JimInVa
Train Attendant
My first-ever trip report, guys, so be gentle. And...how do I post pictures on this thing????
Today was quite the “Train Day.” I’ve been planning this roughly week-long trip to New Orleans for months now, and was all set for a regular day in my office, followed by a 15-minute subway ride to Union Station to pick up Amtrak train #19, The Crescent. A 6:25pm departure meant a full work day, followed by a nice dining-car dinner. But work obligations popped up that put me in New York City for a 10 a.m. meeting; so I headed for NYC Thursday morning on the 7 a.m. Acela high-speed wonder, did the meeting, and wrapped it up in time to pick up the 1 p.m. at NY Penn back to Union Station.
Everything ran on time, or even just a teensy bit ahead of schedule, so I was in good shape. I even got back in time to grab my sport bag from my stored luggage at the Club Acela lounge in DC, head for my office, hit the gym in the basement for a half hour and then change out of my suit and into my traveling clothes. I got back to Union by 5:30, showered, shaved, unsuited and be-denimed. The bottom line: 452 rail miles before my trip even really began!
From there on, it was smooth sailing. I was in a Roomette for the ride, probably a bit cramped for a couple but wonderful for just little ole’ me. Phil, the sleeping car attendant, had it fully stocked, and the car was one of the Viewliners that have gone through a refurbishment program so most everything worked and worked well.
No sooner had we left Union Station when they called us “Sleepers” up for dinner. By the time we emerged from the tunnel under the Capitol past L’Enfant Plaza I was seated with two new friends. That’s what train travel is all about.
New Orleans has a reputation as a surreal place, and our approach into the Crescent City aboard #19 didn’t disappoint. Evening fell just as we crossed the six-mile causeway across the now-infamous Lake Pontchartrain, a full moon rising in challenge across the water from a waning lukewarm sun. By the time we reached the city’s outskirts, the darkness was complete.
We were under a “slow order” for the last few miles into downtown New Orleans, so the train didn’t top about 20 mph for the rest of the trip, all the better to see the post-Katrina landscape. Nearly three years after the storm, whole neighborhoods remained just clusters of FEMA trailers surrounding crumbling, clapboarded houses.
Then, coming around a particularly dark corner dominated by the crypts of Cypress Grove cemetery, there it was: a giant, glowing orb, maybe 12 feet in diameter, about six feet off the ground in the center court of a FEMA trailer enclave. People dressed in voodoo costumes were dancing and gyrating. Within less than a minute, music outside was loud enough to hear inside the train, and as it got louder, we saw five or six large searchlights, their bright lights reaching straight into the darkness as far up as you could crane your neck through the window to see. I asked Phil, who lives in NOL, what it might be. “Football,” he ventured, of the high-school variety. Uh-uh. The music got louder still, and then we slowed to a creaky stop in front of another cemetery. Welcome to New Orleans…
…As usual, there’s always a prosaic explanation for the initially fantastic. It turns out that it was the first night of the annual Voodoo Music Festival, which typically coincides with Halloween weekend. And New Orleans being New Orleans, fake plastic pumpkins and kids bobbing for apples was nowhere near enough to celebrate the event. The Festival ran for three days and brought out voodoo-inspired music acts as well as nationally touring musicians. It also provoked a mixed bag of letters to the local paper, the Times-Picayune, with writers complaining about the noise and the raucous party-goers. Ah well, laissez les bons temps rouler. B)
OK, so I didn’t TRAVEL by train today, but I sure had a cool train experience while in New Orleans: the new Diner/Lounge car was set to make its debut on the City of New Orleans that afternoon, with an expanded regional menu, revamped booth seating and kitchen gear that promised better food, faster. My group and I got the behind-the-scenes tour Sunday morning, including a walk-through of the car and an explanation of Amtrak’s goals for the new service. The car is genuinely nice, a strong improvement over the original Diner Lite idea. It’s dubbed the Cross-Country Café, and it has space for more food, more booze and souvenirs for sale. It’s also been designed so that only three crew are needed to run the whole car, versus the larger number needed for a separate diner and lounge car setup.
Reviews from folks who took CONO Sunday to Chicago were mostly raves; lines were so long they had to use airline-style cart service to get the goodies to the Coach passengers, although they were free to head up to the car themselves if they so chose.
It’s a nice car, folks. Really. Next time you’re out, keep an eye peeled for Superliner car 37001. And evidently the early word is, buy the chicken wings…
Headed home today on Amtrak #20, the northbound Crescent. We pull sleepy-eyed out of NOL just after seven in the morning, and as soon as we rumble out of downtown, John, the LSA in the dining car, welcomes my companions and me to “The Only Restaurant On Lake Ponchartrain.” Breakfast on the causeway while the sun rises is a real treat…plastic mugs notwithstanding, the coffee on the Crescent is better than passable, and John is a real gem.
