Mind the Gap

As sleeping on the train goes, this was not one of my better nights. I could sleep in coach fairly easily as a child, but since I’ve been an adult it’s become pretty much impossible. The sun rose somewhere around Waterloo, Ind., as we spent the morning traversing the northern part of the state. Later we pulled into Elkhart, Ind.—town of more than 50,000 that had an old historic-looking depot. By comparison, the next stop was the much larger city of South Bend, and its station was a rather nondescript shack-like blue building at the edge of town. The ride from there into Chicago was somewhat slow, as we entered the busy railyards surrounding the city. As we got closer to Lake Michigan we passed several factories, then made our way deeper into the Chicago suburbs. We rolled past Guaranteed Rate Field, the home of the White Sox, then went over the Chicago River into Amtrak’s large maintenance yards downtown.  As we headed through the yard, I caught a glimpse of one of the newer trai...

My dad and I had been planning to go cross country by rail since before the pandemic, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Finally we decided it was time to go coast to coast, from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles. He came up on the train the day before from North Carolina, and we set off together May 16 from D.C. to Chicago. Amtrak’s Capitol Limited departs Union Station just after 4 p.m. daily, and the train boarded about a half hour before departure. The Capitol Limited, like many of Amtrak’s east-west long distance services, uses bi-level superliner cars. The train normally runs with 8-10 cars, but today there was just one coach, a dining/café car, two sleepers and a baggage car behind a single locomotive. My suspicion is that ongoing equipment and staffing shortages factored in. We took this leg of the trip in coach, which is considerably cheaper than a roomette and is just fine for daytime travel. We left D.C. on time, and slowly made our way out of the district, through the Maryland...