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Yeah, maybe that was just good luck. On the way out, the train was delayed enough that I missed my connection to the Empire Builder, so I stayed overnight in Portland. Now, on the way back, they're telling me there's no way I can make the connection to the Coast Starlight. Another night in Portland. That's 9 days of travel for a 4-day visit, for those keeping track. I still like it: it means I get a free couple nights in a cool city. But this is 100% not the way to travel if you're in a hurry.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:23
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I see I haven't gone on a rant about freight rail in this thread, so I'm going to take the 1½-2 hours we're sitting still to explain why Amtrak on-time performance is so lovely. By law, freight rail must yield to passenger rail in the United States. But this slows down freight, and this is one of the reasons why freight trains are so drat long. You may recall a recent event where a miles-long train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals all over a town in Pennsylvania: they do this to lower labor costs per car, and also so that they don't have to yield to Amtrak. Here's why:  In order for a train to pass another train, they need to be on parallel rails. The United States has hundreds of thousands of miles of rail, and most of that is just one rail. In order to let trains pass each other, the rails have little pullout sections. But because the freight trains are so long, they can't pull to the side to let Amtrak through. It's just not physically possible for a 2-mile train to yield to a 1000-foot train on a 2000-foot pullout. So Amtrak has to pull to the side, sometimes for hours, to let freight pass, despite the (unenforced) law that it's supposed to be the other way around. As I wrote this, we got passed by a freight train going the same direction we were. Some people in my car took a video of it. I wish I could go back to not being enraged about this. Anyway, the train that passed us isn't the reason we've stopped: we're stopped for some other train ahead of us, and there must be no pullouts between where we stopped and where that train is currently. So we pull to the side, sit here for hours, and then finally we can get on our way again. Making matters worse is the new trend of "precision scheduling". This technique, employed by the freight operators, essentially means "we no longer schedule trains, we just send them off whenever we feel like it." This means Amtrak has no way of knowing when these monster freight trains are going to be on the rails, so there's no way to try to schedule around them. This bullshit, combined with the fact that Amtrak is legally forbidden from reinvesting profits from the Northeast corridor into rail upgrades in other areas to speed up service, are the primary reasons why it's going to take me 5 days to get home, when driving would take 3. At least, that's my understanding. Perhaps a train nerdo will read this and hop in with a better-informed explanation. 
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Oct 27, 2023 17:43
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sounds like we should replace the interstates with rail lines
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Oct 27, 2023 18:54
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Are you planning to keep this up, or was it just a one-off New Year's resolution to try it out for 2023? It's odd -- it seems like they could also pretty trivially address long stoppage times by adding a 2 mile stretch of parallel tracks every 50 miles or something. Doing that for passenger traffic would be a huge money pit, but seems like that would also help freight traffic substantially, since freight also goes in both directions. For going over the Rockies maybe that would be challenging, but for anywhere else it seems like something that a country like Turkey or China could get fixed nation-wide in about a year. Or something that a country like Germany might be able to manage in 50 years.
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Oct 27, 2023 20:44
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Saladman posted:Are you planning to keep this up, or was it just a one-off New Year's resolution to try it out for 2023? I couch this as a goofy new year's resolution so people don't yell at me. The real reason I'm doing this is to cope with my own anxiety about climate change. So this is how I get places from now on. I realize my writing this down is going to make some people angry, or like they want to try and make me see how it actually is. I guess I would just ask that those folks try to consider that I'm doing this as a personal stress response, and it's probably not worth getting upset about. Try to pretend I took up oil painting or something.
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Oct 27, 2023 20:56
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andreas malm covered the only reasonable reaction to climate change, but none of us are going to do it yours is nice and good and anybody who yells at you is not your friend.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:34
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cruft posted:I couch this as a goofy new year's resolution so people don't yell at me. The real reason I'm doing this is to cope with my own anxiety about climate change. I can't imagine why anyone who is not your partner/family/close friends would care enough to get angry over it? I mean I certainly believe you, some people are weird. OTOH the boyfriend of a close friend of mine is also like you, in that he takes his 2 tons of annual carbon extremely seriously... which is definitely going to cause some issues with their relationship, in that she is close with her family (sibling in Canada & most are ~1500 km away in Europe). It'll be interesting to see how that turns out - either he'll have to fly again, or I can't imagine them staying together much longer. It'll be interesting how their Christmas this year turns out, the first outside-of-Europe one for her since they've been together. It's nice to see these firsthand Amtrak accounts regardless of the motivation behind it, even if my interest is just morbid curiosity at this point, like reading those stories about people who do ultra-marathons across the Sahara in summer. Sounds like absolute nightmare hellzone, but it's a good read! I don't mean to come off dismissively with that, I also think it's really great that people like doing ultramarathons, and biking across Mongolia, and bushwacking their way across the Amazon, I just know it's not for me.
