Planeless Circumnavigation (Pt. 2): AmTrak to Chicago

The ticket I booked was from Greenville, South Carolina (allowing me to visit family in the region) to Vancouver, British Columbia – but naturally trains don’t travel in approximately straight lines towards your destination, as the national highway system (almost) allows us to do.

The train trip would actually be from Greenville, SC, to Washington, DC (traveling overnight). I would have several hours in DC, followed by a trip from Washington, DC to Chicago (also traveling overnight). I would have a brief layover in Chicago, then have a two-day-long train ride to Seattle, where I would immediately transfer to a bus to head off to Vancouver, leaving the next day for Japan.

Sounds good, right?

The night I was to leave Greenville, I was feeling particularly tired. I’m prone to impulse purchases (a terrible habit I’m hoping to diminish in the New Year), so I upgraded all my standard tickets to roomettes.

This was quite possibly the best thing that could have happened to my trip.

A little explanation: the “coach” section of these trains are essentially what you would find on an airplane in economy class, only with larger seats that have more of a recline to them. But nonetheless, there’s no privacy, the chairs don’t lie flat, and for someone who has brief bouts of sleeplessness, this would have spelled a miserable trip. By comparison, the roomettes are miniature rooms (hence the name) – they can be closed off from the rest of the trains, the chairs fold out into makeshift beds complete with sheets, they have (minor) temperature control – and complementary minibottles of water, which I killed about 40 of throughout the trip. They also have an overhead bed (in case two people are traveling together), but I never actually used this.

These roomettes are arguably the AmTrak version of business class – they do have an expense to them, but are not the top-of-the-line “Family Rooms”, which come with a couch that folds out into a double-bed, as well as a third, overhead bed. Nevertheless, the ability to lie down on the 4 overnight portions of the trip was huge.

Greenville, SC to Washington, DC

This particular portion, on the Crescent (I believe it was) Amtrak line, travels from New Orleans to New York down to Miami and back. Unfortunately, if I wanted to travel from Greenville, SC, to Charleston, SC (between a 2-4h car trip, depending on how much respect you have for the law), I would have to travel to DC and then down the coastal seaboard to get there, an 18-or-so hour roundtrip.

Hopefully all the money Obama’s poured into the system will bring some improvement to the infrastructure between major cities.

In any case, I boarded the train fairly late at night, as it arrived nearly on time from New Orleans. The majority of the riders were seniors on a special group plan, who immediately climbed into their roomettes and went to sleep. This was great, but I felt like exploring a little, so I set my things down and head to the dining car.

Dinner was over, and the chef was cleaning everything up. I struck up a conversation with the conductor, who was to be replaced in Charlotte – while talking, I quickly discovered that AmTrak rails are not nearly as smooth as the trains I had ridden in Europe and Asia. Actually, AmTrak does not own the majority of their infrastructure, but borrows it from freight lines – and freight doesn’t complain if it’s bumpy (unless the freight is explosives), so the rails were not nearly as well kept as those abroad, which (I believe) are all owned and maintained privately by the company that runs trains on them.

Traveling at night by train was an interesting experience, if nothing else – I lay down to sleep, forcing my stomach to get used to the unusual moments, and when I awoke, I was in DC. I honestly didn’t feel too much of the time between, having half-slept through most of it, but having clear memories of traveling by car that way, train travel struck me – at the time – as a useful if slightly expensive alternative.

Better than driving all night, anyway. I mean, my little roomette had a toilet.

A perk of getting a roomette is access to a special train lounge in each hub, and Washington’s was fairly impressive. Granted, the only other lounges of this type I’ve been in were when I managed to get a cheap upgrade to business class in a return trip from Kansai International Airport in Japan a year before – but the two were definitely comparable. I had several hours to kill – fast food abounded in Washington Central Station, which serves all of Washington’s rail links to the rest of the nation, the gates reminiscent of what airtravel was 15 years ago.

After half the day, my next train rolled in – DC to Chicago, which traveled up through western Pennsylvania.

Washington, DC to Chicago

The trains traveling the length of the nation had AmTrak’s Superliners, which contain roomettes on two different floors of

the car. On this particular superliner, I was placed on the 2nd floor, where the motion of the train was slightly magnified. Good practice for eating and the like (I brought snacks, though a “dinner” (think baseball stadium food) was available) with the motion, training the stomach up for the long haul from Chicago to Seattle.

On the way there, I found a group of recent college graduates who worked for AmTrak, and were heading to Chicago for a company-sponsored colloquium. It surprised me at the time; I’ve been so used to people using planes for company sponsored events that I had, without thinking, assumed AmTrak would do much the same. Not my brightest moment, but the trip was certainly filled with those.

On a personal note, I wasn’t sleeping very well – but as I can have trouble sleeping in a perfectly stationary bed, and can’t sleep at all on turbulence-less planes, I didn’t find this too surprising. The motion of the train lulls some to sleep, and naturally keeps others up – after an hour or so it simply becomes background motion, though it feels more distinct at night, when you don’t have a horizon to justify yourself with – a key cause of motion sickness in the susceptible. I do maintain I far more enjoyed the train than I would have a bus, thanks to the roomette.

The train trip itself was rather uneventful – it rained briefly, night fell, morning came, and sometime in the middle of the morning we arrived in Chicago. No late arrivals at any location for me thus far.

It was definitely humbling to realize that I’d just spent 2 days traveling to a city that, by car, would have taken maybe 12 hours, and that, by plane, gate-to-gate would’ve taken maybe 1.5 to 2 hours. Overall, though, due to the roundabout nature of AmTrak travel, I hadn’t yet “felt” the size of the US or the world – just the feeling of traveling in a right angle to my destination.

Next up – the long haul, from Chicago to Seattle, last minute scheduling changes, and the bus-ride-border-crossing into Vancouver.

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