Travel Blog

Logic #2 - OK since Amtrak can’t make money anywhere, no one else seems to think it’s profitable either.

Formerly known as the American Orient Express, it’s a premier, separate, seven-car train attached to regularly scheduled Amtrak trains. It comes complete with private dining, lounge and sleeping cars.

Before I get into the bulk of what happened over the weekend, two quick notes:1) I’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: getting drunk on a train is fucking spectacular, and perhaps my new favorite pastime. In fact, I may not take a proper vacation this year and instead ride Amtrak across America, getting bombed and watching movies on my laptop. On the ride up to Boston on Wednesday night, I had a ton of beers and watched "Tombstone," a movie that simply does not get old.

I won’t be driving, instead I am planning to take a bus and then a train from the East Lansing Amtrak station with none other than Joy. I’m hoping the train has cocktails so we can arrive in Chicago properly prepared for the festivities.

Author Tony Hiss believes plaNYC does not think big enough. Hiss proposes integrating parks into urban living that harks back to Frederick Law Olmsted’s community-oriented Central Park, a project developed before Moses’ time. By limiting car traffic and integrating park space with every street, a public park would be at the doorstep of every city inhabitant, not just within a 10-minute walk as plaNYC proposes. Car designers have successfully designed car interiors, while the only recent train improvements are to Amtrak’s problematic Acela trains. By improving rider experience through redesigning subway interiors, people will want to use mass transit and not drive their cars to work.

On a recent October night, after the FBI released one of its now customarily nebulous warnings (in this case that Al Quaeda might be targeting American railway systems next), I happened to be asleep on board Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited, bound from Albany, NY to Chicago.

Now the first update from the Montana Trip. Here are two pictures from Tuesday’s journey on Amtrak #22, both taken from the window in our roomette. First up is a view of the Mississippi River as we were leaving St. Louis and its familiar arch behind.

The trip from here from San Francisco via train was pretty cool. Amtrak do a pretty nice job of making you comfortable and the journey, scenically, is just beautiful. The green of the forests runs majestically with the blue of the creeks, rivers and lakes, like a natural marble.

So I decided to swing over to Amtrak's Website to see the status of train #516 Amtrak Cascades from Portland to Seattle. I'm specifically curious about the projected arrival time into Tacoma. With that in mind I pulled up the website and input the particular stations and train number, even though it states OR between the choices I figured what the hoo haa it'll be better if I just leave nothing empty. Theoretically it would use whatever provides the faster query speed that way. Within the matter of about a half second the website whipped up the results and told me the arrival time.

I could even make good use of Metrolink, on the condition that there was a train available for people traveling the wrong way. I could now cross counties with only one transfer. If I were to include Amtrak, I could theoretically go as far as Florida and only have to leave a vehicle once. Of course, the train would take over three days, and I’d have to pencil in being a day and a half late. And the destination is Florida, after all.

So this weekend I’m going be driving my brother’s car down to Maryland to help him move into his new apartment. We’re leaving early Saturday morning so we can get there before the 12 noon to pick up his keys and we’ll stay overnight to buy supplies and other apartment related materials. On Sunday night, I’m going to take the Amtrak back to New Jersey, but hopefully I’ll have enough video material left so I won’t get too bored (are a few episodes of Doctor Who, Eureka Seven, and Justice League Unlimited enough?). Anyway, I’m taking my camera with me to take pics, so watch for a new picture album coming soon.

After a week in Okoboji, I will come back to Iowa City next Friday to do laundry and re-pack for Chicago/China, and tie up any loose ends before leaving. Saturday morning I my mother will drive me down to Mount Pleasant, IA so I can board an Amtrak train to Chicago. In Chicago, I will meet up with my buddy Lee, and stay with him only to board a plane early Sunday morning.

I spent a little time with my old socialist friend Amtrak this passed week. It was such a wonderful experience I thought I better blog a tribute. So here it is:

If Amtrak can make stops in Elgin, Schaumburg, Arlington, O’Hare, and any other major suburb on the way (I’m not sure of what train line it would take), then it makes perfect sense. But if that train service is going to be Rockford downtown to Chicago downtown, it’s going to miss many opportunities for those commuting from the west burbs to Rockford.

Inzwischen sind wir jetzt schon drei Tage in „Philly“ und schon auf dem Sprung nach Washington D.C. Ich denke, „Philly“ ist ein recht guter Start, um die USA zu entdecken. Einerseits ist sie so amerikanisch, dass der von Hollywood konditionierte Provinzler im Glücksgefühl der Wiederkennung schwelgen kann. Aufhängepunkt können wahlweise Filme (Rocky) oder einfach die Wokenkratzer sein (z.B. das neue Amtrak Building, das weniger wegen seiner Höhe sondern vor allem auf Grund seiner kristallinen Form ins Auge sticht). Andererseits ist die Stadt auch noch so überschaubar, dass uns der Kulturschock erspart geblieben ist. Doch noch etwas macht Philadelphia in der Retrospektive zum idealen Startpunkt für unsere Reise: Sie war der Geburtsort der Nation.

