Everfree Northwest Part 3—Eastbound Empire Builder · 1:12am Oct 31st, 2022
Before I begin, I need to say that I totally forgot that I hung out with Winston at the con, too, and completely forgot to mention him in the last blog post.
Departing Seattle
Mondays after cons always have a strange feel. Down in the hotel lobby, congoers mill about, some of them still wearing their garb, and others in civilian clothes.
Besides my top hat, I’ve usually got a pony on my shoulder during the length of the con. Both of those are packed away. As I wait in line at the hotel checkout, somebody asks me why I’m not wearing a pony any more.
A shoulder pony’s not exactly bus-friendly.
Monochromatic has a whole crowd of her people in the lobby, and after a late lunch, they’re still there. I say my final goodbyes and head out to the nearest bus stop.
•••
One of the great things about Everfree Northwest for me is the great public transportation. At the old hotel it was really convenient; they were literally across the street from the airport, and ran shuttles. The Bellevue Hyatt doesn’t run one out to the airport, nor do they run one to the train station.
The 271 bus takes me all the way to the Husky’s Stadium, and from there it’s a short walk to the tram station. Settle’s public transit is fully-integrated into Google Maps, so not only does it tell me which bus (or tram) I need to take, but it also tells me when the next one will arrive. It’s three dollars for the bus and two-fifty for the tram.
The bus gives me a nice scenic view as we cross over the floating bridge into Seattle proper, and it drops me off across from the tram station. A quick stop to buy a ticket from their automated kiosk, and then it’s down to the platform to wait. Since that service is partially underground, partially elevated, and partially on city streets, they decided to power the entire system with overhead wires. It’s odd to see overhead wires in a tunnel.
There are no opportunities for scenery on the tram, not unless one is interested in tunnel walls or underground train stations. It deposits me about a block away from the King Street Station in Chinatown. The upper courtyard is full of pigeons, the curbs are drifted with pigeon down, and I notice a little garden alcove that looks like a peaceful place to relax in the middle of the city.
I’ve got about an hour and a half to wait for the train. The TSA has a dog on patrol and something must have annoyed her, ‘cause she goes on a couple of barking fits which really echo through the station.
•••
As I wait for the Empire Builder to arrive from its yard and start loading, I watch two BNSF freights headed southbound and several Sounder commuter trains go through. One more Sounder departs headed North after I’m in my seat, and a second arrives in the station but we depart before it.
This time, I’m in a lower level in an older Superliner car. Same side of the train as on the way out, though (South side).
We make our way along Puget Sound and then curve around under Everett, through the lower plains until we start climbing into the Cascades. I could stand in the loading area downstairs and take some pictures out towards the ocean, but I need some time to settle in. I’ve packed better this time around, but I’m still going to wind up taking a couple of trips to my suitcase to get stuff—at least that’s a thing that can be done on a train.
It’s just as beautiful as it was before. This time there are plenty of boats lined up to get through the lock, fishing boats on their way back to harbor.
Going into the Cascades was just as beautiful as it was before, although on the lower level of the car the view isn’t as good. We actually sit below the level of normal passenger car passengers, since the only way to make a double-deck car fit on a railroad is to have a drop center (there are no rooms above the wheelsets; those are given to mechanical spaces).
I stood in the vestibule—you don’t get yelled at for doing that on Superliners—and took pictures of the other side of Skykomish, then settled down and watched out the window as we continued to curve through the Cascades.
This time I was ready as we approached the Cascade Tunnel and I got a picture of the Scenic Shed. Unfortunately, the sign didn’t really come out in the picture, so you’ll just have to trust it says what I say it does.
•••
Dinner was called while we were in the tunnel, and we were still in the tunnel when I sat down to eat. If I haven’t mentioned this before, they sit you down with somebody else for your meals, which is great for extroverts and not so much for introverts. Also if I didn’t mention this before, you make a time reservation for dinner, but you can get breakfast or lunch whenever the car’s serving those meals.
