JUNE 13, 2024 – (Cont.) The Empire Builder pulled into Chicago’s Union Depot over an hour late—too late to attend as planned a performance of the Dvorak cello concerto in Millennial Park with Beth’s cousin, Brian Piper, and his wife Gina, who are rightly proud of their city.
After stopping at the luxurious Metropolitan Lounge (reserved for Amtrak passengers with sleeper accommodations) to stow our 10 (“count ’em!”) pieces of luggage, we followed our hosts to the bustling Athena Restaurant in a neighborhood whose ethnicity used to reflect its “Greektown” label.
Brian and Gina—and their adult son and family and British-based daughter—are not only world travelers; they’re world citizens, with broad views of this turning orb of ours, every bit as small as it is large. Our brief reunion between trains replicated the occasion 36 years ago when Illiana’s father—two at the time—was our little travel companion. I couldn’t tell you where we ate; only what: Chicago pizza. As always, I wish our conversation—then and now—could have been longer. Never, even after long interludes, has it taken longer than 10 seconds to plunge into a scintillating conversation with these “fellow travelers.”
As advised by “Calvin,” the robustly cordial Amtrak official in charge of the Metropolitan Lounge, at 8:30 p.m., we retrieved our luggage from storage and staked a claim in a comfortable section of the sprawling first class waiting area. A half hour later, we were herded down a series of long corridors to the last of a line of platform entryways. There, 50 feet ahead, blazed the “tail” lights of Train No. 448, the Lake Shore Limited.
I felt like a sherpa, rolling one suitcase by my right hand and arm and looping my fully-loaded computer bag over the same shoulder, while lugging two-leaden bags by the long handles held tight in my left hand. A few paces down the platform we were intercepted by a crew member. His magic wand over the ticket QR code confirmed our legitimacy, but the bad news was that our accommodations were at the opposite end of the train; in the first car behind the locomotive. With slightly lighter burdens Beth and Illiana sprinted ahead. For me, the super-sherpa, it felt like a sweaty marathon—the kind of unanticipated race for which my daily quota of 750 vertical feet is geared.
I caught up with the young women when together we reached the last car—bearing the name plate, Schuylkill River—where the earnest attendant, a middle-aged blonde Asian-American with a Vietnamese accent, assisted Beth and Illiana up the steep climb off the platform and like a human crane, helped board our freight. We then dragged it frantically into “Room A”—our private sleeper compartment—until . . . there was no room left for all our luggage, let alone us. A quick survey of stowage space aboard the car revealed there was no place outside our room. Our bags and baggage would have to draw straws. For us people, apparently, there would be no straws to draw. How would all this work?
Fortunately, our conscientious attendant said we could pack our extra luggage into “compartment 8,” around the bend halfway down our car, then toward the end of the corridor. It was already stuffed with other luggage and Amtrak laundry bags, but I managed to consolidate it all enough to make room for our excess expedition cargo.
Having managed a thorough workout, I rejoined Beth and Illiana in a remarkably realistic simulation of living inside a half-size Apollo spacecraft. Billed as a “private sleeping room,” our quarters were equipped with a commode, shower, separate sink, fold-down modular table, seating for four, sleeping berths for two, towel and toiletries cabinet, redundant light switches, multiple electrical outlets, and wide-view windows, but all these amenities were squeezed into space that wasn’t large enough for two average-sized American adults to inhale simultaneously. Add as much as a skinny eight-year-old kid to the mix, and there wasn’t room for a single toothbrush. The only way the room would’ve contained enough space was if it had remained unoccupied.
Once we’d figured out how to optimize our contortions, the attendant presented us with a menu for the morrow’s meals, compliments of the culinary staff in the dining car, eight full carriages to the rear of our front-end sleeper car. The entrées were deceptively alluring: baked salmon with herb sauce, roasted vegetables and potatoes; chicken parmesan with noodles and marinara sauce; enchiladas in triple cheese bean sauce, sour cream and rice. The attendant patiently took down our orders, including salad dressing (ranch or Italian), beverage, and dessert choices. She then handed us a slip on which she’d recorded everything, handed it to me, and told me to present it to our server.
