ALL ABOARD AMTRAK. A travel writer from New York has business in White Sulphur Springs.

So off I went to the Amtrak Web site. It offered up The Cardinal, a thrice-weekly train that meanders from New York to Chicago via White Sulphur Springs. The train's schedule was fortuitous: I could leave New York around 9:30 a.m. on Friday, arrive at the Greenbrier by 7 p.m., then leave Sunday afternoon around 1 p.m. and be back in New York by 11:30 p.m. The fare: $160 roundtrip for a coach seat.

We used to have a joke about the try-weakly train: it goes down the branch line, then tries weakly to get back. But I digress.

Had I known last week about The Cardinal's recent appearance in New York, I wouldn't have been surprised by what happened next. As I approached the train to board, an Amtrak employee stationed at the door asked: "Where to?"

"White Sulphur Springs," I said, showing my ticket.

"Where the hell is that?" he said, quite seriously.

"Don't you know?" I said, surprised and a little concerned.

"Hey, pal, I get off the train in Washington. What do I know? You might as well get on the train."

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that the Cardinal, formerly the James Whitcomb Riley, and prior to Amtrak the George Washington had offered a through New York-Chicago sleeping car continuously from Amtrak's formation in 1971 to today (the sleeper has been on or off the Cardinal several times and the train has terminated in Washington or in New York depending on whether it has double-deck Superliner or single-level pot luck for coaches). Although it has been more than 30 years since The Pennsylvania Railroad handed off trains to the Chesapeake and Ohio at Washington, Amtrak employees still often think like New Haven people or Pennsy people on the Corridor, and forget about anything at all if it's off the Pennsy.

I will refrain from quoting that part of the travelogue wherein the usual recital of the usual Amtrak maintenance bugs manifests itself. But when we get to the return trip, we see that Amtrak still acts as if the Chesapeake and Ohio is handing a train off to The Pennsylvania Railroad at Washington.

As we neared Washington, we were an hour behind schedule. The conductor came on a wheezing intercom system and gave new arrival times for several stations. But he claimed the train would arrive on schedule in Washington at 7:30 p.m.

So it did. And, then, we sat. Fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes. Forty-five minutes. An hour. Two or three trains arrived and departed on the track across the platform. But we sat motionless.

Finally, I got up and sought out [coach attendant] Dara. I found her in the vestibule, sitting on a yellow stepstool, surrounded by irate passengers.

"Don't blame me," I heard her say. "It's not my fault. There's no crew. They're not here yet."

From what I could gather, The Cardinal changes crews in Washington and the Washington-boarding crew drives the train to New York. But tonight, the new crew hadn't appeared.

No amount of tax money on better coaches or better tracks for Amtrak will have any effect, so long as the crew callers are unable to cover the trains they know are running.

(Via Web Flyer, a potential source of Company Mail.)