Ridin’ on the City of New Orleans

Actually, the train ride, while fun and certainly an adventure for two middle-aged adults who’d never ridden an overnight train before, was fairly blasé. This may be due to the fact that a great deal of the trip was at night and the scenery on the route is pretty much as described by Steve Goodman —

The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin’ trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

Be that as it may, it’s pretty dang cool riding along doing 80mph and watching what scenery there is go by. When you get south of Memphis, cotton fields and lots and lots of kudzu get added to the list. Oh, and swamps. And highways paralleling the tracks. Although the b-u-M-p-Y T-R-a-c-K is sometimes not particularly amusing. On the other hand, one suspects the CN is not particularly interested in smoothing things out for two Amtrak passenger trains a day. (Yes, the Canadian National now owns what used to be the Illinois Central line. Hosers.)

The little towns are a mix of Southern cute and dirt-poor butt ugly. The sheer number of crumbling, rusting buildings at trackside — even in Memphis — makes you wonder what people down there do for a living these days. Except then you remember that even though thousands of tons of freight are driven down these rails, most of the manufacturing and warehousing has migrated closer to the Interstate highways, thanks to the Eisenhower administration deciding to throw the Teamsters a bone…well…actually pretty near the whole damn side of beef, when you get down to it.

But there are some things the truckers still can’t transport efficiently, like cars and coal. And there were lots of car carriers and coal gondolas. Not to mention CONEX carriers. Miles of them, empty and full. (And whose idea was it that stacking a 40′ container on top of a 20′ container is a Good Idea, anyway? Scares me.)

The food, while coming off a somewhat limited menu, is superb. When we pulled out of Chicago at 8PM, we were told that dinner would be served at 9PM for sleeper car passengers. Who knew? We had already eaten at the station. But since meals are included in the fare for sleeper car passengers, we weren’t going to pass it up. I had the Country Crisp Chicken and Sally had a bowl of Shrimp and Roasted Corn Chowder. For dessert I had ice cream and Sally took a pass because she didn’t want her sugar to be spiky in the morning. The service was fabulous. (When you eat in the dining car, by the way, tipping your server is expected. We didn’t know that. So we double-tipped at breakfast the next morning.)

And yes, we did have the Superliner Bedroom. Thank God. We got a look at the Roomettes and Sally shuddered. They are that small…

[Some video of our accommodations here. Also, Google Earth KMZ file for the area where it was shot.]

Sleeping — even in the Bedroom — was interesting. Our car attendant Nikki rigged out both bunks for us and I took the top one (my wife tried first but succumbed to claustrophobia) over said wife’s objections — she didn’t want me climbing up there with my bad knees and back and I said, not a big deal and finally just got up there so she’d STFU. It wasn’t really that bad although I can see how she couldn’t deal with it; there isn’t very much headroom and there’s this seatbelty thing that you don’t wear, it just hooks to the ceiling and acts like a webbing to keep you from rolling out. So we went to sleep.

Problem was, I woke up about 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got down and sat in the chair and watched the world go by in the dark (full moon). It is my observation and belief that the engineer blew the horn every time he passed a house. Sally woke up and made me get into the bed while she took the chair. This actually worked because she can sleep sitting up. So we slept a little longer and woke up about the time we got to Memphis. (The horn blowing all night actually didn’t bother me, but it bothered Sally. Normally it would be the other way around, so that was weird.)

Breakfast was the Classic Railroad French Toast for both of us. Again, superb. Amtrak is really doing the job on food. Service again was impeccable.

After breakfast we went back to the room (made up for us by Nikki while we were at breakfast) to watch the world go by. I tried to get a broadband signal on my cell phone for the computer, and got one but it was pretty awful, so I gave up on that. Instead, I pulled up Microsoft Streets and Trips and followed our route along with the GPS. Yes, I am a geek, I took the GPS. I like to know where I am. Sue me.

(I must say that I think this is one area where Amtrak is badly lacking. With airlines offering in-flight WiFi for even short flights, Amtrak needs to get on the ball and get connected on its overnight routes. Just having it on the Acela doesn’t cut it. I’d love to take an Amtrak trip out West, but without connectivity, it’s not realistic for me.)

One of the amenities of the bedroom sleeper is a private toilet/shower. Yes, the toilet is in the shower stall. Very airline-y. The toilet is waterless and flushes with a blast of compressed air (be sure to put the lid down first). Sally tried taking a shower in the morning and pronounced it pretty much a waste of time. I waited till we got to the hotel in New Orleans. Probably TMI but you have a right to know how the shower worked 🙂

We watched the scenery go by until Jackson, Mississippi, at which time it was time for lunch. I had the Angus Steak Burger and…hmmm…I can’t remember what Sally had. Actually I think she had the burger, too. No bacon, though; they had run out of bacon. Which leads to another point about the food.

The food, as noted, is very good. But they can only carry so much of it. So when they run out of something, they’re out. In fact, Amtrak encourages passengers to bring some food of their own in case there are delays enroute. That’s something we always do anyway, as Sally is diabetic and sometimes needs a snack to control her sugar. Sally found out when she wanted to order something off the kid’s menu (the Hebrew National hot dog if I recall correctly) that the dining car kid’s menu is restricted to kids 12 and under — no exceptions. Again, this is because they have to be able to have all the options available for the kids and they don’t want to run out because the adults ate all the kids’ food. Seems reasonable to me.

