington to Belfast and 13, 14, & 15 Belfast back to NYC.
You have to draw the line somewhere…
Anyhow, taking a mixture of Amtrak’s timetable and estimates from Google Maps (since the North Eastern timetables don’t publish distances) and adding in the road journey from Lafayette to New Orleans. I came up with the following distances (in miles)
- San Jose to Seattle 954
- Seattle to Milwaukee 2120
- Milwaukee to Chicago 86
- Chicago to Austin 1223
- Austin to San Antonio 82
- San Antonio to Lafayette 428
- Lafayette to New Orleans (by road) 135
- New Orleans to Chicago 934
- Chicago to Washington 922
- Washington to Boston 460
- Boston to Portland 125
- Portland to Belfast 100
- Belfast to Portland 100
- Portland to Boston 125
- Boston to NYC 240
I make that 8,034 miles
I reserved them in eight chunks as each next leg became clear. The 30-day, 12 segment rail pass cost $579 and I had to pay an extra $50 for bus tickets from Portland to Belfast and back because that took me over 12 segments.
Had I paid for tickets individually at the point that I made each decision (discounts are available for advance booking but I didn’t know any of this in advance), they would have cost as follows:
- San Jose to Seattle $158
- Seattle to Milwaukee $347
- Milwaukee to Austin $144
- Austin to Lafayette $67
- New Orleans to Chicago $112
- Chicago to Washington $133
- Washington to Belfast $222
- Belfast to NYC $137
That gives a total of $1320 (£858*)
Total actual cost of inter-city travel = $579+$50 = $629 (£408.85)
So buying the rail pass more than halved the cost of travel, saving me $691 (£449.15)
And on average, I paid just under 8 cents (just over 5p) per mile for this travel.
*at the time of the trip the exchange rate was roughly $1=£0.65