My new dinner friends had a good conversation about trains and touring, and I explained to them how we’d pick up a new half of our train in Spokane, and I pondered what might happen if that Portland half of our train arrived really late. Would it be abandoned in Spokane? Would it proceed independently as a second section of the Empire Builder? Neither of those made much sense, especially since it would mean that the sleeping car passengers on that train wouldn’t have a dining car (not to mention the scheduling conflicts that would arise).
[SIDENOTE: I also took some very blurry pictures of the skeleton flat cars with semi truck trailers on them to see if Sweetsong’s idea of hiding under them was a workable idea. Since I was sitting below the level of the trailer decks, I’d be able to see for sure (they don’t use that equipment in Michigan, as far as I know—I’ve never seen it on the CN freights). I was decently confident it would work, and that it would be hard to spot a pony under one of those cars.
[Recently, Airy Words sent me a link to a documentary about hobos and while I haven’t watched all of it yet, there was a clip in it of them riding under semi trailers on a skeleton flat.]
DAY 2
Sleeping on the lower car was better, but still not great. The rocking was less pronounced, but occasionally on curves it felt like I was going to fall off the bed.
I woke up in the middle of the night, in Spokane, checked the time against the timetable, and realized that we were an hour behind schedule. I stayed up until we hooked on to the Portland half, and got annoyed that when they switch power modes on the train, it turns on the light in the Roomettes and you can’t turn it off.
It’s also a bit disconcerting to be in a lower-level sleeping car and have a tank train zoom past at 60. To people who haven’t ridden trains on parallel tracks, there is not much distance between the cars.
By morning proper—7am local—we were still two hours behind schedule. Not much that they can do to make up time while we go through the twisty bits, not if they want the train to stay on the tracks.
On the plus side, this is a part of the journey I didn’t get to see on the way out. On the westbound train it was at night—and it would have been at night on this trip, too, except for the delay.
My breakfast companions did come from Portland, on the tardy train. They said that on its way to Portland, it hit a four-hour delay for bridge repair. Since the same train heads back east, and they have to service it and turn it, they left Portland several hours late.
Our engineer is doing his best to make up time. We made up fifteen minutes by the time we arrived in Whitefish, MT, and from there he ran her hard until we started climbing into the Rockies.
Whether I make my connecting train in Chicago remains to be seen. If he can’t make up at least some of the lost time, I won’t. My next train—the last of the day—leaves about an hour after this one arrives.
•••
These days, some railroad control points just have numbers. A train might have to stop at CP 114.3. Back in the old days of timetable operations, everything had a name, usually the closest town, but I’d assume that sometimes out in the boonies whoever laid the tracks got to choose what it was called.
Assuming I remember, I’ll check into what the sign on the West Glacier station says. [I checked; it says Belton] Amtrak calls the stop West Glacier, but it wasn’t always called that, and it’s strange how the station still has the sign with the old name on it, but there are newer Amtrak signs that supersede it.
In areas where rock slides are common, the railroads sometimes install rock fences. Those are electric fences which discourage rocks from crossing, because if they do, they get an electric shock, if interrupted, send a signal that there could be rocks across the track.
Signs on the fence indicate which one it is, so crews and dispatchers and maintenance (in the form of rock-movers) will know where to go.
We pass a section of rock fence at Java West. One end of the fence is labeled “Java West West Fence,” and the other is “Java West East Fence.”
There’s also a lot of relay rail stacked up here and there, and a fair bit of maintenance of way equipment as well. I suspect that the curves and rock slides are frequent enough to justify rock fences are the reason; this section of track is vital to get to Seattle.
In fact, we pass a maintenance crew installing a new switch on our way across the mountain pass. I didn’t get a picture of it; I wish I had.
•••
I haven’t warmed to this train crew as much as I did on the westbound train. There’s nothing wrong with the services they’re providing or their professionalism, but the crew we had going out just seemed more friendly, more outgoing—my porter was so friendly and a genuinely happy person.
