Amtrak passengers: a 36-hour trip felt like a "nightmare"

After all, the trip between Seattle and Los Angeles on the Amtrak Coast Starlight is meant to be a scenic 35-hour journey through mountain ranges, along an oceanic coastline and through forests.

Instead, for the approximately 200 people on board, it took 36 hours in cramped quarters with little food and even less indication of when they could leave.

"I thought to myself 'When am I going to be home to see my mom, my dad and my family?'," Friedman told CNN's affiliate, KOMO.

The Amtrak train struck a fallen tree on the railway on Sunday night and remained stuck in Oakridge, Oregon, where it sat until Tuesday, before traveling to Eugene, in Oregon, then return to Seattle.

"36 hours without sleep, 36 hours by train and 36 reasons to be grateful," said passenger Rebekah Dodson on Facebook at the end of this test. "Good night to this crazy day."

A sudden stop

Train 11 took about eight hours when it stopped abruptly.

"There was no shock, but the train stopped and they announced that we had hit a tree branch because of storms and the like," said Carly. Bigby to CTV, a subsidiary of CNN.

Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said that none of the 183 passengers and twelve crew members of the train had been injured.

But the train did not move and with more branches and snow on the rails, there was no movement for a moment.

The city of Oakridge usually only gets about an inch of snow in February. This week, a 9-inch snow record hit the ground Monday, according to the National Weather Service. The city did not have electricity because of the weather, Dodson said.

So the passengers were stuck.

"There were 4 feet of snow on either side of us," said Dodson. "We could see people snowboarding in front of us, people came by car on the road … we felt in a snow globe."

Games, stories and music

Time passed Groups of passengers were playing cards, others huddled together and shared stories. A man, said Dodson, took out his ukelele to help put the children to sleep.

It was like a "giant Kumbaya party".

"We played cards, we took a nap and we watched the snow accumulate (on the outside)," said passenger Alberto Hernandez at CNN's affiliate, KOIN, while he was leaving the station.

A couple of passengers ignored a previous directive not to open the windows and yelled in the snow to take a pizza. Their requests went unanswered.

And as the hours passed and the snow accumulated around the train, frustration grew.

According to KOIN, Bigby, who was doing what was supposed to be a three-hour trip between Eugene and Klamath Falls, told the news channel that the snack cart was empty and the diapers were out of breath.

She said that the communication of Amtrak was "terrible". And according to Dodson, passengers did not receive updates for hours after the train was blocked.

"Many of us find information online before we even receive an announcement on our train stating what will happen to us," Bigby said. "People are a little anxious and angry, but most of the time they are pretty civil to each other."

Leaving the passengers on the train was the safest option, said Scot Naparstek, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Amtrak.

"We sincerely regret the lengthy delay that Coast Starlight customers in the south experienced due to extreme weather conditions while traveling with Amtrak," he said. "With local power cuts and road blockage, it was decided that the safest place for our customers was to stay on the train, which allowed us to provide food, heat electricity and toilets. "

Move finally

The train resumed taxiing Tuesday morning with a Union Pacific locomotive after teams cleared the tracks overnight Monday, a Union Pacific spokesman told CNN.

"We are walking very slowly," said passenger Emilie Wyrick as the train headed for Washington State. "We are going to move for a few hundred years, then we stop, it will be like that for hours."

Wyrick said that due to power outages, "they have to manually switch all the signals we come across to guarantee the safety of the train and the cars that can be crossed."

Tuesday's announcement that the train would be moved arrived at an ideal time, Bigby said. The food ran out Monday night and there was a heating problem.

"Last night, the train was frozen," Bigby told CTV. "I do not know what happened with our heat, but it was really cold."

As the passengers finally set foot on the dock in Eugene, they only wanted a comfortable place to lie down and maybe take a shower, said passenger Marcia Trujillo at KOIN.

They ate muffins, spoke to reporters and took away their luggage, the train remaining in the station to be repaired before returning to Seattle.

"Honestly, it sounds like a nightmare, because it took forever and yet it's already over," said Friedman, CNN affiliate, KOMO. "It feels good that I'm not stuck."

But as the return trip to Seattle began and the exhausted passengers waited until the end of their journey by several days, another delay came after a railway bridge fire on the Columbia, KOMO reported.

Train 11 arrived in Seattle Wednesday morning.

Amtrak suspended service between Portland and Eugene until Friday.