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Oct 28, 2023 20:38
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Saladman posted:I just know it's not for me. Yeah, definitely. Know thy self. For example: I've just learned that coconut milk lattes are not for me! I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but just now, eating a hot bowl of vegan ramen in downtown Portland, planning to check out the Saturday market and then stop by a barcade on the way back to the station, I realized the frequent overnight travel delays are actually awesome! In fact, now that I'm looking back, I've been enjoying these unplanned overnight expenses-paid vacations every time they happen. When you have to stay overnight due to a missed connection, Amtrak books you a nice hotel, and gives you $10 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $20 for dinner, depending on how long you're staying. Sometimes that has to be spent inside the hotel, but today they just handed me cash. Because of overnight delays, I've gotten to grub around Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, all of which have awesome downtown areas full of places to visit and things to do. Now that I'm looking at them in this light, I might be more inclined to spend a little of my own money to expand the scope of my tourism. I mean, poo poo, for $10.50, I can take the bus from LA Union Station to Disneyland. Not being tethered to an airport in the outskirts of town is actually hella rad, and I'm not sure why I hadn't realized this until now. I don't even have to go through security when I come back to the union station. There may be days when I just don't want to trudge around, and that's fine too. But today was frickin' awesome, and I think I'm going to try to have more days like this. cruft fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Oct 28, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2023 20:58
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cruft posted:Making matters worse is the new trend of "precision scheduling". This technique, employed by the freight operators, essentially means "we no longer schedule trains, we just send them off whenever we feel like it." This means Amtrak has no way of knowing when these monster freight trains are going to be on the rails, so there's no way to try to schedule around them. Reminds me of that George Carlin bit about how the government will name legislation the exact opposite of what it actually does.
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Nov 12, 2023 04:03
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How does your wife feel about your long haul addiction?
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Nov 19, 2023 05:44
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She's in graduate school doing clinical rotations all over the state, so she's away from home a lot too. I wouldn't have wanted to try this when we were both at home raising a kid.
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Nov 19, 2023 06:19
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One day I will do one of these trips but it seems like you need to book the roomettes a year in advance to get reasonable rates. We once did a sleeper train in Europe but it wasn’t as fun as I wished since it was basically just the sleeping part from 10 PM to 8 AM. And the sleeping wasn’t that great.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:49
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smackfu posted:One day I will do one of these trips but it seems like you need to book the roomettes a year in advance to get reasonable rates. i assure you it was better than the uzbekistan platzkart sleeper featuring a bed that a 5'10" person can't lie flat in, either the body heat of too many people or a fully-open window blasting air in your face, and the lower bunk playing muslim devotional music at 2am for god knows what reason
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Feb 22, 2024 06:56
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Qtotonibudinibudet posted:i assure you it was better than the uzbekistan platzkart sleeper featuring a bed that a 5'10" person can't lie flat in, either the body heat of too many people or a fully-open window blasting air in your face, and the lower bunk playing muslim devotional music at 2am for god knows what reason Genuinely interested in reading more of this story before my 3-day ride to Louisiana in 2 weeks.
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Feb 22, 2024 15:02
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Lol I have a uzbekistan platzkart story too but it's not much of one, so hopefully Qtotonibudinibudet has a better story. This was like 8 years ago, I got on in the evening in Buchara and woke up around Toshkent. It was in March so it wasn't too hot. Not exactly a luxurious experience, like trying to sleep in a moving hostel dormroom. I got the shittier longitudinal bed like on the right here:  It sucks because IIRC it was somewhat narrower and your entire body including the heard is basically in the hallway. In the other beds you could lie down with your head facing away so somewhat isolated from people walking around. I don't remember how I slept, porbably not great but I guess not terrible enough to remember it either. Otherwise mostly unremarkable.