Also they sometimes had discussions over the train PA they probably shouldn’t have. Anybody remember the scene in Airplane! where the two airport staff were arguing over what red curbs were for? On the first leg of our trip, one of the train crew asked another for more garbage bags over the intercom, then she only got half the message, so it went something like this:
“Hey, anybody up in the dining car got more garbage bags? I need them back in the sleepers.”
“What?”
“Garbage bags, I need some back in the sleepers.”
“Hold on, let me look.”
<PA falls silent>
“Never mind, I found some.”
“Okay.”
Maybe not the most professional conversation, but it really lightened the mood.
•••
Our speed limit through the mountains is 35 mph, so we get to enjoy the scenery whether we want to or not. Besides the rock fences, they’ve got snow sheds in spots where drifting snow is a problem. In the early days of railroads, they’d’ve been built of wood, but now they’re big concrete structures arching over the tracks. The support pillars give it an almost cathedral vibe, especially since as often as not, the land drops off on the other side of the shed, and we’re looking out into a valley.
Marias Pass and the continental divide bring a giant obelisk for the drivers on US-2; the closest thing that BNSF provides for a marker is an equipment shed. It’s (mostly) all downhill from here.
•••
East Glacier would be a great place to pick up some lost time, but we’re stuck behind a slow freight. So be it. At some point, we do pass him or else he goes off on a side track somewhere, or else he gets inspired by the long downgrade and hammers down. Hard to say.
Montana is big. Most of today will be Montana, in fact. We'll cross into North Dakota in the evening, around dinnertime. It will be my last dinner on the train; even if they wind up losing more time during the night, they don’t have the supplies for another meal.
This morning at breakfast, a few hopefuls from coach turned up and then got sent away. They won’t serve coach passengers, they’ll have to make due with what they can get from the snack bar. When it opens. If it opens.
This makes me uncomfortable, and don’t know why it should. Logically, there’s only so much space to store food, and they only promised to serve meals to people who bought sleeping car tickets. I feel like some out-of-touch billionaire, watching the peons starve while I get served microwaved eggs on a plastic plate. It’s customizable; I can get one of two different kinds of cheese on it (American or Swiss).
Montana is big, and it varies from the Rockies to the plains. Parts of it seem very flat, but off in the distance you can see a mountain or you’re suddenly crossing over a river gorge.
My lunch partner is silent and reserved. We’re coming into Shelby and I recognize the landmarks from Sweetsong’s trip. There’s the track that she didn’t want to take, there’s the signal bridge, there’s the interstate bridge, and I look north but can’t see the airport from the train.
I get excited when I see a train headed up by a locomotive still in Burlington Northern Green, and it’s followed by a locomotive in Santa Fe Warbonnet. They’re probably just yard switchers, or maybe they run local freights on obscure branches; whichever it is, the BNSF has had over 20 years to repaint them and hasn’t bothered to do so.
Seeing what Sweetsong would have seen, but from the comfort of a train—there’s parts of it I got right, parts of it I would have changed had this journey been fresh in my mind. There are more junk cars by the tracks than I expected, and of course the everpresent litter. Even the remains of some homeless encampments or hobo encampments, who knows.
I also find that I pay more attention to hopper end sills than I used to. Not just for hobos (I didn’t see any), but for evidence that they’d been there, things they’d left behind on the car.
Most of the day, if we didn’t have US-2 or a main road through a town alongside the tracks, they aren’t paved. We pass a stretch of gravel road, and I can read the warning sign for a DIP as it crosses a shallow gulley or drainage ditch. There’s also a huge rock on the shoulder, but no warning sign for that. Where did it even come from?
•••
We get to make up a little time in Glasgow, Montana. There are no passengers getting on or off, so the engineer is going to do the train equivalent of a touch-and-go landing.
Markle’s in Glasgow advertises themselves as a railroad salvage yard, but all I can see on their platform is appliances. Maybe they fell off a train. Their delivery truck is from the 60s—the number of old cars and trucks in Montana and North Dakota surprises me. Back home, we’re lucky if they last twenty years before the road salt gets them.
