By Jayme Deerwester, USA TODAY; January 21, 2020
Amtrak has reversed course and will not charge an accessibility advocacy group $25,000 for two employees who use power wheelchairs to travel from Chicago to Bloomington, Illinois, for a meeting this week, the company told USA TODAY.
The Chicago-based group Access Living told The Washington Post and NPR that it reached out to Amtrak in late December to arrange travel for 10 members of its staff. Because five of them are in wheelchairs and the 7 a.m. train they wanted to travel on only has three spots for wheelchairs, Amtrak said it would have to reconfigure the cars to accommodate the additional two wheelchairs, incurring thousands in expenses. (The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 requires there to be at least one wheelchair-accessible car on any train with one or more cars.)