kevin_standlee: (Pointless Arrow)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
The trip from Chicago to DC was shorter than the Emeryville-Chicago one, but it was in some ways more tiring. Let's see if I can cover the highlights (or sometimes the lowlights).

We got a 2 PM checkout, and our train was scheduled for a 5:45 PM departure. It's a good thing we had plenty of time, because it took three taxis before we got one that was big enough to hold all of our luggage. I Tweeted about this later and got a series of posts from people who I suspect have never traveled heavy.

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I did not take this photo until we got everything in Washington Union Station, but I hope it makes it understandable why we checked some of this luggage with Amtrak. In fact, we had to do so, because while Amtrak's allowances are generous, they are not infinite, and for that matter, even in a bedroom, there isn't enough room for everything. We had nine bags total. It wouldn't be this much, but we're doing the Business Meeting video, and I'm carrying stuff for the Winnipeg Worldcon bid.

After not-fun with taxis, we finally got one that could get us and our bags to Chicago Union Station. It wasn't raining today, which was a huge help, and the driver was much nicer than most of the people with whom we'd dealt before. I got two of our nine bags checked and we headed for the Metropolitan Lounge.

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This was our first time in the new, significantly expanded Metropolitan Lounge in Chicago Union Station. It's huge, and we're grateful for that because it gave us lots of room to social distance. We went upstairs to the Pennsylvania Room.

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Later, we went for a walk around Union Station (leaving our larger bags in the Lounge storage area) to pass the time before what should have been our 5:45 train.

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When we returned to the lounge, we discovered that our train was delayed for mechanical reasons, so we had to wait even longer.

Our train was eventually roughly two hours late out of Chicago.

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Eventually they called our train and we made our way trackside and into the one and only sleeper car on the Amtrak Cardinal, train number 50. This train uses single-level Viewliner I sleepers, and there are only two standard bedrooms (we had room B), one handicapped bedroom, and 12 roomettes on board. We wrestled our bags on board, especially the big camera case.

It turns out that we slightly miscalculated. The big camera bag — which I took to calling the Elephant — would not fit into the "attic" storage. There was enough space behind the retaining railing, but not enough clearance for the bag to get into the space to start with.

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Lisa ended up sleeping with the case in the upper bunk.

We got dinner on board the train shortly after departure. Unlike the western long-distance 2-night trains like the California Zephyr, the shorter-distance overnight trains in the east are still serving "flexible" dining, which means microwavable meals.

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Lisa had the salmon, while I had the pasta and meatballs. They were okay, but that's all they were: okay. They were not as good as the cooked-to-order meals on the Zephyr.

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Lisa didn't like the look of the salad dressing, so used catsup instead.

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The only dessert were toffee (sometimes chocolate) brownies.

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Amtrak's plastic flatware isn't that good, and we shattered several forks on the Emeryville-Chicago leg of the trip. In Chicago, Lisa dug out the titanium flatware that she'd packed for us to use while eating in our hotel room in DC. We put this to work on our train meals and didn't have to worry about shattered forks.

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Breakfast the next morning was french toast for Lisa and a three-cheese omelette for me. Neither were as good as their cooked-to-order equivalents. They were not actively bad, understand, just not as good.

We discovered (or re-discovered) that the Viewliner bedrooms aren't quite as large as their Superliner equivalents. Among other constraints was that it was hard to get the en suite toilet/shower compartment door to open wide enough for us to get into it without folding the chair inside the main room away.

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In addition, the Viewliner car only has power outlets near the sink, so Lisa had to rig extension cords to get power over to the bed where we actually needed it.

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Also, there was a recurring sound in the car that we think was a laboring vacuum pump that only quieted down when someone flushed their toilet. Click through to the video above to see the snaking course of the extension cords and the sound of the thumping pump, plus some views of the en suite shower/toilet in the bedroom.

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Still, we could at least use our shower in our bedroom. The roomette passengers have only one shower for the rest of the car, and it was out of service, used only for storage.

After the late departure and minor annoyances, we did get to sleep pretty late. We appear to have lost more time overnight, for reasons we never determined. Our train did get shorter overnight, but that's intentional: the Cardinal is used to move equipment to and from Chicago from the heavy maintenance shops at Beech Grove, Indiana (near Indianapolis), and overnight we determined that our train had shrunk by seven cars.

Sunday's trip was very scenic, but hard to photograph. There are a few photos after the cut, and more if you click through to Flickr, as always.

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I tried to take station photos when I could.

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The scenic part of this trip was the hours spent traversing the New River Gorge. This is really very pretty, but also very difficult to photograph. I did my best, but it would be easier if the railroad trimmed the trees along the right of way.

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At Clifton Forge, VA, the C&O Railway Heritage Center is adjacent to the train station. We'd like to come back sometime and see this collection.

Eventually, about 2 1/2 hours late, we finally got to Washington Union Station.

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We made our way into the station and waited for our luggage. And waited. After a long wait, I went looking for someone who might know what happened to it. When I came back, Lisa discovered that the bags had already come up, but so quickly that while we made our way slowly from the platform, the attendants had already stored them away as unclaimed. I produced my claim checks and we got the last of our nine bags.

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We rolled our way across the Main Hall of the station and out to the taxi stand. It took a bit of persuading of the taxi starter (and grumbling from the other cabbies), but we were able to get an oversized vehicle to take us and our bags to the Omni Shoreham Hotel.

We got checked in to our room with a minimum of trouble. The room phone doesn't work, but that's a minor thing that we'll see about getting fixed tomorrow. I was surprised that (unlike nearly every hotel in which we've stayed since the pandemic hit), the Omni by default still provides daily housekeeping service in our room. We don't want daily service and will leave our Do Not Disturb sign up and call for supplies when we need them. This allows us to leave things the way that suits us.

This room is really nicely sized and it's shaped in a way that allows Lisa and I to both use it without having to crawl over each other all of the time the way so many hotel rooms seem to require. There's also a huge amount of storage space including a large closet. It took us a long time to unpack (there's those nine bags again), but there seems to be a place for nearly everything except the Winnipeg supplies that I'll turn over to the Winnipeg bid when the active bid team arrives. (And I won't be taking any of the Winnipeg supplies back with me, which will lighten our luggage, I hope.)

It's not going to be a cheap stay, but for a ten-day trip to DC, one could do a lot worse than this hotel. But now it's time to use the room for sleeping, as we have one day of pre-convention tourism before I have organizational commitments on the day before the convention.

Date: 2021-12-13 01:02 pm (UTC)
garyomaha: Sophie&Charlie_04-27-25 (Default)
From: [personal profile] garyomaha
Heavy load aside, looks like a nice trip. I've never traveled long-distance east of Chicago on Amtrak, only a short trip (to, I think, Milwaukee). I'd like to do so someday.

Date: 2021-12-13 07:06 pm (UTC)
wild_patience: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wild_patience
With so many CPAP users these days, it's surprising they don't have a power outlet by the beds.

Date: 2021-12-13 09:50 pm (UTC)
delosharriman: a bearded, serious-looking man in a khaki turtleneck & hat : Captain Tatsumi from "Aim for the Top! Gunbuster" (Default)
From: [personal profile] delosharriman
I still think that one of the most spectacular sights on Amtrak is the crossing the Capitol Limited makes at Harper's Ferry. The bridge which carries you across the river goes right into the side of a mountain!

Date: 2021-12-16 01:38 am (UTC)
katster: (Default)
From: [personal profile] katster
West Virginia's actually on my list of places I want to see in person after spending hours traspising through a virtual version in one of my video games.

The video game does sorta look like your pictures of the the New River Gorge. :)

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