The Hotel El Bosque concierge ("Freddy") was very helpful in dealing with the train mess. We needed to book the train to Chillan for our fourth week coming up, and I had realized before the trip that they were not selling tickets for the dates we needed. A friend of Sara's who used to live in Valpo had called the train and they told her that it was because they were changing schedules and the new schedule would be up by now. However, the promised date had passed, so the concierge stepped in and called several times to figure out what was going on. Finally, the August 3rd dates went on sale and he bought our tickets to Chillan for us, but they still wouldn't sell tickets for August 11th (the return). This all happened while we were in Valpo.
This seemed to be business as usual for now, so we weren't too concerned. We were told that the return tickets would become available "soon" and we would just buy them then. However, we knew we had to be "fast" to get to them, as the August 3rd date sold out very quickly in the Preferente class. There are only 38 seats available in the only class that allows checked luggage and assigned seats.
So, every day as we were in Valle Nevado, we would check the website and there still were no tickets for the return date. Even worse, when the front desk of Valle Nevado would call them, they would either not answer the phone or would be very vague on why there were no tickets available. At one point, they started citing "internal problems" and "restructuring" and then mentioned that they might not even be able to honor the tickets that we had already bought!!! The website only mentioned that they would post new schedules on August 1st (which went by without any difference).
At some point, we found out from Freddy, the El Bosque concierge, that there was a possibility of a strike and they would not know until the day before we would leave if they would run trains at all. We started to look for alternatives to get to Chillan. A six hour drive was not very conducive to hiring a driver. The bus was the only other alternative, but they would not let non-Chilean citizens buy tickets online (a "RUT number" was required) and no tickets on the phone!!! Amazing. We wanted to buy tickets as a backup, but after this mess up we just decided to wait until the 8/2 morning and find out if there really was going to be a strike. The meeting was set for 8pm on 8/1, and shortly after that, without any "news" posted on their website, they quietly began to allow you to buy tickets again. I took that as good news, and this was confirmed the next morning by calling them - no strike! Our 8/3 tickets would be honored.
At this point, we also realized that our return was somewhat complicated because the train that we wanted didn't offer any preferente class! We had wanted to leave Chillan about noon so that we wouldn't be running to the train station early in the morning, nor arriving in Santiago very very late at night. As a result, we went to the bus station and bought return tickets through them. We get to try the train down to Chillan and the bus back up to Santiago. I am writing this on the train down, which left promptly at 8:50am with no difficulties!!!
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