It didn't occur to me to ask; I was staying in a youth hostel that was something like $20/night (maybe less). In any case, the way the USARail pass worked, you had to reserve individual tickets to each destination you wanted to travel to. (You could reserve them spontaneously, which is what I did.) Since I didn't have a ticket at the time to a particular destination (just a generic USARail pass), technically they weren't at fault for failing to fulfill a particular obligation.