141–150 of 468 posts
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Maybe, but having to view the scenery from your own seat instead of from the observation car is pretty far removed from “hell.”
Seems a bit selfish that you leave people the only option of moving to avoid noise.
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Many people are fine with taking the train in the US when it's remotely competitive in terms of time and price. However, in practice, that mostly means a subset of the Northeast Corridor (the whole thing is about an 8-hour trip vs. a short flight) or a handful of various city pairs that are only a few hundred miles apart. But it's simply not practical for me to take the train from Boston to Chicago, much less San Fra…
Quite. Makes sense to do train from NY-Boston or NY-Washington. Maybe Washington-Boston, but 5 hours is probably about the limit. I suspect few people in Sweden would recommend traveling Stockholm to Madrid by train
It's really the two segments you mention that get a lot of the traffic. You see this when you pull into NYP from Boston and the train pretty much empties out.
New Canadian citizens get a Cultural Access Pass which enables them to a 50% discount on Canadian train travel with VIARail (among a ton of other perks). https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2015/10-july-2015...
My wife and I did this several years back, New York to Chicago to San Francisco, and it really was a wonderful experience. But get a sleeper compartment, don't sit with the cattle. It's worth it, really. And that's even though we spent little time in our compartment almost the whole trip we were up in the observation car watching the American landscape roll by. One highlight of the trip was when storms over Helper, U…
> While waiting, there was a guy with a guitar in the observation car, and we had a nice sing-along. That bit sounds like hell to me but I'm glad you had fun! In the UK we have special carriages where you're not allowed to make a noise so you can avoid that kind of thing.
If Amtrak would add reliable paid WiFi and upgrade their cars, train would be exceedingly worth it. The next step would be to repair the tracks, which are shared by freight and passenger, which makes the ride worse.
The problem is the tracks are owned by the freight (at least for these long segments in the western US). For it to get better Amtrak would need an entire new set of tracks.
One thing I do blame Amtrak for is that they don't always announce their delays as soon as they were known; I took a train that was delayed for two or three hours immediately after picking me up because CSX spit decided to rearrange a bunch of freight trains directly in front of us, and my cousins waiting to pick me up at the station at the other end said that the arrivals board claimed the train was on time up until a few minutes before it was scheduled to arrive, and then ticked up the arrival time by 15 or 30 minutes at a time until we actually arrived.
It wasn't Amtrak's fault I was 3 hours late, but it was their fault my cousins just had to hang out at a train station for 3 hours instead of leaving and coming back later.
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> While waiting, there was a guy with a guitar in the observation car, and we had a nice sing-along. That bit sounds like hell to me but I'm glad you had fun! In the UK we have special carriages where you're not allowed to make a noise so you can avoid that kind of thing.
Thats because there is a cultural difference between how americans and europeans see trains. For americans its something quaint and wild whereas for europeans its just a basic form of transportation.
This article is noticably more creative in its writing than the average nytimes article. Maybe a long train ride does a writer good (and anyone else who needs to think outside the box).
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An absolute fortune. I've looked into this, and it isn't economical in any way, shape, or form. Flying across the continent is MUCH cheaper, and with your number of vacation days usually being limited, gives you a lot more time at your destination. The only reason to do this is because you really want to spend your vacation time sitting in a train watching rural American scenery go by in states like Montana. It's sor…
I'd indeed say it costs more than most people are willing to pay. That said, a sleeper car on Amtrak gets you: a flat surface to lie down on, your own toilet (note the toilet is just there in the roomette, next to the bunk, prison style), access to a shower (your own shower in the rooms, one per car for the roomettes), access to the first class lounges, and includes meals in the dining car. Rooms have a slightly wide…
This sounds like fun. I wonder if there are any European routes that are as long/uninterrupted that I could try that on.
My wife and I did this several years back, New York to Chicago to San Francisco, and it really was a wonderful experience. But get a sleeper compartment, don't sit with the cattle. It's worth it, really. And that's even though we spent little time in our compartment almost the whole trip we were up in the observation car watching the American landscape roll by. One highlight of the trip was when storms over Helper, U…
> It's worth it, really How much does it cost?
If Amtrak would add reliable paid WiFi and upgrade their cars, train would be exceedingly worth it. The next step would be to repair the tracks, which are shared by freight and passenger, which makes the ride worse.