We spend less than twenty seconds stopped at Glasgow. I assume the engineer stopped, radioed that he was stopped, counted to ten, then radioed that he was going again. Back in the old days, you could make up time by speeding, so long as you kept the train on the tracks. Nowadays, that’s surely frowned upon, and there may be a way that they can monitor how fast the train is going.
Barren scrubland is fenced in just the same. No cattle graze it, no crops are grown. There’s a section where the fence posts have fallen off and nobody has bothered to fix it. How long has that fence been down? Years? Decades? It’s impossible to know.
Of course, I’m no expert; the pastures that do have cows in them look the same as the ones that don’t (with the exception of cows, of course). Maybe the ones I think are abandoned aren’t; maybe those cows don’t like trains and stay away from the tracks.
There’s a different vibe to this land, it’s not like the mountains where the trees are clustered up against the track, and the train takes the only route that’s wide enough for it. Here there are stretches where I can see for miles and miles, and there’s just nothing. We’ve got big fields in my part of Michigan, but the stubble and the occasional tire tracks in the field is the only sign anybody does anything with this land.
•••
We’ve gotten sided out a couple of times this afternoon, waiting for a westbound train to pass. Our train is a lot shorter than the freights the siding was built for, so the engineer doesn’t stop on the sidings if he can avoid it, just slows down and lets the train go at a fast walk. In this territory, he can probably see the oncoming train long before it arrives, but it feels like impeccable timing on his part.
But we don’t always get lucky. Whatever time we saved in Glasgow is gone as a crude oil train creeps by.
Dinner gets called as we’re nearing the eastern border of Montana. I opted for the late dinner again, and I get seated alone, across from my former dinnermates from Cleveland. We’re skirting the edge of the Missouri, but I’m on the wrong side of the train to get a good picture of it. I snap a picture of an unknown locomotive out the window.
There’s no big fanfare as we finally cross into North Dakota. A dinner latecomer gets seated across from me and we talk about trains and bicycles and airplane rides and such. The train makes its first stop in North Dakota, and now we know we’ve arrived.
Unless things go disastrously wrong, we’ll be in Minnesota in the morning, and then it’s a (hopefully) quick run through Wisconsin and into Chicago.
We’ve also changed time zones again, which is always a little weird. I sat down for dinner at 7 and returned to my room at 9—where did the time go? I borrowed it on my way out west and now I have to give it back.
•••
To add to the fun, I get an e-mail from Consumers power saying that there’s an outage where I live and I might not get my electricity back until two days after I return home.
No word on the current state of the Big Green BoxTM
•••
Obligatory North Dakota oil well pic:
•••
Our engineer must know a shortcut. We’re still an hour and forty minutes behind schedule in Stanley, ND, and according to the timetable, it’s an hour and a half to the next stop, Minot. The conductor announces we’ll be there in 50 minutes, and we are.
Minot is a service stop, we’re scheduled to be there for almost an hour, and while there’s a certain amount of time required to service the train, it doesn’t take the full hour. We leave only half an hour behind schedule, and we even had time for one of the field car repairwomen to come aboard, check the AC in my car, concur it isn’t working properly, and write a repair ticket for it. Whatever’s wrong with it can’t be field-repaired in Minot.
Note the CP train passing under the bridge
A CP train blasts by on the other track and as we depart, I decide to take a train shower, just for the experience. It’s a lot like a normal shower but the room is smaller, the water pressure lower, the temperature knob more finicky, and of course the chance every second that the train will toss you off your feet.
I feel that on a ship, at least, you can get used to the rhythm of the waves and the rocking of the boat. The train’s usually more stable, but every now and then we hit a track joint that’s misaligned or rumble across a switch or the engineer’s a little too frisky on the brakes.
Nevertheless, I survive, and settle down for the night.
DAY 3
As the schedule promised, morning finds us in Minnesota. I’m in the dining car when it opens, and my breakfast companion is an older guy who’s got a train shirt and a railroad scanner. He’s in the same car as I am, and sometimes I hear his radio going off as the train crosses the defect detector.