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Feb 23, 2024 21:45
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In 2022 I took my kids on Amtrak from DC to Chicago (14 hrs). My kids were independent in the row behind me, my seat buddy was a hs teacher on summer break bumming around the country on Amtrak, the person in front of me was a stonermom on her way to stay with a midwest old testament cult that doesn't use any electricity. The Mennonites were chill, in the dining car there was a teenage boy who was fascinated by the condiment packets.quote:The next thing that happens in any case is you get a little slip of paper on which is written some combination of your car, seat, and destination city. You go find your seat, then jam the paper into the space between the carpet headliner and the steel edging. Then you sit down. Sometimes the conductor comes through later to scan your ticket. DC did this and it was embarrassingly analog compared to other travel I've done. The conductors asked where we were going and told us which car to line up at. They gave us hand written slips of paper with numbers, let's say I got 28. When I got to my seat someone was already sitting there, their paper also said 28. People were getting on one car and walking through to another and the staff had no way to track or enforce who sat where. The dining car had one guy to handle orders for the whole train and he was not happy. My daughter dropped her cool hat under the seat and it was never returned to lost and found. We saved over $1000 by taking Amtrak instead of flying and I would ride it again with a decent neck pillow.
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Mar 3, 2024 07:41
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Hi, I'm in New Orleans. Got here by train. Southwest Chief leaves Lamy at about 13:38 on Saturday. Arrives the next day in Chicago around the same time. Walked around Chicago looking for Ramen, found it, then walked back to the train station for a 17:30 call to line up. Chicago Union Station is under construction and it was chaotic, but I got on the City Of New Orleans, which left on time at 18:05. Contrary to the Arlo Guthrie song, this train was at 100% capacity: the conductors even remarked on it when they were changing shifts. Rolled into New Orleans around an hour early, maybe 12:30. Then walked to my hotel in the rain. Now all my stuff's hanging in front of the air conditioner. Good thing I've got that rain cover built in to the backpack. I love that backpack. Nothing else to report except that Mississippi was absolutely gorgeous at sunrise, and I get the impression that the humidity is a real pain in the rear end to deal with. Things look like they fall apart so quickly here compared to the dry Rocky Mountains where I live. e: oh, actually, I'm getting tired of bringing hard boiled eggs. Keeping them cool is a dumb pain in the rear end. This morning's eggs felt a little dicey. I ate two, and threw the remaining two away: wasting food makes me feel bad. I guess I'm in the market for alternative breakfast items. I'll see what this bodega down the street in downtown New Orleans has. Maybe somebody makes a ready-to-eat breakfast that's not 60% sugar. ee: I couldn't find Tasty Bites at the store before I left, so I got Ben's Rice. The first one was pretty good cold! I think it was a rice pilaf? The second one wasn't great, it was red beans and rice. Not bad, just bland. Third one is cheese and broccoli rice. I have high hopes. cruft fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 04:00
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cruft posted:Hi, I'm in New Orleans. Got here by train. 
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Mar 5, 2024 08:02
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mobby_6kl posted:Lol I have a uzbekistan platzkart story too but it's not much of one, so hopefully Qtotonibudinibudet has a better story. Is this four beds per... cell?
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Mar 15, 2024 17:25
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cruft posted:Is this four beds per... cell?  These beds with the pillows by the window I think would be quite a bit better than the one I got, which was like this on the left 
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Mar 19, 2024 11:38
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mobby_6kl posted:Yess. Two beds on each side, IIRC that top one is just a shelf thankfully, though you could probably cram two more people there in an emergency. I guess I didn't take any photos there so just stuff from google: I'm 187cm tall (6'2") and would probably have to curl up to fit in one of those, but at first blush it looks like I'd get a better night's sleep than I do on Amtrak. I'm attaching a photo of an Amtrak coach seat fully reclined. I never could sleep on airplanes at all, so at least on Amtrak I can sleep a little. The way it's usually worked for me is that the first day of travel I'm well rested, and then I'm just tired for the rest of the trip. I guess I sleep better the second night, due to fatigue. I should try doing calisthenics on day 1, or something else to wear me out.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:12
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