Our Journey with Amtrak

Riding Coach on The Lakeshore LImited to Chicago

Traveling is difficult with my health problems. Airline travel is something I avoid like the plague since procuring this illness for many reasons and the train has many benefits for me when it comes to managing my health. I could write a novel on why airline travel is horrendous for my health and yet train travel is much more friendly for my situation but this blog entry isn't about explaining any of this so I need to try to avoid getting sidetracked! I just wanted to write a few words about our cross country train journey...

First, let me say that if you want to just view some photos and a short video of our journey with Amtrak rather than reading through all of this, skip to the links at the bottom of this blog entry.  

For the most part, our experiences with Amtrak were good and I would definitely do it again. Some parts were outstanding, some parts were okay, some parts were fair, some parts were simply dumb luck, and, as with all trips, some parts were rather poor. Overall, however, we had a very enjoyable trip and enjoyed the part Amtrak played in our cross country rail journey. We traveled with Sheila's parents and I highly suspect that they enjoyed this long cross country rail excursion as well.

Observation Lounge

Let's start with the good points... First Class is the way to travel and this is the class we chose for most of our journey. Our first class roomette provided much needed privacy. Meals were included in the cost of our roomette which is a huge savings. The meals were pretty good... certainly better than the Cafe Car food. If you felt the need to lie down, each roomette has two beds. Amtrak provides blankets and pillows in each roomette. Even the seats are more comfortable than in Coach Class (much, much more comfortable)... wider, softer, and facing each other for easy conversation... reclining... and the facing seats make putting your feet up a whole lot easier!

The First Class Sleeper Car has an attendant to attend to our needs. The Sleeper Car has decent bathrooms which are only available to the few First Class Sleeper Car passengers (a huge plus for those with my illness is having easy and quick access to a clean, decent bathroom... something which Amtrak provided in their First Class Sleeper Car service), a shower, room for luggage (more on potential problems with luggage storage in a different blog post), free coffee, free bottled water, free bottled juices and various other free bonuses depending upon circumstances and your particular train route.  

Our first and last legs were spent in Coach Class. The first leg in Coach was not bad at all. We were excited and full of energy... this particular Coach car was clean... and, at this point in the trip, we didn't fully understand all the benefits awaiting us for our First Class legs!

When we sat in Coach on our last leg, we knew that not spending the extra money on First Class was a major mistake. Mostly, the privacy and semi-private bathrooms were missed. We also missed the showers. I don't know about the rest of our party, but my spinal injuries were missing the comfort provided in the First Class Sleeper Car. My spinal injuries were definitely aggravated in Coach Class seating. In the future, we will always go First Class, when available.

One downside to our train experience was due to traveling two legs in Coach Class... particularly our last leg on the Lakeshore Limited. In all fairness, Coach Class itself is not bad but these trains we traveled on were old and worn and in desperate need of upgrading.

Time to stretch our legs and enjoy the warm, sunny
weather in Dallas, Texas

Our Coach Class car on this last leg was... to put it simply... it was filthy. It was also exceptionally uncomfortable. As I mentioned above, this train was in desperate need of cleaning, updating, upgrading, and even maintenance. Doors kept getting stuck open making the car noisy. Toilets didn't work correctly. The entire car was dirty and I didn't want to touch anything... I even wondered how clean my seat was in this train! This leg was simply lousy.

After traveling, living, and sleeping in First Class for two of our longest legs, the seats in Coach Class seemed like stiff, wooden chairs designed for torture purposes. I don't think any of us were comfortable. Add to that our disappointment with the cleanliness of our particular car, poorly operating toilets, and malfunctioning stuck doors and I know we were all disappointed with our decision to save a few dollars by traveling in Coach Class for this last leg of our long journey.

I feel the need to say a bit more about the seats in Coach...  These seats are definitely not designed for people taller than shorter-than-average. The leg rests cut into the back of the legs at your knees and there is no way to find a comfortable position to relax. For kids and shorter people, these seats are probably quite comfortable but for all of us taller than average, it was quite uncomfortable.

Another problem worth mentioning is that we had some brief problems with customer service at one of our stops but, overall, I must say that customer service was just fine. When we visited this problematic stop on our return home, the customer service was so good it is worth mentioning. This definitely made up for the lousy service we had received previously and then some! 

So... overall... it was a great trip and we would definitely travel with Amtrak again. Next time, however, it will be First Class for every leg of our journey! 

It would be really nice to travel by rail all the way across the northern tier of the United States... stopping in a few cities for a night or two... visiting the Seattle area... then heading back east toward home...  all First Class this time though!



Photos from our Amtrak journey can be found here...  Amtrak Photos.

Photos from Union Station in Chicago can be found here... Union Station.

I had put together a very short video of our time on Amtrak for our grandson, Lukey, the train fanatic...  I thought it would be appropriate to add here too...