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kevin_standleeThe fourth leg of our around-the-country journey was Chicago to New Orleans on the famous City of New Orleans, immortalized in the song by Steve Goodman. After getting our luggage to Chicago Union Station and two of our bags checked, we once again went to the fantastic Amtrak Metropolitan Lounge, and requested Red Cap service to help us get the large remaining baggage to trainside.
The City, train 59, is one of the last trains of the evening, departing at 8:05 PM, and we had the upper level of the lounge mostly to ourselves.
Lisa saw to getting The Elephant and our other larger bags secured on the lower level while I moved up to Room E, where I somehow managed to make a panoramic photo work.
As we we were settling in, and before the train departed, the dining car attendant (singular; she had to take orders, heat up meals, and serve them single-handedly) came to get our dinner orders. She advised us that there was no sleeping car attendant on this train because the rostered attendant had tested positive for COVID-19 and there were no available substitutes, in part because of the holiday. That wasn't as crucial to us as it would be to others, because Lisa prefers to make our own bunks anyway, but it would turn out to be a bit of a problem later.
Our previous two Superliner bedrooms have been in Room D, and we immediately discovered a problem with the mirror-imaged Room E: the power outlet placement is wrong. Lisa started to run an extension cord to where we wanted power. This was when she discovered that the power outlet was dead anyway. This meant doubling the extension cord (fortunately I brought long cords) to run it from the other outlet at the sink, over the door and around to where we needed it.
This was only one of several improvisations Lisa made to make our bedroom usable. The flow-control lever that opens the vent on the heating/air-conditioning was missing. She used her multi-tool to get it open. The stuffy room became more livable very quickly.
We once again had to shim the door dividing us from Room D to make it not rattle.
Next was an issue specific to Superliner I sleepers. (The previous legs were in Superliner II sleepers or Viewliners.) Superliner I's have a support that engages a bracket to hold this end of the upper bunk in place. This one squeaked annoyingly. Lisa used the wrapper from a bar of soap to shim and quiet it.
This next issue was far beyond Lisa's ability to fix. There was no water in the car! Shortly after we departed Chicago (on time), Lisa discovered that our room had no water, and some investigation showed that the entire car was dry. Lisa quickly got several extra bottles of water so we'd have some water, while I informed one of the conductors. I told him that I understood he wasn't the car attendant, but that he should know the car had no water. He told me that he would look into it at the first station stop.
With all of the rushing about and Lisa trying to rig fixes to all of the minor mechanical problems with our compartment,travelswithkuma took up a perch on the high shelf over the car to supervise operations.
We ate our "flexible dining" meal and hoped for the best for our various fixes and that the conductor could track down the problem with the plumbing.
As the train pulled out of Kankakee (admittedly not very visible in this blurry photo), we found that we had water again. The Superliner's water system needs air to drive it (which is why it tends to spit water at you out of the faucets). Because we didn't have a car attendant, nobody had pressurized the system. The conductor, or at least someone on the train crew, was indeed able to fix it after one of our early station stops.
With our plumbing working and most of the worst of the mechanical issues worked around, Lisa finished making up the bunks and we turned in for the night.
One thing about falling asleep on a moving train for me is that when the train stops, I often wake up. That happened in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois...
...and also at Carbondale, the first of three crew change stations. With host railroad CN trying to give as many people the Christmas holiday off as they could, there was less freight traffic than usual, with the City accordingly running way ahead of schedule and having to "wait on time" at the crew-change points.
We didn't have to change cars at Memphis, Tennessee, the second crew-change point, but we did decide that while it was early, we might as well get up because the stop had woken us both up. Lisa turned the room and I took a shower. After that I had to go order breakfast, then come back later to collect it and take it back to the room because there was no attendant to do so. Because the City's two sleepers are a regular sleeper and a crew-dorm in which Amtrak sells a few spaces to revenue passengers, spreading one attendant across two cars, there was nobody to help the passengers who had no experience with sleeping-car travel. Mind you, we'd rather have no attendant than a sick one.
More than once during this trip, passengers seemed to mistake me for a crew member. I answered their questions, but pointed out, "I don't work for Amtrak. I'm just another passenger." In one case, I gave the wrong answer, when I answered what I thought was the question, "Where is the restroom" when what the person was really saying was "Where is the restaurant," i.e. the dining car.
Along our ride today we saw several "graveyards of the rusted automobiles" mentioned in the Goodman song.
Also quite a bit of goopy-looking swamps.
But also a small collection of preserved railway equipment at McComb, Mississippi.