Charlotte and me are currently sitting in an Orlando hotel lobby, killing time until it is time to call a taxt to take us to the Amtrak station. Since ya'll probably have no idea why we are here, I'll do a little recap:

The backers of this are worried that the TPA “could kill the proposed train service by preventing the new Regional Transit Authority from raising money for it.” What this means is that if they are denied the power to raise taxes as much as they want, then they won’t get to play with their trains. I’m sorry. Should I care about their problem? If the trains are a good idea, the TPA allows them to get their money by asking the voters to approve it. Why should I be concerned that they want the unlimited power to tax?

What other things is the Smirkster planning to toss overboard so his oil buddies (who, coincidentally of course, have just reaped record profits) can get tons of refunds, permanently? Let's see: watershed protection and flood prevention funding. Vocational education grants. Dropout prevention programs. Job opportunities for low-income folks. Health programs. Rural fire assistance. Social services block grants. Amtrak. The list goes on. For someone who claimed education was such a priority, about a third of his cuts are in education alone.

Montanans have demanded Conrad Burns explain his dealings with Jack Abramoff. We’ve pushed our Junior Senator to explain his stance on Social Security privatization and his votes on Amtrak and pesticide testing.

I recently loaded up EverNote with tons of content when I took Amtrak to my parent's new home (that didn't have Internet hooked up just yet). EverNote was being used on my laptop the entire train ride and I often perused material late at night. To me, it's now absolutely essential when wanting to read Web content when you don't have access to the Internet or when taking notes. The only problem that I had was that there were times when I was on different PCs when I came across content that I wanted to save in EverNote. I wanted all the content in one database instead of having three different sets of info on three different computers. After trial and error, I discovered that I could just put my EverNote database files on my USB stick and have it with me wherever I go. I just made sure that EverNote mapped to the stick and now I don't have to worry about having different content in several places. There's word that the company will have a "formal" mobile solution sometime next year, so until that happens I'll keep using my USB stick.

I took the train out of Washington today to visit family in New Jersey. Amtrak ran on time, which was a blessing. At times in the past the Northeast Corridor has been rife with delays; in recent years this improved a lot. But the Amtrak management gave its customers a holiday present: price-gouging. A one-way ticket on the route I travel usually costs $76; this morning it cost $101. That's one-way, folks. And that is not the worst of it. An afternoon ticket cost $120.

I rode the Amtrak home for Thanksgiving break. There are always just-released convicts on the train, taking it from a prison somewhere in the southern Illinois to Chicago. One of the hispanic guys spent the entire trip practicing his tagging skills on the windows with his finger.

There are scenic and romantic train rides all over the world. Some of Amtrak’s more scenic stretches take days and can be a vacation in themselves. Otherwise, you can plan a vacation around one or more “dinner trains” or scenic rides like the one we took from Silverton to Durango Colorado (beautiful mountains).

New York's busy Penn Station returned to normal on Friday after a rush-hour false alarm caused by a suspicious substance found in a soda bottle near Amtrak's ticket counter, authorities said.

With one destructive hurricane behind us, one on the way, and who knows how many more possible, it may be time to consider some way to pay for all the rebuilding necessary. I understand that the administration does not want to raise taxes and that “Operation Offset” is a way that some in Congress are proposing to try to pay for reconstruction. Some of their ideas are to freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, and U.N. peacekeeping operations. They would eliminate the EnergyStar program, grants for state and local energy conservation, federal subsidies for Amtrak, funding for new light-rail programs and the hydrogen fuel initiative. Also eliminated are grants for safe and drug-free schools, and teen contraceptive programs. They’d probably also cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts.

When a free-marketeer presents Amtrak as an example of government waste, I have to wonder what they think of the Interstate Highway System. This is also a government program and the cost has been in the trillions. Toll roads with electronic payment systems may have their place, but where would the United States be if Eisenhower had decided to wait for private enterprise to build the highway system? It is the same place we are headed because of the endless wail for privatizing everything in the past 30 years. Commercial healthcare has not brought us universal coverage. Commercial energy has lowered standards but not price. Commercial transportation needs bailout after bailout. America continues to suffer under this delusion.

We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater - they just wouldn’t move them, afraid they’d be stolen.

Elementary math will tell you that only 20% of the monies in the bill was allocated for other transportation projects - bus, rail (this does not include Amtrak, about which more eventually), light rail, bike and pedestrian ways and trails. Alternative transportation remains a stepchild of the 21st century evidently. This despite the fact that all signs point to the rapidly approaching end of cheap available oil and gas. With gasoline prices around the country, even here in DE where they have remained relatively low in comparison to, say, the West Coast, creeping towards the $3.00 a gallon mark, mass transport looks like a better and better idea for those of us whose wallets are not bottomless.

