greyhound tickets: i refunded my greyhound ticket and got an amtrak ticket. im going from Los Angeles to santa cruz so i was wondering how reliable is amtrak and if i will get there at or near my scheduled arrival time|||You will be taking the Coast Starlight. It has on-time record of 86%, according to wikipedia. With Amtrak it all depends on the route. Some tracks are shared with freight trains, so they tend to be late. Shorter distance trains are usually on time.|||it depends on which train you take you could take startlight to San Jose then bus to Sant a Cruz if you go this route you wont get to Santa Cruz till 10:00pm at niight you could also take a Pacific surliner train to San Luiso Obispo then take 2 amtrak buses (via San Jose) which will put you in Santa Cruz at 6'30pm or you go via the San Jaquin route by take amtrak bus to Bakerfiled then the San Jaquin train to stocken and then 2 more buses to Santa Cruz this will put you there at 8:38pm |||From what I have seen they will get you there, but expect delays, most Amtraks run on freight railroads and are subject to their dispatchers and will usually run their own train before Amtrak, there are exceptions to this where Amtrak have agreements to get them through as quickly as possible. On the other hand on the East Coast today (10-18-08) Amtrak 50 left Charlottesville 12.5hrs late!!!!|||I rode AmTrak from L.A. to Kansas City a couple of times; really enjoyed the trips but was always late. Broke down a couple of times. An interesting thing happened on the way to Kansas City. About an hour from our destination the train stopped for what must have been 2 hours. Every one was getting angry and wondering why the delay, that's about the time I saw what looked to me to be farm equipment being used to remove mail trailer/van's from flat cars being towed by our train. Looked very incongruous to see a John Deere tractor pulling a mail trailer.|||In Michigan, it's usually late. Our train to Chicago is typically anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours late. Good luck. You can also go on the Amtrak website and see how late the train typically is.