I have eaten in the frigid dining car a breakfast of weak coffee and a decent quiche with potatoes and a lunch of a chicken breast sandwich with packaged mustard, slightly wilted lettuce, tomato, and more weak coffee. Dinner is now done and I chatted with a professor of psychology and ethics in a university. He had the beef and pronounced it "good" and I the roast half chicken, baked potato, string beans and salad. It got an “OK”, better than the lounge car with its nuked, packaged dinners. One RR dining car attendant was pleasant, cheerful for the entire trip and helpful. The woman who brought the food was the expected RR worker — surly and on the verge of rude, to be ignored. Still, my first trip I had bought a dinner to go near Penn Station, fearing the worst for the dining car and learned the next morning that they would make me an egg-white omelet and the tablecloths were clean, the company often enjoyable on the rigid table and benches that are shared at the order of the dining car attendant.
After two or three hours we rolled out of the nearly endless urbanization of the southeast Florida corridor of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, this beach and that beach and began to see green again. Up Okechobee and Sebring way the view began to look more like the way I remember my Florida of 50 years ago. Here we clattered past not just a few yachts but whole marinas full of them and lines of marinas, a fenced lot of Bentleys and Rolls, the town of Winter Park that the Amtrak Route Guide describes as “the birthplace of the Temple Orange” and the place President Chester Arthur (not one of our most memorable) described as “the prettiest place I have seen in Florida.” It looks neat and clean and manicured and boasts the “largest outdoor art show in the country.” It looks rich and stuffy and I wanted to get off and wander around anyway.
We have rounded a curve and I have seen the train clearly for the first time It is a long train with at least a dozen cars behind the three sleepers and the dining car. Train travel is not dying, maybe growing, merely needs to embrace the European spirit, the Japanese vision of trains that move and trains that serve up a travel experience just a little more like the cruise lines, huge, mass tourism movement and Marriott's Courtyard business model of service to the customer.
Article comments
1 - RNB
Passenger rail carries less than 1 percent of the intercity travel in the U.S. That's not a transportation mode, it's somebody's hobby.
2 - Mark Saleski
wow, really great stuff howard.
reminds me of shorter (and far less scary) version of paul theroux's The Old Patagonia Express
3 - Elvira Black
Hey Howard--good stuff. My b/f and I took Amtrak twice from NYC to Wisconsin. What a schlep, and the route was not very scenic. The second time I brought a ton of sandwiches for the road because the sandwiches etc cost a fortune. We didn't travel in "style" but I noticed that the supposed "sleeper" seats were identical to the regular ones. I guess you got the real deal though.
The conductors can be rude and unhelpful. You're right about the lack of security--one time we went right after there was a big announcement that Amtrak would be checking security more closely but apparently not.
My b/f went out to Ohio recently by plane to visit his folks, and though it was a short trip it was hellish nonetheless. He is very hesitant to ever take a plane trip again after that ordeal.
But it sounds like you had a relatively "pleasant" time of it in exchange for the extra bucks.
4 - Howard Dratch
Thanks for the comments. Mark: time for me to read the Theroux. Elvira yest it did have a "relatively" pleasant time. In the morning I board the Silver Star for the return.
I posted a similar article on my own blog, 7 Color Lagoon which garnered a wonderfully informative comment by Jim L. It is really worth the read for more of the Amtrak passenger rail situation from the keyboard of a real railroad man. I hope he will also post it here.
RNB. You may be right about the percentage of travel by rail but that could mean that there is a lot of room for the country to go back to the future.