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...

It's arguably the most wonderful time of the ….. you know. For me that meant it was time for another ride on the rails. I had booked a round trip on Amtrak's Pennsylvanian to Pittsburgh several weeks ago, long before we all knew there would be an Arctic blast that hampered travel across the country during one of the busiest periods of the year. Fortunately my plans did not involve any airplane travel, but the lingering effects of the storm were still causing problems for trains in the Northeast when I departed D.C. on the 24th.  First, let's just take a minute to enjoy Union Station's annual holiday decorations. So yes, the departure board showed many trains that were delayed by multiple hours, delayed indefinitely or canceled outright. My first train, a Northeast Regional, was about an hour and a half late into D.C., as it had encountered mechanical problems at its point of origin in Richmond due to the cold. But all in all, not too bad when put in the larger context o...

One Saturday earlier this month wasn't a particularly great day weatherwise in the DMV, but of course it was a great day for a Metro ride that I was long overdue to take.  The long-awaited Silver Line extension out to Ashburn via Dulles International Airport opened in mid-November amidst great fanfare and anticipation. And for good reason. I mean, Dulles travelers for many decades had to make the journey by auto, or shuttle, out to the terminal. For Marylanders, that meant crossing the American Legion Bridge. With the Silver Line link now complete, all three D.C.-area airports have a rail transit option (Dulles and National have Metro, and BWI has a MARC/Amtrak station). Dulles isn't exactly convenient to access by Metro from my Montgomery County abode. But I didn't need an excuse to ride the rails. Plus, I hadn't even ridden the original Silver Line between East Falls Church and Wiehle-Reston East since trains began running on it in 2014. So this was a chance for me to...

For four months I've had the bitter taste in my mouth of my last train trip to Florida, which ended prematurely in Jacksonville . I've been determined to complete the northbound trip on Amtrak's Silver Star, particularly because there was one stretch of the route through the Carolinas that I had never seen in the light of day. Amtrak had given me a full refund from the truncated trip in April, and after I kvetched a little more to them about their customer service they threw in an additional $75 voucher. I'll take it. My birthday seemed like a good time to use the voucher. So I figured I'd fly down to Tampa for the day, then catch the train in the evening back to D.C. I invited my best friend from college, Eric, to join me in a roomette. I took the 6:30 a.m. flight to Tampa to begin my trip from National Airport. We were a bit delayed in taking off, and touched down around 9:15.  This is where things get fun. Tampa's airport has a series of people movers that co...