My dad escorted a tour from Portland, Oregon to the Bahamas via CN and Amtrak and air. His letter below was hurried, but it gives us a look at what Amtrak was like in the Heritage Fleet days. This was his first time on Seaboard Coast Line and his first visit to Florida.
You can see at the beginning that SCL isn't very smooth [handwriting re-written]. A few palm trees so far but I'm surprised the northern Florida in the a.m. looks a little like the Willamette Valley. Mist in the trees, some mobile homes, small stores, gas stations (49.9¢ gal.) and more signs than Canada.
Trip down from New York was great as you can imagine [father was a juice fan.]. We had GG1, baggage-dorm, 5 coaches, club car, diner, 5 sleepers. One of the sleepers is half lounge like 'Mt. Hood' [SP&S car]. Had about 100 in sleepers by the time we got to Jacksonville. Quite a few on in Philadelphia and Washington.
TV and Horse Race in club car are non-op and hostess says she thinks they will be discontinued. She did have a Bingo party for a couple of hours. One of our party won an Amtrak carry-on bag. Amtrak has a girl working coach section as well as the hostess that we see. I don't know if she is really a hostess or coach attendant. She's about 70 lbs. overweight, bought eyelashes, 3 sizes too large at Woolworth and took speech classes on the docks of New York.
Conductor says they will be hard-pressed to handle much Greyhound business [bus strike loomed] as they (Amtrak) already had a lower intra-state fare and some days hauled standees. With season starting soon it would take quite a bit more equipment to do any kind of job.
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[I believe the tour flew to the Bahamas from Miami on Eastern. They joined a Panama Canal cruise back to the West Coast, completing a very large circle. My father handed the tour off to one of the agency's regulars and he flew back to Portland.]
[One funny moment on the flight leg was when a lady asked him to tell about other flights that he must have taken and he had to inform her that he had only taken one flight before, 15 minutes in a Pan American Clipper launched over the Bay from the San Francisco Fair in 1940. As a newspaper country circulation district manager he drove, took trains and buses, but there was no point in flying. Airplanes for him were a means of shipping bundles of newspapers.]
You can see at the beginning that SCL isn't very smooth [handwriting re-written]. A few palm trees so far but I'm surprised the northern Florida in the a.m. looks a little like the Willamette Valley. Mist in the trees, some mobile homes, small stores, gas stations (49.9¢ gal.) and more signs than Canada.
Trip down from New York was great as you can imagine [father was a juice fan.]. We had GG1, baggage-dorm, 5 coaches, club car, diner, 5 sleepers. One of the sleepers is half lounge like 'Mt. Hood' [SP&S car]. Had about 100 in sleepers by the time we got to Jacksonville. Quite a few on in Philadelphia and Washington.
TV and Horse Race in club car are non-op and hostess says she thinks they will be discontinued. She did have a Bingo party for a couple of hours. One of our party won an Amtrak carry-on bag. Amtrak has a girl working coach section as well as the hostess that we see. I don't know if she is really a hostess or coach attendant. She's about 70 lbs. overweight, bought eyelashes, 3 sizes too large at Woolworth and took speech classes on the docks of New York.
Conductor says they will be hard-pressed to handle much Greyhound business [bus strike loomed] as they (Amtrak) already had a lower intra-state fare and some days hauled standees. With season starting soon it would take quite a bit more equipment to do any kind of job.
=====================================
[I believe the tour flew to the Bahamas from Miami on Eastern. They joined a Panama Canal cruise back to the West Coast, completing a very large circle. My father handed the tour off to one of the agency's regulars and he flew back to Portland.]
[One funny moment on the flight leg was when a lady asked him to tell about other flights that he must have taken and he had to inform her that he had only taken one flight before, 15 minutes in a Pan American Clipper launched over the Bay from the San Francisco Fair in 1940. As a newspaper country circulation district manager he drove, took trains and buses, but there was no point in flying. Airplanes for him were a means of shipping bundles of newspapers.]
