[HN Gopher] Seeing America by train
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Seeing America by train
Author : howard941
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-08-31 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| frereubu wrote:
| I imagine many people here will know this site, but for those who
| want to travel across Europe by train, The Man in Seat 61 is an
| invaluable resource: https://www.seat61.com/
|
| If you want to become envious, he's also on Twitter -
| https://x.com/seatsixtyone - where he posts beautiful journeys.
| Just a shame it's all so expensive compared to flights!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Seat61 definitely helped me set expectations for my trip, Last
| month I took a Paris-Berlin-Vienna-Venice-Paris loop utilizing
| the nightjet for 3 overnight trains in a row thinking the cost
| was at least offset by not needing a hotel each night, but
| alas, a hotel would have been money well spent as I spent that
| leg of the trip in a sleep deprived daze !
|
| On the bright side I got the experience of groggily asking a
| German border guard "what's up?" before I had a handle on why
| my makeshift curtain was being pulled aside at 3am
| rjsw wrote:
| Your journey was all within the Schengen zone, there are no
| border checks. Are you sure about why you were woken up?
| pedvide wrote:
| There are a lot of "temporary" internal border checks
| within Schengen [1], especially in the last 5 years. Wiki
| has lots of info [2]
|
| I've personally been checked in trains crossing from the
| east towards Germany multiple times, including the night
| train.
|
| 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17yy61g/curren
| t_re...
|
| 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area under
| "regulation of internal borders"
| noduerme wrote:
| German police do check passports on trains within Germany.
| I was questioned on a train going from Munich to Prague,
| and as I had overstayed in Schengen, things got a bit
| tense. Ultimately they decided it wasn't worth it; they got
| off one stop before the Czech border and let me continue.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I can attest this too; at Aachen Hbf. in April of this
| year, I witnessed a group of policemen verbally (in
| English) warning a passenger for travelling across the
| Belgo-German border without ID.
|
| On a tangential topic, the behaviour of railway staff
| when checking passports was interesting. With a paper
| Interrail ticket, they would always ask to see my
| passport or ID card, yet I don't think I have been asked
| once when using the electronic Interrail ticket - this is
| despite the rules being identical for both types.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| All I know is they were banging on every door for
| passports, I can't say whether I was at the border, only
| assumed. Between Venice and Stuttgart.
| EricE wrote:
| Along those lines I've been enjoying Solo Travel Japan - he
| does more ferries than trains (gee, imagine that!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@SoloTravelJapan
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| https://archive.is/Irje1
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Love the illustrations of the roommette
|
| The zephyr crew really goes the extra mile with fresh flowers in
| the dining car, haven't seen that on any other route
|
| Conspicuously absent from a visual diary is the odor of toilets
| out of service
| triyambakam wrote:
| It sounds like you have experience with that? Can you share
| further?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| These routes can be 70, 80 hours of runtime with only brief
| stops for a crew change
|
| If something breaks it stays broken until the train can be
| serviced. I actually lack experience in clogging or
| unclogging Amtrak toilets so I don't know what must be done
| to keep them in service
|
| Each superliner has multiple toilets in the lower level, most
| seats are upstairs but there are lower level seats
| particularly for folks who are not able to navigate stairs
| for whatever reason or just people who prefer the peace of
| not having people walk back and forth through the car (only
| the upper levels are connected by vestibule)
|
| So anyway if you have a seat in the lower level you're down
| the hall from the toilets, and 2 or 3 days in the clogged
| toilets just stay clogged and it reaks
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IDK how Amtrak does it, but on some European trains, crews
| will board a defective train for emergency repairs if
| necessary, and simply get off when done.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I just took the LA-Seattle overnight train a few weeks ago to add
| a mini trip in before heading to Alaska. A lot of you HNers are
| west coasters. Do it! Get the little bedroom, it makes the trip a
| lot more fun.
|
| Few of my pictures are here
| https://www.kylehotchkiss.com/photography/collections/2024-c...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Do you mind sharing how much the ticket cost? That's always my
| main deterrent for USA rail travel. The prices I get quoted are
| ludicrous compared to plane tickets. I'd love to ride a train
| instead but I don't feel like it should come at the premiums it
| does.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You need to factor in meals and hotel stays when comparing
| prices. You will get to your destination a couple nights
| earlier, but you'll need to eat and sleep during that time as
| well.
|
| The railroad trip is a destination in itself.
| radpanda wrote:
| On the other hand if taking off work means forgoing income,
| taking the slower rail journey is even more expensive.