We’re joined by a woman a little bit later on. There’s not a lot of breakfast conversation, it’s too early for that. Instead we watch the sun rise over one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul railroad yard—just north/west of the Amtrak station, is a huge bottleneck. Apparently, our conductor has to get out and set switches herself, too.
I get a good look at a Minnesota Commercial locomotive and do a double-take—they’re still running Alcos, it seems. Just manage to catch a shot of it, and then I see a lash-up of their locomotives on a side track. Unfortunately, that’s behind a string of grainers, so I do my best to take shots between individual cars.
I also make the discovery that my train window is the perfect height to look onto grainer end platforms. No hobos—pegasus or human—spotted.
•••
The Minneapolis/St. Paul yard seems to go on forever. A few tracks over, a train’s being pushed over the hump to be switched in the classification yard, and the nearby tracks are chock-full of railcars of every type. It’s certainly the biggest one we’ve gone through in a while.
Across the river is a string of barges, and I wonder if some grain for export is brought in by grainer and then transferred to a barge? It wouldn’t surprise me.
It’s slow going. Yards eat up travel time; even if the conductor doesn’t have to set her own switches—you don’t want a train to blast through at sixty while there are crew on the ground making up trains.
•••
We hug the Mississippi after we leave the Twin Cities. For a while, it’s on our right, then we cross over and it’ll stay on our right until we cross it one last time to get to Wisconsin.
Whoever built this line decided that instead of one big bridge, they’d pick a spot where there are a bunch of islands so they could build several shorter bridges. Fun fact, one of the plans to cross the Straits of Mackinac involved island-hopping. Since there was only one island, it wasn’t a better plan than a single, very long bridge. We cross the Mississippi and then we cross the Mississippi and then we cross the Mississippi . . . the two first crossings are both the Mississippi, while the third is named French Slough.
Right after that we cross the Black River, which feeds into the Mississippi just south of the railroad bridge.
Next big waterway is going to be Lake Michigan; I don’t know how close the train runs to the lake. [The closest we get is about three quarters of a mile (about 1.5km)], and it’s in downtown Milwaukee, so you can’t see it.]
Lunch is with familiar faces; the gentleman who rode from Portland and told me why the train had to wait in Spokane, and a fellow traveler I met in Seattle. It shouldn’t have surprised me that many of my fellow riders are train enthusiasts—the man from Portland had been riding Amtrak since the Rainbow era, back when they stuck whatever equipment they had that worked and was kind of compatible on a single train, back when they were discovering that SPDF-40s liked to fall off the tracks if you went too fast. As I recall, those were the first locomotives Amtrak ordered new, and they went on to provide years of reliable service . . . to the railroad who bought them cheap from Amtrak.
He also told me that when the Superliner cars were new, they had trouble keeping the electrical cables plugged in between the cars, so you’d be riding through the mountains and all of a sudden a large section of the train would have a power failure until it stopped at the next station where there was an Amtrak employee qualified to plug it back in.
We’ve got a GE Genesis at the front of our train, and a Siemens Charger behind it. We picked up the Genesis in Spokane; apparently, the locomotive doesn’t stay there and wait for the next train any more.
•••
We’re in the Wisconsin Dells. The terrain is more like northern Michigan now; the geology is probably quite similar. This part of Wisconsin has glass insulators on the power poles, and the glisten in the sunlight as the train goes past.
The Dells is a popular stop, apparently; we sit for a few minutes as passengers load and disembark. Portage, the next stop, must not be popular—we pick up a few, and nobody gets off. The train’s back in motion in less than a minute.
•••
As we accelerate out of the station, I can’t help but think of the long freights we’ve been passing with two or three locomotives, and here we’ve got two for a ten (ish) car train. And that makes me wonder how much electrical power the cars draw?
I bet it’s a lot. And I bet that number will be either extremely easy to find, or well-nigh impossible.
[It was easy to find. Amtrak uses three-phase 480V for head end power, and it’s limited to 85 kilowatts per car. Their full-train limitation is 1,200kw, or fifteen cars, according to utahrails.net. The reason for the limitation is that the cables that pass the power from car-to-car are rated at 1200kw.
