When Aubrie Lee and Peter Saathoff-Harshfield ride Amtrak’s Coast Starlight up the California coast or the Lake Shore Limited along the Great Lakes, they seek out more than just a seat with a view. They’re also on the lookout for garbage cans and suitcases blocking their spot.

Ms. Lee, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a power wheelchair, often relies on Amtrak’s designated wheelchair spaces to travel. Despite signs requiring those areas be kept clear, they frequently end up as repositories for luggage and trash.

Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield, who has low vision and depends on screen-reading software, contends with glitches and inaccessible features when he uses Amtrak’s app.

The couple, who estimate that they’ve spent 560 hours on Amtrak together in the last three years, traveling coast-to-coast five times, said that riding the train is still much easier than flying. But the indignities they’ve experienced — not just trash cans and a faulty app but also incorrectly deployed boarding ramps, inaccessible dining cars and more — have left them with the sense that they must constantly advocate to receive the services they’re entitled to by law.

“It makes me feel like freight,” Ms. Lee said. “I don’t feel respected as a person.”

The Americans With Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990, prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and mandates that businesses, including Amtrak, provide people with disabilities an “equal opportunity” to use their services.

Amtrak aims to be fully compliant with the A.D.A. by 2029. But a report last month from Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General showed how far the railroad company still has to go. The report found that while Amtrak was making progress toward its accessibility goals, it lacked an overarching strategy to improve customer service for passengers with disabilities and did not collect or use all the data at its disposal to improve those passengers’ experiences.

Amtrak said in a statement that it had begun to address the recommendations in the report, and had taken steps such as “strengthening a comprehensive strategic plan focused on improving the experience for passengers with a disability, enhancing our training processes and more.”

When Inches Count

People with disabilities who spoke with The New York Times overwhelmingly said Amtrak was their preferred mode of transportation.

Flying can be onerous for wheelchair users, who must be hoisted in and out of their seats and risk having their wheelchairs lost or damaged in an airplane’s cargo hold. For travelers with vision impairments, navigating — and getting to and from — airports can also pose a challenge. Train stations are typically smaller and more centrally located.

“Airplane travel is torture,” Ms. Lee said. “Train travel is not torture — it’s challenging in many ways, but it’s also enjoyable.”

Experts said Amtrak had taken meaningful steps to improve access for the more than 70 million U.S. adults with a disability, and the company laid out plans to comply with the inspector general’s recommendations by next year. But progress cannot come fast enough for many disabled people who depend on Amtrak.

In June, Alisa Grishman, a longtime Amtrak rider, planned to travel to Washington from her home in Pittsburgh to attend a protest. Ms. Grishman, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a motorized wheelchair, knew from experience that her chair fit through the door of Amtrak’s double-decker train cars. But she was surprised when a train with single-level cars arrived at the station. When she tried to enter, her chair got jammed in the doorway.

“I got stuck to the point that I had to get out of my wheelchair and turn around and shove it back,” Ms. Grishman said. “I was just in an absolute panic at that point, and other than offering me a refund, no one really did anything.” She ended up having to cancel her trip and was “devastated,” she said.

The A.D.A. generally requires train car doors to be 32 inches wide. But some Amtrak cars, mostly built in the 1970s and ’80s and used on short- and medium-haul routes, have 30-inch doors, said W. Kyle Anderson, an Amtrak spokesman. He added that much of the current fleet is equipped with doors that meet or exceed A.D.A. requirements, as will all new trains currently on order.

Barriers and Blunders

Amtrak, established by Congress in 1970, has struggled to meet the needs of riders with disabilities since its early days, when accessibility was hardly a consideration, and through the decades since the A.D.A. became law.

A 2013 report from the National Disability Rights Network titled “All Aboard (Except People With Disabilities)” found that disabled passengers were “forced to suffer embarrassment, discomfort and other indignities” when riding on Amtrak.

In 2020, Amtrak reached a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice over its accessibility failures and ultimately paid more than $2 million to more than 1,500 passengers with disabilities whom it had discriminated against.

But perhaps nothing encapsulates the frustrations of disabled passengers like the time in 2020 when Amtrak asked a group of wheelchair users to pay $25,000 to remove a row of seats for a two-hour trip from Chicago. After widespread condemnation, Amtrak reversed course and agreed to accommodate the entire group without charging them to reconfigure the car.

Amtrak’s duty to disabled passengers extends beyond its trains, too. One major barrier to improving accessibility is that the railroad company doesn’t own all its stations. If the city owns the parking lot and Amtrak owns the platform, for example, the bureaucratic hurdles to making upgrades can multiply quickly, said David Capozzi, a member of Amtrak’s board of directors and a longtime disability rights advocate.

The inspector general’s report calls for greater coordination among Amtrak’s seven divisions that handle customer service for passengers with disabilities. The report found, for example, that Amtrak’s technology department had modified its app without consulting the accessibility office, “resulting in some features being inaccessible” for passengers who use screen readers.

Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield said he had noticed the problems: A button to select a station when checking a train’s on-time status was inaccessible via his screen reader, and at one point it repeated the word “train” before the name of each station when he clicked through a list of them.

“It just seemed like there was no attention to detail,” said Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield, who works as an accessibility analyst at Google.

A Moment of Opportunity

The inspector general’s report focused on customer service, but outdated equipment bears some of the blame. Much of Amtrak’s current infrastructure, from its stations to the train cars themselves, comes from a bygone era.

“Most of the equipment is 40 or 50 years old, well before the A.D.A. was a glimmer in anyone’s eye,” said Mr. Capozzi. “Accessibility just wasn’t considered.”

Adam Ballard, one of the Amtrak riders who faced that $25,000 charge a half-decade ago, said the Amtrak agents who interact with passengers were almost never at fault for the challenges he encountered.

“More often than not, I can trace bad customer service I’ve gotten to a problem that staff have a hard time working around because of the actual design of the system,” he said, “whether it’s stations that are less-than-accessible or equipment that’s not as user-friendly as it should be.”

Piece by piece, that’s changing. Amtrak brought more than 50 stations into A.D.A. compliance over the last five years, Mr. Capozzi said. Acela, Amtrak’s premium service in the Northeast Corridor, is set to enter new trains into service starting Aug. 28 with technology that can play onboard announcements directly via most hearing aids.

And Amtrak’s next-generation trains, called Airo, will have built-in motorized wheelchair lifts, replacing the hand-cranked mobile lifts currently in use. Airo trains are expected to debut in 2026 and will eventually serve 14 routes along the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.

“Amtrak’s fundamental dilemma is, whatever they do today is going to be what we’re living with for the next 30 to 40 years,” said Charles Petrof, a senior attorney at Access Living, an organization that provides support services for people with disabilities and was consulted for the report. “That time horizon means they’ve got to fix it now or be stuck with it for a really long time.”

The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 essentially holds Amtrak funding steady at around $2.4 billion, though it shifts $290 million to Amtrak’s national network and away from the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak said it was “largely aligned” with the administration’s budget request.

But even when there is progress — Ms. Lee was recently able to access a train’s dining car for the first time — it has so far been incremental at best.

“She was kind of wedged in there between the trash can and the table,” Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield said.

Despite the challenges, Ms. Lee and Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield said they understand that Amtrak operates under difficult conditions.

“It’s this really old system, and Amtrak is a bare-minimum thing that’s still going along,” Mr. Saathoff-Harshfield said.

Still, for them, the train remains a better option than the alternative.

“You don’t have to go to some far-flung airport,” he said. “You get to see the country up close.”

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