| Instead of taking 6 days off work to fly and take a cruise,
| maybe now I need to take 8. For retirees or folks who can
| work on a train, the calculation might be very different.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I think that was parents point, the train /is/ the cruise
| radpanda wrote:
| I get that, that's one way of looking at it. But other
| folks look at train vs plane for more utilitarian
| "getting there". Depending on your situation and what you
| consider the train ride to be, the value offered by the
| train can be considered a reasonable deal or outlandishly
| expensive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Economy class airplanes are all utility and zero
| experience. The business is viable because utility and
| torment can cancel out because the trip itself has need
| to have a perceived value - all the value is in moving
| from A to B.
|
| A drive, a cruise, or a train trip have intrinsic value
| beyond moving from A to B. You experience the movement in
| a different way.
|
| We need to start thinking a bit differently about the
| economics of transportation when travelling for leisure.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Just picking two large cities, Dallas to New Orleans takes
| 33 hours by Amtrak vs. 7 hours just driving a car. It's
| hard to understand how anyone would make that choice. I'd
| really like rail to be a choice in the USA for being able
| to get somewhere instead of the train ride being the
| destination.
|
| It looks like $104 by coach, which seems really reasonable
| but I can't imagine sitting in a coach seat in a car that
| has both upper and lower levels for 33h. A private room is
| $619. A round trip plane ticket is about $139 and the
| flight is 1h37m. Amtrak needs to enter our universe.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Well, you've chosen two large cities that don't have an
| Amtrak route between them so you have a layover in San
| Antonio
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| That sounds like a super boring route. I'd much rather do
| Chicago to LA, SF, or Seattle, as all those routes pass
| through interesting to me scenery.
|
| I will say the coast starlight was pretty full when I
| took it from LA to Seattle. A lot of people take it and
| really really like it. The staff seemed more personable
| and to be enjoying themselves over the ones I've
| experienced in northeast corridor
| itronitron wrote:
| Any location in Texas, aside from El Paso?, seems like a
| hassle by train. I priced DC to Austin a few years ago
| and it was way too expensive even for a consumer that
| _wanted_ to take the trip by train.
|
| Amtrak seems to be good at North to South on the coasts,
| and East to West in the middle, but bad at any diagonal
| routes.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| ~$200 per person ticket ~$600 for the room
|
| So for 2 people in a room, about $1000
| handzhiev wrote:
| "The content of this site is geofenced and not available in
| your region."
|
| Why? This is in the EU
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| GDPR
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| I'm in Brazil, it still blocks me.
| eCa wrote:
| And I'm in the EU, and didn't get blocked... Enjoyed the
| photos, but don't really understand attempting to
| geofence a personal website.
| kattagarian wrote:
| "The content of this site is geofenced and not available in
| your region."
| cortesoft wrote:
| My family went across the country on Amtrak, from Sacramento one
| York, in 1991. Was an incredible experience, and I have a lot of
| formative memories from the time.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| How old were you? Our oldest LOVES trains and we're looking at
| getting a (much shorter) ride. We want to time it so that he
| gets the most out of it.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| You can fly into Denver and take the Zephyr west, and you'll get
| all the best scenery right off the bat, at the right time of day,
| and end in California, where you can then catch a train along the
| coast, to a city with a big airport and cheap flights home.
|
| Get yourself a roomette. It provides most of the comfort, glamor,
| and privacy of the experience, along with the dining car access.
| It's expensive, but consider it an investment in a once in a
| lifetime experience (I probably wouldn't do it again until I
| retire).
|
| The rest - the observation car - is nice, but you will have
| slightly annoying interactions there, and if you're going through
| a popular area, may have to jockey for a timed spot in the car.
| Coach is just depressing and uninteresting, with extremely grimy
| windows that are blocked half the time. They have now added rules
| to prevent people from sitting in the cafe car unless they're
| eating something they bought in the cafe car, so say goodbye to
| working on your laptop with a nice view.
|
| Don't expect any connectivity on the train. Expect to be offline.
| Expect to spend about every other hour in the good parts of the
| trip just staring out the window; don't expect to work. And do
| talk to your neighbors.