[I also found out (to my lack of surprise) that there are other systems in use with other connectors and other voltages.
[Older designs used steam heat and electrical generators on each car; Amtrak had to make a changeover back in the seventies, and for a while was running equipment with both systems. The aforementioned SDP40F locomotives were equipped with steam generators, but were designed so that the place where the steam generator was could also be used for an electrical generator as the passenger car fleet was updated. The locomotives didn’t last long enough on Amtrak for the conversion to be done, AFAIK.
[Train facts!]
•••
We’ve passed through any number of small towns with train stations, some of them rotting and abandoned, others which have been maintained, at least. A few converted for other uses. Wouldn’t have been all that long ago that most of them would have still been in use, mail and parcels would have arrived there first and then been delivered to the local post office for final delivery. People would have started and ended their trips at the local train station, whether it be a couple on their honeymoon, a family vacation, or a soldier going off to war. Kinda strange to think about. There’s a slim chance that the Michigan Central Station in Detroit will see passenger trains once again; the Ford Motor Company who now owns it says that they intend to keep four of the tracks; maybe one day some of the smaller stations we’ve passed will be put to use again.
•••
I don’t know why I didn’t notice before, but the Milwaukee train station is underground, basically in a parking garage (but one with trains). My manager likes Harleys, and was upset that when I was in Milwaukee for Ciderfest last year, I didn’t stop at the Harley museum. During some downtime on the train, I figured out where it was on the map, and the train station is really close. As we approach the station, I can see a building painted in Harley colors, which is almost certainly the museum.
I’m ready to get a great picture of it, so of course a slow freight passes and blocks my view. If I were on the top deck of my Superliner, I could see over it, but I’m not.
•••
Like Chicago, some of the track in Milwaukee runs on an embankment to keep the trains away from the surface streets. I’m not on the top deck, but on an embankment I’m high enough. In big cities, trains often run through industrial areas that grew out to be close to the tracks. Warehouses, batch plants, and then we pass a policeman on a horse walking down a side street, and a moment later, very out-of-place stables. Turns out that the Milwaukee Mounted Police stables are right by the tracks.
•••
The next part of the trip passes in a blur. I’m watching the time—there’s a very real chance I’ll miss my next train. We’ve made up a bunch of time, but will it be enough? The shortcut in North Dakota made up some time, but not all of it, and we’re getting into Chicago around rush hour. While car traffic won’t be a problem (unless a car decides to play chicken with the train and loses), there will be lots of commuter trains on the same tracks.
It turns out that Amtrak has planned for that, mostly. We don’t have to wait for any commuter trains, but we do have to wait to get into the station, and we use up the last bit of padding that Amtrak had in their schedule while we’re sitting across a surface crossing . . .much to the annoyance of commuters, I’m sure. I’ve got a great view of cars and pedestrians frustrated by a stopped Amtrak train . . . I could wave at them, but don’t.
We blocked the crossing you can see in the top left of the photo
After a few minutes, we pull into the station, and I’ve already packed up, I’m ready to go. I’ve got about forty-five minutes, which is actually plenty of time.
•••
Once again, I can use the lounge, and I do for a while, but then I start to worry that I’ll miss my next train, so I go down to the waiting area. The line is long and I’m towards the back even though I’m in theory a priority passenger. I paid for a ride in a business car rather than a coach; the last leg of my journey is also Amtrak first class. Not because I need the luxury, but because I thought that if we arrived only a few minutes after the Wolverine was supposed to depart, they might hold it for someone in first class.
Half the car is given over to a snack bar. As a first class passenger, I can get some free food and drinks if I want to, but I don’t get anything but a coffee.
I’ve got legroom, a comfy seat, and a wall outlet I can plug my laptop into. In the interests of full disclosure, I didn’t finish this blog live; I was working on a different project (and I don’t remember which one; it might have been Parsnip, or it might have been something else).
