On my solo trip, I decided to
go via Amtrak from
several model railroad layouts in my house. So forgive me if some of what
I
say only rail fans could understand and appreciate. :)
I knew I want privacy and a bed, not just coach and a seat for 20 hours, so
I spent the money to upgrade to a small sleeper room.
Getting a sleeper room qualifies you as first class passenger. In Penn
station, there is a special waiting area where there is complimentary soda,
tea, and coffee, and they call you when the train is ready for passengers
For those who aren't familiar with the two person sleeper on Amtrak, here is
how I describe it.
There are two chairs that can recline a little, that face each other.
Next
to one of the chairs is the.... toilet bowl that is covered as its is one of
the steps to help someone climb onto the upper bunk. but
more about that
later. Between both chairs is a little table that can fold out.
There is
a checker board pattern if you wanted to play chess of checkers. There is
no privacy in these little rooms for when you go to the bathroom, so either
you will have to go with someone else in the room, or be prepared to ask
them to leave for a bit.
The toilet bowls operate with no water in them, and
just a little when it
flushes. It uses air pressure to help flush, but it doesn't do 100% job
on
this, enough said :) fill in the blanks here :)
the sink also folds away when not in use. There are three spigots, hot,
cold and ice water which I guess is meant for drinking. They also give
you
bottled water. There is no drain in the sink. the
water drains from the
basin when it is folded into the wall.
There is a main cabin light, which could also have a night light feature to
it. There is a light over the sink, and there are several reading lights
positioned accordingly. There is more then just one switch to operate
most
of the lights in the room.
On the bottom set of windows, there are two sets of ac vents, which can be
just opened and closed. On one side of the cabin, there are two ac
blowers
which you can adjust airflow (off, low, med, high), temperature and
direction
of air flow.
Across from the upper bunk is a storage area. To place things here, you
need to lift them over your head, so I hope you don't pack to much heavy
stuff. I couldn't, my luggage weighed 70 pounds. It occupied the
chair in
front of me. :)
For privacy, there is a window shade that slides down a fixed window (cant
be open) between you and the walkway in the car. The sliding door has a
curtain that you open and use velcro to keep it in
the closed position,
covering the window. There are also curtains for the outside windows too.
The upper bunk slides up and down, up when you want head room, down when you
want to sleep in it. To climb up, you stand on the toilet bowl closed,.
then the sink area step, before hoisting yourself onto
the bed. To make
sure you don't roll out of it onto the floor, there are two straps that hook
up to the ceiling to protect yourself. I slept in the upper bunk as my
luggage was sitting on the lower chair. On the trip down, I only slept
maybe a couple of hours that night. On the way home, I slept for a couple
of hours, went in for breakfast, ate, and went back to sleep for a couple of
more hours.
Before I can talk about dinning, I need to discuss something unpleasant,
security
Once in your room, you can lock yourself in, esp. when sleeping to give you
a
sense of security. However, when you leave your room, you cannot lock
your
room, its open for whomever wants to go in and search
it for anything they
want. I spoke to a Amtrak representative on the
phone about security, and
even she told me she had a credit card stolen while traveling on Amtrak.
When you leave your room, make sure you take anything of value with you.
When having a sleeper room, this is first class travel. They have juice
and
coffee available. And meals are comped.
If you ordered alcoholic
beverages, you paid extra for this (I think) For
breakfast and lunch, I was
able bring it back to my room to eat. Dinner was another story, I think
you
can also bring it back to your room, but they prefer you cant
and or may not
give you a option. Even though meals are included, gratuity isn't.
When
eating in the dinning car, if you are a single, they will sit you down with
others. If you are two, they may let you sit facing each other, they wont
make you sit next to a stranger. I used the space next to me for my
backpack which had all my electronics and money in it. I just left my
clothes in the empty sleeper room. On the trip down, I took breakfast and
lunch back to my room, but had dinner in the dinning car. On the trip
back
to
real smooth, sometimes it was a little rough. When trying to take a drink,
putting a glass against your lips, you kind of hoped that you didn't hit a
section of track which would cause you to smash the glass against your teeth
:)
While traveling between
electric locomotive and we sometimes hit speeds between 90 and 100 mph.
At
rest of the trip down to
speed of between 60 and 70 mph. I don't know if a diesel cant
go as fast or
the tracks aren't rated for faster speed.
We made numerous stops along the way, some in the middle of the night. We
would maybe stop for 5 minutes before we were moving again. On the
southern
half of the trip, we were ground level and whenever we approached a street
crossing, the locomotives horn sounded a warning. I got used to this, and
after awhile, didn't bother me anymore.
One of the main reasons I wanted to go via train was to see train related
items. I've seen preserved equipment that by the time I had my camera
ready, we were long past. I saw giant locomotives that I have in ho scale
that seeing in person makes you look in awe at how tall these things are.
Some may not understand the need to touch these things, but I so wanted to
:)
One of the holy grails (in my opinion at least) is something called simply
the 'Juice Train' Down in Florida, Tropicana delivers via rail to a
distribution center in New Jersey fresh squeezed Orange Juice already in
containers. Box car, after box car with the Tropicana logo on it, pulled
by
a couple of the largest diesel locomotives I ever saw. Since I was
heading
south, these were heading north to
Things to do while on the train. I understand
that they did have TV's in
the room, but they were recently removed. I took with me a computer, DVD
player and some TV series I recently purchased to watch on the way down.
I
also have GPS software for the laptop, which when it worked, showed me speed
and location. The GPS receiver need to have
direct site to the sky, like
under a wind shield of a car. It does work when next to a window, but not
very often as I found out. I also think in some regions, like in the
seemed to see satellites, but the train was moving too fast for the computer
to lock onto.
The other thing I took my laptop for was to dial onto the internet. I
have
a Nextel phone, which I can connect to my laptop for use a dialup modem.
This worked even less then the GPS software did. When we traveled through
major cities, I had a good signal, but at the speed we were going, that time
would be about 5 to 10 minutes. I did connect and talk to Joyce on the
mouse for less chat room and was able to send her a
message to which she
relayed from the chat room to the yahoogroup. I
also gave a update or two
while in
The last stop before
15 minutes to wait. :)
Going back to New York, the train was about 40 minutes late, but we arrived
back into Penn Station 10 minutes early, figure that one out :)
All in all, that this was a major part of my adventure to WDW solo... and it
cost almost as much as the stay at
Would I do this again? In a
Bruce