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| If you like this genre I would highly recommend checking out
| Downey Live yt channel. He has documented a lot of cross country
| train trips in north america.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA5QbK3C98Q
| pessimizer wrote:
| Sleeping in coach is awful. There's an untapped revenue source in
| auctioning off empty sleepers to people already on the train.
|
| Before they changed their booking systems about 10 years ago, you
| could always get on the train with a coach ticket and ask the
| conductor if any roomettes would be free all night, and they'd
| negotiate a token price with you. I'd even haggle for one during
| the day for a long nap after a sleepless night in observation
| watching movies on my laptop.
| davely wrote:
| In 2015, we took the California Zephyr from Berkeley to Chicago
| and then (I forget which train) from Chicago to Washington D.C.
| The connection was pretty smooth. Met a friend in Chicago for
| drinks for a few hours while we waited for the DC train to
| depart.
|
| I remember loading up ebooks, podcasts, etc, just in case I was
| "bored."
|
| No joke, I sat in the parlor car staring out at the landscape for
| 3 straight days!
|
| It was absolutely glorious.
|
| One fun thing ("fun", depending on your perspective) is that
| you're paired with random strangers at dinner.
|
| The first night, I am telling the couple across from me how
| "awesome and civilized" this felt and it was nice not to have to
| deal with the bullshittery of TSA agents at airports.
|
| They politely coughed and I knew instantly I screwed up.
|
| "Yeah, we're actually both TSA agents."
|
| Dinner was pretty awkward after that!
| atum47 wrote:
| I found the experience of getting the ticket a little bit
| confusing. I was in San Francisco and heard mixed things about
| the train to San Diego. I wasn't exactly sure about where and
| when would the train leave as well, so I just took a plane. I do
| want to take a trip in a train though, I quite like trains.
| ag8 wrote:
| Apparently the California to Denver part is especially nice; I'd
| recommend starting with that!
|
| https://derikk.com/blog/zephyr.html
| itronitron wrote:
| St. Louis to D.C. in the winter is nice by train, especially
| during a snow storm. My route went to Chicago then through
| Pennsylvania and down to D.C. if I recall correctly.
| myself248 wrote:
| As it happens, I have another tab open at this very moment,
| watching the Steve Wallis Step 2 channel's latest video, "Amtrak
| Across America with Steve".
|
| It's..... it's quite an interesting perspective. All the little
| incidental stuff, the copious announcements from the staff,
| certainly add color to the story.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I just watched that video last night! The weird thing is, I'm
| pretty sure (based on the weather and the delay he experienced)
| that the Chicago-Seattle leg of his trip happened just a couple
| days before I made the same trip. It seemed like he didn't
| enjoy his trip as much as the author of this article did.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| What in the US seems like something fun you could do one summer,
| in the rest of the world trains are used heavily daily by
| commuters and others.
| david38 wrote:
| No, this is not a commuter train.
|
| And by "the rest of world" you mean Europe and parts of Asia?
|
| I suppose Latin America doesn't exist? Maybe they're evolved
| enough to be considered real people? What about Africa? Also
| still not human?
| ks2048 wrote:
| Two trains I've taken recently: Mexico's Tren Maya and
| Kenya's Nairobi to Mombasa are both probably better than
| anything the US has built in decades.
| jhbadger wrote:
| We have lots of commuter trains near large cities in the US.
| Many people who work in NYC, Chicago, Washington DC, and the
| like take commuter trains into and out of these cities from
| surrounding towns and cities. The issue is outside these big
| metro centers, most of the US isn't as densely populated to
| make this feasible.
| supernova87a wrote:
| The positive aspects described in the story are all fine and
| nice.
|
| You just have to know that the author almost certainly left out
| the heavy downsides of the journey, which would have been the
| totally unpredictable, frustrating, hours-long (maybe even good-
| part-of-a-day) delays along the route where Amtrak is stuck
| waiting for freight trains on rails that it does not own.
|
| Unfortunately a few hours of scenery isn't worth the overall
| frustration at the state of US rail in my opinion.
| timr wrote:
| > The railroad, lauded as one of the greatest achievements in
| U.S. history, also set the stage for an era of aggressive
| westward expansion, empire-building and the subjugation of
| Indigenous people.
|
| They just had to include that last bit, didn't they? Setting
| aside the fact that "the subjugation of indigenous people" in the
| American west began long before the transcontinental railroad,
| and so the whole comment is debatable at best (the Trail of Tears
| was 1831, and the first Apache wars were in 1849; the Oregon
| trail was 1830-1840, and the transcontinental railroad was begun
| in 1863), it's the sort of drop-in to an otherwise unrelated
| story that makes you cringe.
|
| Literally _anything_ in the world can be tied back to oppression
| of a people, if you want it hard enough. You 're writing a nice
| little human-interest story about a _train ride_...can 't you
| give it a rest for a minute?
| BadHumans wrote:
| Can't fathom why this bothers you so much but it is relevant as
| this sentence immediately leads into a story the conductor on
| the train was giving about the history of the rail. Would you
| rather the author leave that experience out of the story
| because it makes you uncomfortable?