WRAL says two people are confirmed dead after an Amtrak train hit a dump truck in Raleigh, North Carolina:

Today we took the train down to San Diego to visit Grandpa Schwarz. Riding the train is a pleasant way to go there, and it’s an arduous trip by car. The only bad thing(s) that happened were that we missed the first two trains. When we got to the Gold Line station in Pasadena, the train left just as we were coming down the stairs. We had to wait for the next train, and then when we got to Union Station, we looked out the window and saw the Amtrak Surfliner leaving for San Diego. So we had to wait for the next one.

Gosh, lets see where should we start… Last week while we were visiting Petoski, MI. we met two cyclists from CA. Kirsten and Geoff who were both riding long wheelbase Ryan Recumbents and pulling Burley trailers. They were cycling from west to east after taking an Amtrak Train from California to Montana due to their limited vacation time. They were riding to Mass. to visit Geoff’s mother. It was wonderful to exchange stories with them and to hear what WI, MN and the Dakota’s are like. They were riding 80 miles per day, which seems crazy to us, but again they had vacation time limitations. (We are so lucky)! They invited us to stay with them when we reach Oakland, CA. It will be great to see them in September or October!

Unfortunately, as I travel by way of the Amtrak train, I could not haul them back to campus with me. All I have in Bellingham is my guitar and a piano in the lounge downstairs, which is in-tune but so ordinary in sound that I could not pick out its B-flat in a crowd. I put a note in each instrument case saying: Do not sell this instrument under any circumstances. I will be coming back for it in two years. They will make nice additions to my music room when I have a place to call my own.

Since then, the service has undergone a revamp at Amtrak. I’ve never encountered friendlier, more attentive, and funny people working in a service industry. And not even just the dining car attendants or the porters. It’s one thing to wait tables at a restaurant on the mainland, but when you have to wait tables and work with people and sleep with people for a period of 3-4 days, as some of the trains are long, then keeping a smile on your face and not wanting to knock a passenger off the caboose has got to be the hardest thing on earth!

I’m leaving the SF area after the Computers and Writing conference, which was surprisingly productive for me (in relation to the conference and my own projects…). The thing about taking the Amtrak after conferences is the cool-down period. I mean, I get 18 hours (on this leg, 12 of which I will be awake) to do nothing but think. No email, no phone, no disruptions, except for when I have to eat meals.

In January, Cohen boarded an Amtrak bound from New York to DC. Along the way, he attempted to shoot the passing scenery. (Note to Homeland Security: “Shoot” has multiple meanings.) But when the train stopped in Philly, four armed cops boarded the train and demanded that Cohen turn over his film.

Riders on Amtrak may think that the $3.25 hot dog and the $1.50 bag of chips in the cafe car are no bargain. Neither does Amtrak. It is spending just over $2 for each dollar of food it sells on its trains, according to auditors.

For some unknown reason (not that I'm complaining!), the train-enthusiast website TrainWeb -- which has a buried link somewhere to my old cross-country train trip page -- decided to post that link prominently on its "What's New" page over the weekend, under the headline "Revisiting a 2002 trip on the Amtrak Sunset Limited."

I have just enjoyed a couple of days in San Francisco, after arriving there on the California Zephyr, Amtrak’s long distance train from Chicago.

Amtrack run a service between Montreal and New York. I knew of this, but couldn’t actually locate the service in a casual search because I wasn’t specifically requesting Montreal as a starting point (it’s annoying that information about much of those possibilities offered by North American rail transportation seems to be only available if you know roughly what you will be looking for in advance).

In theory, the train ride from Detroit to Chicago is "relaxing" and "easy". Fans will rant on about Amtrak's many virtues, saying things like, "you can read a book, or take a nap - and there's no traffic!". You get the picture.

In practice, it's a relatively long (7-hour) trip in pseudo-comfortable seating with way too many stops in random-ass cities. As I type this, I'm feeling guilty for sounding like such a transportation snob - and I'm not, really - I've happily slept on trains next to live chickens and pigs (Vietnam) and made it through countless cross-country trips in the wood-paneled family wagon, even without possession of the coveted "way-way-back seat". The problem with the Amtrak version of the Detroit to Chicago trek is that there's just nothing outstanding...

The national rail system in America is called Amtrak, the train pictured here is the "California Zephyr" which runs from Chicago to San Francisco, and it's reckoned to be one of the worlds outstandingly scenic rail journeys. Today is April 29th 2004, and I am planning to take this train myself in less than a week.