Oh, and their coffee is very good, too. The only thing I find lacking is the bar — no bourbon and no single-malt.

After lunch we went back, made sure everything was packed up, and watched the scenery go by again. And then we had excitement! Just after we left the station at Hammond, Louisiana, the engineer went nuts with his horn and then the train slid to a stop in the middle of BFE. Almost immediately the conductor came on the PA and said, “Sorry about the stop, folks, but we’ve just averted a tragedy — some guy in a Jeep decided he was going to try to beat the train to a crossing. Nobody was hurt, but since the engineer had to pull the emergency stop, the conductors have to get out and walk the train and check for any damage. We’ll be on our way again as soon as they do that.”

And they did, and we were, and we eventually pulled into the station in New Orleans right on the tick of 3:32 PM.

I will say that the last thirty or forty miles are rather interesting. The tracks run right on the edge of Lake Ponchartrain, which appeared to be at high tide when we came through. Which means there was water on both sides of the tracks, and given the weather that day, there was quite a bit of chop in the lake. Talk about nothing to see for miles and miles. And then all of a sudden you’re in the northern sections of New Orleans, and you’re riding past trailers and new homes that are pretty obviously post-Katrina replacements.

So we got there, got off, took a hack to the hotel and spent several fun-filled days until we had to come back.

The return trip was somewhat different. For one thing, it left town at 1:45PM intead of 8PM. For another, the first class lounge at New Orleans Union Station is not quite as . . . palatial . . . as the Metropolitan Lounge at Chicago Union Station. And it doesn’t have nearly enough chairs for all the first class passengers when the train is full. Which it was.

Given the departure time, and given the oddity of the late dinner on the train coming down, we thought it might be possible that lunch might be served after we left. We asked; they said no. So we went and got Subway for lunch. (Already described in my other New Orleans posting.) By the time we got our sandwiches, it was time to line up to get on the train.

When we got on the train, it became evident that the décor was somewhat . . . different. In fact, it was a lot newer. This train apparently had been modernized recently, or built later than the one we rode down. Personally I suspect the former. The room was much nicer and seemed roomier, probably because the restroom module had been replaced with one that curved and gave you a little more room to get around it. Bonus, the restroom was actually a little bit bigger, and boasted a door that actually sealed so that you didn’t need a snap-on shower curtain like the other train had. (I didn’t mention that little detail, did I?) The walls were paneled instead of carpeted and the whole effect was much nicer and more modern.

I’ll just hit the high points of the trip back so as not to repeat myself too much. The food was, again, excellent. We both had the Garlic Butter Marinated New York Strip Steak for dinner, which was about half an hour north of Jackson, MS, on this leg of the trip. This was interesting because they actually gave us steak knives on perhaps the roughest part of the railroad we’d been on 🙂 For dessert I had cheesecake and Sally had what they called “Mississippi Mud Pie” but which was basically cheesecake with a cookie layer — still really good.

Oh, and the other episode of excitement happened in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, when the train was stopped at the station there. We were all looking out the windows on the right side of the train and there was this car sitting in the middle of an intersection with its left front wheel jacked up, and a couple of cop cars sitting behind it. We assumed that there was a simple breakdown in progress and the cops were just there seeing if they could be of any assistance. Apparently they were also there to cuff and stuff a young black male who was present at the scene. Not sure if he was wanted for something or just mouthed off to the cops . . . also not sure that he wasn’t the driver of the disabled car. Anyway, looked like the big excitement for the day in Hazlehurst, MS.

Bedtime: Instead of having the bunk folded down, we slept me in the bed and her in the chair. The only problem with that being that the chair in this train was really hard, so she had to stuff a couple of pillows under her before she was really comfortable. In the morning she took a shower and said that this shower was MUCH better than the other one. (She also went downstairs and looked at the “accessible” shower and said that if we ever took the train again, that was where she planned to shower.)

We put in for a wakeup knock at 5AM because breakfast was at 6, and our car attendant Dan knocked right on the tick. Breakfast was at 6 because the train was due to pull into Chicago at 9AM. We both had the French Toast again.

While we were eating breakfast, the train stopped at the station in Champaign-Urbana. They have an extremely nice (to all outward appearances) station there. I’d be tempted to drive there next time and pick up the train if we took it to New Orleans again.

After some delays getting into Chicago, we pulled into Union Station about half an hour late. It was in the 50’s in Chicago and we were both still dressed for 90’s in New Orleans! So we ran our carry-on luggage out to the van and came back to get our checked bags, after which Sally retired to the restroom to swap shorts for jeans and t-shirt for sweatshirt.

And then we got the hell out of MordorDodge and went home.

Yes, we’d do it again. But we’d be sure to take sleeping bags and possibly our little plug-in cooler for drinks. Oh, and that was another thing — the electricity on both trains never flickered the whole trip, which surprised me. It’s not like you can plug a lot of stuff in, but Sally has an air purifier for her allergies that has to be turned back on when the power fails, and it ran all night both ways.

(For those interested, here is the schedule.)