The diner on this run has a little history to it: it dates back to the mid-1950s, and was one of the original Northern Pacific dining cars. How do I know? The glass partitions separating dining sections still have the original yin/yang etchings in them that symbolized that service. An Amtrak cardboard sign was ignominiously taped over one of those etchings, but the rest of the partition made it clear enough – this car could tell stories!
After lunch, we pass sun-dappled, piney woods just south of Anniston, AL, and north of the Chula Vista Mountain tunnel, heading for the Coosa River. The Coosa is popularly known as “Catfish Heaven,” but now might well be better described as Coosa Creek. The water level is visibly lower by several feet, and large sections of what used to be the river floor are turning to powder along the river’s edge. Anyone who doubts that prolonged drought has gripped Alabama, Georgia and parts of Florida ought to take a ride on the Crescent and pass town after dried-up town, with resort houses and fishing shacks sitting 12 to 15 feet above water that once lapped up to the edge of their rickety docks.
So far, an uneventful trip, with 21 hours of blessed solitude each way to listen to my own thoughts and take in the views of the Fall woods. I climb into the upper bunk after a nice dinner, drowsy and ready to be rocked like a baby until we get to Manassas the next morning. I’m briefly awakened by a longish stop, and I open my eyes long enough to see that we’re spending an awfully long time in Charlotte, NC, at 2 a.m. The power briefly goes out, and then comes on again. But it’s too quiet, and I’m too cozy, to investigate further. The blanket comes up over my ears and I drift away…
Only when I get up on Wednesday do I learn that we stopped in Charlotte overnight so the entire length of the train could be inspected. We hit a car at a grade crossing just south of Charlotte, and a passenger in the car was ejected and killed. I truly had no idea, and neither did anyone else on the train, other than the crew. The car evidently side-swiped the train, and none of us – including, apparently, the Engineer – knew quite what had happened until emergency services alerted the railroad and the crew.
Henry, our dining car attendant working with John, shook his head sadly over our breakfasts and wondered aloud why people seem to ignore grade crossings so much, particularly on this route. “They have no regard for their own life,” he said. So true, so true.
All my train rides make me think about and re-evaluate my life’s arc and all the people whose lives affect mine and in whose life I hope I play a small part. All that solo time is made for meditation. But this trip gave me just that much more to chew over. When I got into the cab at the Manassas train station, I called my wife and told her how much I love her.
JimInVa
43,000 rail miles...and counting!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Today was quite the “Train Day.” I’ve been planning this roughly week-long trip to New Orleans for months now, and was all set for a regular day in my office, followed by a 15-minute subway ride to Union Station to pick up Amtrak train #19, The Crescent. A 6:25pm departure meant a full work day, followed by a nice dining-car dinner. But work obligations popped up that put me in New York City for a 10 a.m. meeting; so I headed for NYC Thursday morning on the 7 a.m. Acela high-speed wonder, did the meeting, and wrapped it up in time to pick up the 1 p.m. at NY Penn back to Union Station.
Everything ran on time, or even just a teensy bit ahead of schedule, so I was in good shape. I even got back in time to grab my sport bag from my stored luggage at the Club Acela lounge in DC, head for my office, hit the gym in the basement for a half hour and then change out of my suit and into my traveling clothes. I got back to Union by 5:30, showered, shaved, unsuited and be-denimed. The bottom line: 452 rail miles before my trip even really began!
From there on, it was smooth sailing. I was in a Roomette for the ride, probably a bit cramped for a couple but wonderful for just little ole’ me. Phil, the sleeping car attendant, had it fully stocked, and the car was one of the Viewliners that have gone through a refurbishment program so most everything worked and worked well.
No sooner had we left Union Station when they called us “Sleepers” up for dinner. By the time we emerged from the tunnel under the Capitol past L’Enfant Plaza I was seated with two new friends. That’s what train travel is all about.
Friday, October 26, 2007
New Orleans has a reputation as a surreal place, and our approach into the Crescent City aboard #19 didn’t disappoint. Evening fell just as we crossed the six-mile causeway across the now-infamous Lake Pontchartrain, a full moon rising in challenge across the water from a waning lukewarm sun. By the time we reached the city’s outskirts, the darkness was complete.
We were under a “slow order” for the last few miles into downtown New Orleans, so the train didn’t top about 20 mph for the rest of the trip, all the better to see the post-Katrina landscape. Nearly three years after the storm, whole neighborhoods remained just clusters of FEMA trailers surrounding crumbling, clapboarded houses.