Avoid doing business with people who demand government-issued ID — including, where possible, banks (you may want to get an offshore account), federalized mass transit services such as Amtrak and the airlines, etc. Use cash, gold or electronic currencies where you can. Buy a pre-loaded debit card that can be reloaded on the Internet or at local kiosks — and buy it before you’re required to present your new internal passport for the privilege of doing so. If possible, get it with a fake name (if you’re doing that, don’t...

On a final footnote, I would have taken the Amtrak train to Washington Dc because I like the roominess on the train and the ability to walk and relax and get a bite on the train. Sine I was on a time crunch and needed to get their ASAP, I had to take Greyhound. As for taking another trip next time, I will take Amtrak more often and I will take Amtrak more than Greyhound.

Every July 9th, Laguna Niguel locals get together and moon passing Amtrak trains. The Amtrak trains usually fill to capacity on the day of the show.

If the act's mandates take effect in May 2008, as expected, Americans will be required to obtain federally approved ID cards with "machine readable technology" that abides by Department of Homeland Security specifications. Anyone without such an ID card will be effectively prohibited from traveling by air or Amtrak, opening a bank account, or entering federal buildings.

At a Senate hearing, David Gunn, Amtrak’s president warned that bankruptcy was possible unless the federal government provides subsidies. Amtrak’s premium Acela service has been derailed for a month because of cracks in brake discs and Amtrack could lose up to $1 million per week without Acela service. Amtrak requested up to $1.8 billion in federal subsidies — but so far a Senate subcommittee has refused to approve any subsidy plan until Amtrak makes changes that would reduce its dependence on federal subsidies in the future....

Before that time, we will first make a little trip through south west USA. We both leave our “homes” on May 14 to meet up at Dallas/Ft. Worth Aiport, where, hopefully, my aunt will pick us up and take us to her place in Anna, TX. We will stay with my aunt and uncle until May 20. On that say we will take the AmTrak train from Dallas via San Antonio to Tucson, AZ. This trip will take us almost one and a half day, but at least we get to see the country. The day after we arrive in Tucson, we will rent a car and drive to Julie’s host...

I've been thinking lately of re-locating from the District to Baltimore. Housing is less expensive and the lifestyle and people are more to my taste. The only thing keeping me from a serious look-see is the commute. Now, if Amtrak or the MARC train had wifi, I'd be in business.

I ride on Amtrak on the Philadelphia to New York line pretty frequently. On three instances now when the train has been late, I've overheard, while on the train, that it's due to a fatality. (Specifically ON the train, not getting hit by it) The next comment from the train staff is always "I don't know any details."

Amtrak never mentions the fatality thing unless someone directly asks, which is why I feel it may in fact be all about the marketing.

If you want change, then do it – don’t wait for the federal government. Stop driving your car, and use TriMet. Walk to the store instead of driving, and buy a cart for your shopping bags. On longer trips, consider Greyhound or Amtrak. If you currently own an SUV, trade it in for a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle, such as a hybrid.

When I board a plane, I am generally confident it will get me there in one piece, but hey, shit happens. And I'll accept that inept, poorly-trained, sleepy or even drunken pilots (or air traffic controllers) are to blame for such misfortunes. But as cut-throat as the airline industry can be, the actual flying of the plane is no place to flex competitive muscle by cranking it up a few m.p.h. (Besides, in the case of Amtrak, lack of competition and being on the government dole doesn't seem to make it a better rail service.)

Amtrak, and everyone else in the railroad business, knew that the Acela train would be only marginally faster than Metroliner, because unless and until the track bed is improved, speed is not an option.

The tale of the Acela is in many ways the story of Amtrak itself, where political pressures, tight budgets, contested regulations and design changes turned a high-speed train into something slower, more expensive and less reliable than what Amtrak had promised.

A reconstruction of Acela’s history involving dozens of interviews and a review of court documents and other records shows that Amtrak was under intense pressure to deliver its new train as quickly as possible. And that rush to do something bigger and more complicated than the railroad had ever done led to a series of missteps that many experts believe contributed to the problems that have plagued the Acela to this day.

As our buddy bush tries to starve Amtrak to death and it's suffering bad press, it's a particularly relevant time to turn our heads to the classic debate over mass transit taking place over at The Truth About Cars. On the liberal side is one Colin Murchie, Director of Government Affairs of the Solar Energy Industries Association:

My taxes bought the road you’re idling on and the troopers and snow plows and medevac flights that come with it; as sure as they bought the El train blowing past you on the left. More than $40 billion per year in the next highway bill, not including state taxes.

The timeout while I'm entering the credit card information at the Amtrak site has to be the most obnoxious thing ever. My card number is right there for anyone to see until I click submit, and THEN it rejects me. Stupid, obnoxious, and if I were getting the ticket for myself I think I'd hitchhike instead.