| akira2501 wrote:
| >> it's the sort of drop-in to an otherwise unrelated story
| that makes you cringe.
|
| > Can't fathom why this bothers you so much
|
| Really? They just explained it particularly well.
|
| > because it makes you uncomfortable?
|
| I think they're taking issue over the fact that it is not
| only mostly irrelevant but it's also completely incorrect.
| timr wrote:
| It doesn't make me uncomfortable. I just think it's stupid. I
| guess it made me roll my eyes, so that was sort of
| uncomfortable.
|
| (To be as charitable as possible to your point, I did say
| "cringe", but I didn't mean it in the way that you're
| interpreting it. I just meant "cringe", in the same way that
| I cringe when I see someone who boldly expresses an opinion
| about anything that is factually incorrect, or perhaps, when
| a stranger starts selling you on their multi-level-marketing
| scheme in the bathroom. More like _" oh god, we're going to
| do this now, are we?"_, than a _" I reject basic facts of
| history that the average US high school student should know,
| including the approximate order of major historical events"_
| sort of thing.)
| encomiast wrote:
| I guess it just depends on your point of view. I would have
| found a sentence lauding the railroads and the mechanized
| opening of the West to be pretty 'cringe' if they had not
| mentioned this.
| timr wrote:
| I submit that you could cut the entire sentence out of
| the piece and not lose anything other than a vague sense
| of judgment from the author.
|
| But hey, I also don't think observing the basic fact that
| the railroads led to the "opening of the west" would
| qualify as "lauding" that fact, any more than observing
| that "George Washington was the first US president" would
| be "lauding" George Washington. For that matter, I can
| also enjoy a train ride without feeling the urge to
| "acknowledge" that Cornelius Vanderbilt did some bad
| things.
|
| (...though I sadly acknowledge that we're well 'round
| that bend as a society)
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Because most of the time it takes a nice, feel good story and
| immediately sets the tone.
|
| It's like having a casual chat with a colleague and then they
| trauma dump about what happened to them when they were 15 or
| whatever. Like okay, cool, take it to therapy, this isn't the
| place, you're just making things awkward for everyone.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Can't fathom why this bothers you so much
|
| You're calling timr the bad guy for noticing. It's OK to
| notice things.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Original comment is not "noticing". It's complaining to
| people to stop talking about what matters to them.
|
| It's one thing to say "look, they said X" than to say
| "please don't talk about X on the internet".
| whythre wrote:
| Seems like lip service slacktivism that does nothing but
| inject a bit of weird misplaced guilt. Railroads were a
| huge technological innovation. Handwringing about the
| skeletons in the national closet without really
| understanding how or why the railroad played a role seems
| distracting. The quote from the article says, in essence:
| 'railroads and the Indian Wars happened at the same time,
| kinda, so... railroads bad, maybe?'
|
| And op's point stands. Tech is power; and almost any tech
| can be used and abused. But tossing this in seems lazy at
| best.
| giaour wrote:
| Did you read the article? The sentence OP objects to is
| the lead-in to a conductor on a trip telling him about
| how rail passengers were encouraged to help reduce the
| native population. It's a bit of context for an anecdote,
| in an article that is entirely compared of lightly
| contextualized anecdotes.
| timr wrote:
| You could remove the sentence I quoted, keep the thing
| from the conductor about bison, and it wouldn't make a
| difference to the story [1]. It's a "lead in" only in the
| extremely literal sense that the one sentence comes
| before the other one.
|
| [1] It might even work _better_ , since it lets you draw
| your own conclusions about the anecdote. Not everything
| needs to be a lesson.
| giaour wrote:
| > "the subjugation of indigenous people" in the American west
| began long before the transcontinental railroad
|
| So did "empire building" and "westward expansion," but those
| assertions don't seem to have bothered you despite suffering
| from the same deficiency in the same sentence.
| timr wrote:
| Indeed. I didn't specifically call out every incorrect thing
| in the sentence, and chose only one. Westward expansion and
| empire building both existed for even longer before railroads
| existed. Touche.