While we were to await in the café car with access to complimentary coffee and packaged desserts, the attendant prepared our bunks. Upon our return to the room we discovered that the floor space had been reduced to allow at any given time, no more than one and half adult feet or one adult foot and two feet of an eight-year-old. Beth and Illiana shared the larger lower bunk, and I squeezed myself into the upper bunk. The thermostat was disabled, and though the vent motors worked, they generated the sound of a field of summer crickets.
Beth and Illiana conked out quite readily. From my upper perch, I drew the curtains aside from the top window at the foot of the bunk. By that hour we were in farm country well east of Chicago, given the limited illumination over the countryside—a dwelling here, a farmyard there, a lone rural pole light along some country road. It seemed ridiculous to open the curtains, except I knew why I’d done so: Even while sleeping, I didn’t want to “miss anything” as we hurtled across the countryside.
Before long, I decided to turn in for the evening. This would require some careful maneuvering around strategically placed baggage. In time, however, I’d maneuvered my way onto the top bunk and was gradually rocked to sleep by the train.
Not for long. On average the despondent wail of the train horn sounded twice every 10 seconds. I realized that aboard the Empire Builder, we’d been assigned to a car well to the rear. Consequently, the regular train whistle had been barely noticeable; certainly not bothersome. Now that we found ourselves at the head of the train, first behind the locomotives, the horn was not only audible but offensive to a person desirous of sleep. I realized that along the romantic sounding Lake Shore Route were hundreds, even thousands of rail crossings, big and small. Every single one of them required active horn blasts by the approaching train engine. Once my ears had fixated on the noise, I had to insert earplugs. This regular sounding of the train horn would continue nearly for the rest of our journey—until we reached the last few stretches of wooded wilderness in eastern New York and western Massachusetts.
After sleeping through the equivalent of “heavy chop” aboard an airplane, we awoke this morning to bright sunshine, vineyards to the horizons and sharp glimpses of the deep blue waters of Lake Erie. After re-assembling ourselves for the day, we walked through eight carriages to the dining car to break our fast.
In past eras, the food choices and preparation aboard Amtrak dining cars had been quite good, as far as “food on the go” was concerned. On this trip, however, the meals were micro-waved versions of school-lunch surplus served on thin faux (plastic) “china.” We ate what we could and thanked the polite servers, but the best feature of the restaurant car was the glass vase holding real and relatively fresh roses—one red, one white—that graced each table.
The rest of our journey was decidedly low-energy. Confinement in our closet-size quarters wasn’t optimal for rewarding diversions, though we played some cards, did some drawing[1], and engaged in limited viewing out the window (I more than my two traveling companions). The sight-seeing was limited by two very critical factors: our windows were filthy and the scenery was largely unremarkable. At a station stop in Albany, I was able to put soaked paper towels to work on the windows, but I couldn’t do much to alter the path of our route or the sight blockages that were often quite close to the railroad right of way.
Because of our isolation from the rest of the passengers, who, for the most part, were sound asleep, we had little interaction with them. Many were of one branch or another of the Amish, and they appeared as withdrawn as the non-Amish. The Amish presence, however, afforded Beth a chance to explain their ways to Illiana, who took their odd clothes simply for what they were: “old-fashioned.” A fuller explanation will have to wait.
Our train pulled into Springfield, MA exactly on time. Byron had just arrived from his office in West Hartford, CT, a short trek away, and was conveniently parked directly across the street from the modest station. As he comfortably loaded all of our luggage (save for a snack bag) into the trunk of his Honda Civic, I realized that that trunk was about the size of our “private room.”
We were ready for our rail journey to end and family visit to begin. Amtrak does its best with the limited resources it’s allocated. The rolling stock is ancient, and train travelers shouldn’t hold their breath for state-of-the-art replacements—anyway, there wouldn’t be room for breath-holding in the sleeper cars. When it comes to passenger trains, America isn’t and never will be Japan or France or any other number of countries with a smooth, high-speed, high-priority passenger rail service. Under the circumstances, I must hand it to Amtrak personnel, who by all appearances were cheerful, competent, motivated, hard-working, and conscientious.
Our over-night on Amtrak was demanding but worth the effort and (considerable) cost—a multiple of the air fare for our return to Minnesota. For Illiana, the trip was a fun-filled adventure that expanded her horizons in ways that can’t yet be fully measured. She proved herself an intrepid, cheerful, organized, responsible, and now veteran traveler[2].
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