Then, coming around a particularly dark corner dominated by the crypts of Cypress Grove cemetery, there it was: a giant, glowing orb, maybe 12 feet in diameter, about six feet off the ground in the center court of a FEMA trailer enclave. People dressed in voodoo costumes were dancing and gyrating. Within less than a minute, music outside was loud enough to hear inside the train, and as it got louder, we saw five or six large searchlights, their bright lights reaching straight into the darkness as far up as you could crane your neck through the window to see. I asked Phil, who lives in NOL, what it might be. “Football,” he ventured, of the high-school variety. Uh-uh. The music got louder still, and then we slowed to a creaky stop in front of another cemetery. Welcome to New Orleans…
…As usual, there’s always a prosaic explanation for the initially fantastic. It turns out that it was the first night of the annual Voodoo Music Festival, which typically coincides with Halloween weekend. And New Orleans being New Orleans, fake plastic pumpkins and kids bobbing for apples was nowhere near enough to celebrate the event. The Festival ran for three days and brought out voodoo-inspired music acts as well as nationally touring musicians. It also provoked a mixed bag of letters to the local paper, the Times-Picayune, with writers complaining about the noise and the raucous party-goers. Ah well, laissez les bons temps rouler. B)
Sunday, October 28, 2007
OK, so I didn’t TRAVEL by train today, but I sure had a cool train experience while in New Orleans: the new Diner/Lounge car was set to make its debut on the City of New Orleans that afternoon, with an expanded regional menu, revamped booth seating and kitchen gear that promised better food, faster. My group and I got the behind-the-scenes tour Sunday morning, including a walk-through of the car and an explanation of Amtrak’s goals for the new service. The car is genuinely nice, a strong improvement over the original Diner Lite idea. It’s dubbed the Cross-Country Café, and it has space for more food, more booze and souvenirs for sale. It’s also been designed so that only three crew are needed to run the whole car, versus the larger number needed for a separate diner and lounge car setup.
Reviews from folks who took CONO Sunday to Chicago were mostly raves; lines were so long they had to use airline-style cart service to get the goodies to the Coach passengers, although they were free to head up to the car themselves if they so chose.
It’s a nice car, folks. Really. Next time you’re out, keep an eye peeled for Superliner car 37001. And evidently the early word is, buy the chicken wings…
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Headed home today on Amtrak #20, the northbound Crescent. We pull sleepy-eyed out of NOL just after seven in the morning, and as soon as we rumble out of downtown, John, the LSA in the dining car, welcomes my companions and me to “The Only Restaurant On Lake Ponchartrain.” Breakfast on the causeway while the sun rises is a real treat…plastic mugs notwithstanding, the coffee on the Crescent is better than passable, and John is a real gem.
The diner on this run has a little history to it: it dates back to the mid-1950s, and was one of the original Northern Pacific dining cars. How do I know? The glass partitions separating dining sections still have the original yin/yang etchings in them that symbolized that service. An Amtrak cardboard sign was ignominiously taped over one of those etchings, but the rest of the partition made it clear enough – this car could tell stories!
After lunch, we pass sun-dappled, piney woods just south of Anniston, AL, and north of the Chula Vista Mountain tunnel, heading for the Coosa River. The Coosa is popularly known as “Catfish Heaven,” but now might well be better described as Coosa Creek. The water level is visibly lower by several feet, and large sections of what used to be the river floor are turning to powder along the river’s edge. Anyone who doubts that prolonged drought has gripped Alabama, Georgia and parts of Florida ought to take a ride on the Crescent and pass town after dried-up town, with resort houses and fishing shacks sitting 12 to 15 feet above water that once lapped up to the edge of their rickety docks.
So far, an uneventful trip, with 21 hours of blessed solitude each way to listen to my own thoughts and take in the views of the Fall woods. I climb into the upper bunk after a nice dinner, drowsy and ready to be rocked like a baby until we get to Manassas the next morning. I’m briefly awakened by a longish stop, and I open my eyes long enough to see that we’re spending an awfully long time in Charlotte, NC, at 2 a.m. The power briefly goes out, and then comes on again. But it’s too quiet, and I’m too cozy, to investigate further. The blanket comes up over my ears and I drift away…
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Only when I get up on Wednesday do I learn that we stopped in Charlotte overnight so the entire length of the train could be inspected. We hit a car at a grade crossing just south of Charlotte, and a passenger in the car was ejected and killed. I truly had no idea, and neither did anyone else on the train, other than the crew. The car evidently side-swiped the train, and none of us – including, apparently, the Engineer – knew quite what had happened until emergency services alerted the railroad and the crew.
Henry, our dining car attendant working with John, shook his head sadly over our breakfasts and wondered aloud why people seem to ignore grade crossings so much, particularly on this route. “They have no regard for their own life,” he said. So true, so true.
All my train rides make me think about and re-evaluate my life’s arc and all the people whose lives affect mine and in whose life I hope I play a small part. All that solo time is made for meditation. But this trip gave me just that much more to chew over. When I got into the cab at the Manassas train station, I called my wife and told her how much I love her.
JimInVa
43,000 rail miles...and counting!