Our engineer on the way back isn’t as lead-footed as the one we had on the way out. We cruise by all the cars on the highway—the tracks parallel it on and off through Illinois and Indiana. Lots of trains around Gary, and then we’re back in Michigan and entering high-speed territory.
When the sun goes down, it’s harder to judge the speed unless we’re passing close to something. It seems fast, but as I would find out when I got to Jackson that we were behind schedule.
On par for Amtrak, honestly.
•••
The area around Gary, where the steel mills are, has a unique look. It's kind of post-apocalyptic, and kind of Victorian steampunky, and you get glimpses of the beach and dunes, too.
•••
I sat on the north side of the train, partially in hopes of getting a shot of Kalamazoo College as we went by that wasn’t all blurry. I didn’t think there was much chance of it, that it would be dark before we got there, and it was.
Amtrak’s got some awesome tools in their wall-mounted emergency kit.
•••
We arrive about an hour late. My van is still in the lot where I left it, and it starts. Nobody stole the catalytic convertor, and I don’t have to pay for parking.
The train leaves Jackson just as I’m loading stuff into the back of the van. Its next stop will be Ann Arbor. I was gonna post a video of that, but the embed function doesn't allow for embedding shorts (which is what YouTube decided to make it).
I don’t normally drive back from Jackson that late, but it’s a very familiar route back home. My power is still on, and the light on the Big Green BoxTM is glowing brightly.
•••
All in all, it was a fantastic trip.
I am so-incredibly-excited for this
can't wait to start reading again!!
. I have been waiting for over half a year for this masterpiece to return woth A new installment among the volumes. I
Couple busted images at the start I'm afraid.
This was so lovely, thanks for taking us along on your journey n__n
I really liked the long form post :)
How long in all roughly did it take to get back home?
Images 2 to 7 are giving a "Network error fetching image" - could just be my end.
One day, I too will ride a train to Seattle!
Quick note, Network error fetching images roughly to Portland?.. At least teh rock fences and spare track?
5695347
I'm behind on posting blogs, but not that behind.
It hasn't been a half year, only a couple months since I went to EFNW
5695359
Oh, whoops; I lost track of time. Honoustly, if I didn't check any calendars, I'd not even know what month nor possibly even what year it is, hehheh. Sorry about that.
5695350
They all work on my end; refreshing might make them appear. FimFic doesn't like blogs that are filled with pictures--this one has fewer than the first blog post, but it's still too many as far as FimFic is concerned. I don't really have a good solution. (I tried a different browser and they all worked in that, too.)
Thank you!
In the last days of the Santa Fe my whole family travelled from California to Chicago and back on the Super Chief.
There were seven of us and no table big enough to seat us in the dining car, so the staff were very kind and let us use the Turquoise Room.
I still remember having steak and shrimp for dinner as we rolled across the Mojave at sunset
5695351
Thank you!
It was about three days--the train left in the afternoon on Monday, and arrived in Chicago in the afternoon on Wednesday. As I recall, the total trip time (Chicago to Seattle and back) was about 90 hours. Add to that a bit of waiting time and three or four hours (I don't remember) for the Wolverine from Chicago to Jackson.
FimFic is not happy with lots and lots of images. I've tested them on a couple browsers and they work; you could try refreshing and see if they appear. I wish I had a better suggestion, but I don't.
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It's a good trip!
I don't know how they do pricing; the roomette I was in had two beds. I would imagine that adding a second person to it would cost a little more (more meals), but not a lot more (since they don't put strangers in your room if you only bought one ticket).
There are 'family rooms' on the trains that have four beds; I would think that four people on the train would be at least somewhat competitive with an airplane. The family rooms also have windows on both sides (but they're on the lower level, so the view isn't as great).
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FimFic doesn't like lots of images; you might try refreshing and see what happens. I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.
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Heh, no worries. I lose track of time as well, and I do have stuff that hasn't updated in a long, long time. When I eventually get around to publishing my Seaquestria blog, it'll be six months (or more) after the event.
