Riding trains in the winter

Dad's train trip will take him 4 or 5 days from Ohio to Oregon in December. They do hang out in Chicago and ride escalators. We live in a town without any escalators, I remember how much fun my daughter had when she first got to ride one, I can imagine the thrill when they first came out.
I was thinking about train rides and winter. Our family got together this December in Colorado. Tim and I came up from NM and Bonnie came from Tennessee we all came by trains. Our trip ended up being a lot shorter than Bonnie's. For us to get to Denver by train we drive 200 miles north to Albuquerque and catch the Amtrak there at about 1pm. We get a nice 5 hour ride across northern NM and across the land of 4 or 5 Pueblos, then through the Sangre de Cristo mountains then across the LLano (high plains) to Raton. At Raton we tumble out in the dark and find the Bus waiting for us, it takes us on North to Colorado, while the train heads NE to Chicago. When we got to Colorado Springs my sister said it was a blizzard at their house but my nephew and she managed to come and pick us up.
A few days later before Bonnie was due she called at 5 am to say that her train was running late and we could go back to sleep. We would have a 45 minute drive to get in to Denver to meet her. She said they were stuck in Lincoln Nebraska. She had gotten on the train in Illinois the afternoon before and had been due into Denver at 8 am. Once we got up we called her and they had only traveled 50 miles in 3 hours. They were into a major storm. They had put on a special engine and were plowing their way through the snow drifts, she was in a lower compartment and said the snow was often above the windows on one side or the other and once on both sides. We took turns calling her or Amtrak to see what their prediction was, she finally got off the train that evening at midnight glad to be off the train.