| giaour wrote:
| I see, good to know you weren't looking to make the
| political point you expressed above but merely wanted to be
| technically correct.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Yes, it is when I closed the tab. Enough with the self-
| flagellating virtue signalling nonsense, it does not do any
| good for anyone other than for the grifters who make their
| living off selling indulgences for past sins. Not to mention
| the fact that those indigenous tribes were quite the
| quarrelsome bunch themselves which makes all those land
| acknowledgements another level of silliness: "we acknowledge
| that we are standing on the land of the Comanche" upon which a
| Cheyenne stands calls out that it was their land until those
| bastard Comanche came along and took it, followed by an Apache
| who hollers at the Cheyenne who took their land whereupon an
| ageing Kiowa stares down the Apache who took their ancestral
| lands. Rinse and repeat for the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and
| Choctaw, the Sioux and the Crow, the Iroquois and the Huron,
| the Iroquois and the Powhatan confederacy, the Navajo versus
| the Hopi, etc. They made war against each other, they sometimes
| won, they sometimes lost. Eventually a stronger tribe came and
| conquered them all just like they used to conquer others. Since
| we're not at the end of history - Fukuyama [1] was wrong - the
| story will move on from here and who knows what - and who -
| will come next?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
| polairscience wrote:
| It might have begun far before the railroads but it only became
| worse with time. The sand creek massacre was in 1864. Square in
| the railroad era. Not to mention every broken treaty of that
| era that was directly incentivized by the new massive
| industrial access to western land.
|
| One could and probably should understand that the beauty of the
| Railroad is inseperable from the subjugation of the indiginous
| tribes and the labor abuses that built it. Should those things
| be ignored because they make you uncomfortable? It's perfectly
| contextual to have that in this piece....
|
| ... though I do concede the way that's mentioned and the
| article in general seems low effort and mediocre. But that's a
| different argument than "stop making me uncomfortable".
| timr wrote:
| Sure. But you can pick pretty much any piece of technology
| from the era and say the same thing: _" How the hammer led to
| the oppression of Indigenous People in the American west"_.
|
| > One could and probably should understand that the beauty of
| the Railroad is inseperable from the subjugation of the
| indiginous tribes and the labor abuses that built it. Should
| those things be ignored because they make you uncomfortable?
| It's perfectly contextual to have that in this piece....
|
| Someone else on this thread tried the same rhetorical feint.
| Who told you that I am "uncomfortable"? Did the fact that I
| cited events and dates somehow convince you that _I didn 't
| know about these events_ before now? That I _just became
| aware of the story of the US westward expansion_ because this
| author dropped it into her Amtrak feature?
|
| Look, if you want to write (or read) a thesis on the
| influence of the locomotive on the oppression of indigenous
| people, that's great. I bet there's one to be written. But
| this is just lazy, dumb, superficial propaganda, dropped into
| a puff piece.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| The line from Chicago to Seattle is literally called the Empire
| Builder
| ineedasername wrote:
| The transcontinental railroad was highly significant. Past
| atrocities don't negate the unique role the railroad played in
| a centuries-long process, especiallY when a major stage of it
| was enabled by the railroad:
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/TRR
| smsm42 wrote:
| [delayed]
| gretch wrote:
| I'm looking forward to booking one of these with my girlfriend.
| Just trying to decide location.
|
| For those who "don't get it" - it's like a cruise that goes over
| land instead of water. (Though it's fair if you don't like
| cruises either)
| layer8 wrote:
| I naively expected some photos.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Early in 2002, Disneyland cut its entertainment budget and laid
| me off, and my first wife got herself confined to a psych ward,
| in the process destroying our apartment and getting my lease
| terminated, so I noped out and decided to move clear across the
| country.
|
| I took the train. Los Angeles to Newark. Three days. I can't
| really imagine doing it today, because I'm like everyone else
| here, a whiny little prissy bitch. But back then, I shared a two-
| bedroom place with three other guys, slept in my car all the
| time, was used to an hourly job with no consistent schedule.
| Without any expectation of luxury or customer service, it was a
| pretty nice experience. My back was healthier then, too, so
| sleeping in coach wasn't a big deal. The great thing about taking
| Amtrak is the rail line didn't create towns the way highways do.
| You're truly remote for much of the ride. You're not seeing the
| "Americana" America you see on road trips. You're seeing the
| natural country. Following the Susquehanna River through
| Pennsylvania was my favorite part of the trip.
|
| It was also amusing when the FBI questioned me in Albuquerque, as
| they apparently flagged anyone taking a long one-way trip after
| 9/11. 21 year-old aimless drifter with no plans dressed like
| Hunter Thompson. I don't even remember what I told them. Don't
| ever wanna go home, I guess, but you can check my bags and see I
| don't have a bomb.
| zachlatta wrote:
| Some of you may be interested in The Hacker Zephyr, where we took
| 42 high schoolers across America by rail, coding and hacking the
| whole way.
|
| We made a video at https://youtube.com/watch?v=2BID8_pGuqA
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