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Ooh, that sounds amazing! Fun fact, as I recall a lot (or all) of the double-deck cars that Amtrak got were from the Super Chief. I think all the original ones are retired by now, but the newer ones were built for Amtrak. I just checked the Wikipedia on Superliners, and it turns out that they were the last passenger cars built by Pullman-Standard.
I wonder how many of the old Pullman-Standard cars are in service? Some of them might still be. . . .
You cannot beat the view from a dining car. On my trip, the best was breakfast along the Columbia River, but all of them had great views; I ate dinner on the way out as we went through Glacier, MT. which was also pretty epic.
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That sounds like an amasing concept. I'd love to see the other lands, locales, and lore explored by the fans, and I wish the staff at Hasbro would. My theory is they only ended the show because they knew Flash was getting killed by the big-whig directors at companies like Google. Maybe Gen. 5 is only temporary and is like the true G4.5, instead of Pony Life, but we could still be stuck with it until they finish preparing something else A lot of companies have been thrown off in the past half-decade or so.
I also want to explore the undervalued concepts and underdog characters, and I was planning on starting A huge site-wide project to celebrate the fandom and as A tribute, but garnering support and then getting tied up with personal troubles threw me off-schedule. I still need to post in My blog to apologise for My absence and disappearance, as well as speak on how I'm unsure of when I'll get back to consistency on here with My original works.
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All the -ING election ads hint that the election is coming. Or, possibly, the end of the world if the wrong candidate is elected.
That's November 8. Afterwards, they will go away.
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All the -ING election ads hint that the election is coming. Or, possibly, the end of the world if the wrong candidate is elected.
That's November 8. Afterwards, they will go away. (I hope.)
Lyra likes looking out the window! (And who doesn't?) Also watching you type pony stuff. She probably gives you good advice.
Lovely kirin plushies!
Thanks for the long-form blog. The real-time writing allowed you to give a lot more detail you might have forgotten. Maybe a trend for future trips?
Biscuit, remind me to invite you when I eventually do my own cross (technically half) Canada train trip... once I give up on the horribly overpriced VIP cabin I'll need someone to split a regular cabin with and I know you'd enjoy it.
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Thanks!
I did refesh earlier and got the error; I just loaded this page to see your comment and they're working. Danke!
I'll assume you have that inverted, as that arrangement sounds like it would be no fun for my introverted self.
Look at Mr. Fancy Billionaire with his 20th-century food preparation and his international cheeses!
(looks at picture) Did Amtrak also give you a Lyra? That is first-class service!
Sounds like a pretty nice train trip!
Dunno what it is about trains and ponies, but they do seem to go together really well...
Very beautiful photos! There are fascinating, diverse landscapes in your land. I like the way you describe your trips, interesting to read.
The only surprise is the delay of trains. In our country, a train delay of 20 minutes or more is possible only because of an rare extraordinary situation, usually caused by some kind of emergency.
Now I'm picturing Lyra crawling onto someone's shoulder, asking, 'What'cha dooooin'?'
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They seem to be working today, I tried a few refreshes last night and didn't have any luck before I pinged you n_n
*cough*
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I honoustly-think the world is practically doomed without some form of Miracle, anyway. No One Person can fix it, so we all need to band together and overlook differences and disagreements to make the world better for all of us. Until then, I suppose I'm mostly content where I'm at. Just been feeling A bit unproductive.
I tend to leave My opinionated personal details private, since I don't want any One to see me for those, and instead see me for who I am, but I would say I'm A centrist whom leans toward traditionality and being old-fashioned. In the future, everypony here might be able to ask me "Take Me Back to the Eighties!
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And I hope the same. Politics stress me, and I mostly just keep it out of My conversations since I can get along with and be cordial with any One. I don't let political views interfere, and especially not when they're menial matters. I don't see
eye-to-eye with radicals, liberals, progressives, nor even conservatives, so I don't talk about My views unless I'm prompted, ~And than I just tell the truth bluntly, since I don't believe in fabricating and think every One deserves to know the truth.
¡I wish that I should have such a wonderful trip!
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