Unfortunately, the depot-museum has been apparently recently badly damaged by fire.
Thanks to the lack of rail congestion, we had an extra-long "fresh air" stop at Jackson, the final crew-change point.
I had enough time to trot down to the head end to photograph Amtrak engine 117, which pulled our train today. I'm not used to long-distance Amtrak trains having only one locomotive, being more accustomed to needing two locomotives to haul longer consists through the mountains of the west, but there aren't any mountains to speak of on the 934-mile haul from Chicago to New Orleans paralleling the Mississippi River.
The Jackson stop, timetabled for only nine minutes, lasted a full 40 minutes before we pulled out on time at 11:20 AM.
We were nearly there, and I wondered if there would be any last-minute delays to prevent an early or on-time departure.
Today's City runs on a different schedule than the Illinois Central train that inspired Steve Goodman, so it runs in daylight through Mississippi and Louisiana, rather than "through the Mississippi darkness, rolling down to the sea." Here, we traverse the "pass" that connects Lake Maurepas to Lake Ponchartrain.
We did end up having to hold for a while in this less-than-salubrious spot near New Orleans Airport waiting for our train's northbound counterpart, number 58, to pass on it's way toward Chicago before we could creep in to the Big Easy.
The stub-end nature of New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal means that the City has to first pull into a wye track past this building...
...then back in past the Superdome to the station.
We still arrived some 45 minutes early.
After waiting for a taxi, we were fortunate to have one arrive that was big enough for us. The driver warned us that people here don't wear face masks, as there's no public mandate, and even where there are mandates, people are ignoring them. He took us to the Crowne Plaza Astor Hotel on Canal Street, in the heart of the city. As he did so, I considered that most of the clothing I'd brought with me was intended for daytime high temperatures of 5°C, not 25°C such as we were getting in New Orleans.
We checked in to the hotel and went up to the room they assigned us. As we eased the luggage cart into the room, things did not look good. It was a tiny little room with barely enough room to hold the bed. Lisa immediately noticed that the room hadn't even been cleaned. We went back downstairs, told them about this, and they gave us another room in the other wing of the hotel. (The Crowne Plaza appears to be two historical hotels stitched together.)
Thank goodness the original room wasn't made up. While not a suite like we had in Chicago, this room is much better that what we first got. It has more than enough room for us to spread out and not trip over each other, space for me to work, and space for our luggage.
Kuma Bear sat on the bed while we unpacked.
There is a shower-tub as we requested.
The bathroom does suffer from having no rails from which to hang any of the towels, but at least it isn't one of those trendy new designs that seems to think you shouldn't have any flat surfaces on which to store anything in the bathroom. Neither the Crowne Plaza Chicago nor the Omni Shoreham suffered from this problem, I'm happy to say.
And finally, there's a nice view of the streetcars running on Canal Street outside the hotel.
While it is a nice room, Lisa says it's easier to sleep when "the rhythm of the rails is all she feels."
Christmas Day isn't the best day to be traveling. Also, we made our travel plans before the Omicron variant of COVID-19 appeared. Had we known what we do now, we might not have made this New Orleans detour. The people here in Louisiana don't seem to care about the danger. On the other hand, they don't seem to care if people wear masks or not, rather than having a governor like that of Florida who seemingly wants to ban people from protecting themselves from deadly disease entirely, and to prohibit private businesses from protecting their customers from getting sick. In any event, a number of our original plans for things to do while in New Orleans are likely to be scratched.
The hotel was able to provide us with a mini-fridge, which will help a lot. We made a couple of brief sorties to CVS and Walgreen's to get some groceries. We made dinner in the room from what we got from the stores and what we brought with us on the train from Chicago.
We have a total of four nights here in New Orleans. Tomorrow is likely to be a day of sleeping a lot, after which we'll decide what, if anything, we can do safely while we're here.
The City, train 59, is one of the last trains of the evening, departing at 8:05 PM, and we had the upper level of the lounge mostly to ourselves.
Lisa saw to getting The Elephant and our other larger bags secured on the lower level while I moved up to Room E, where I somehow managed to make a panoramic photo work.
As we we were settling in, and before the train departed, the dining car attendant (singular; she had to take orders, heat up meals, and serve them single-handedly) came to get our dinner orders. She advised us that there was no sleeping car attendant on this train because the rostered attendant had tested positive for COVID-19 and there were no available substitutes, in part because of the holiday. That wasn't as crucial to us as it would be to others, because Lisa prefers to make our own bunks anyway, but it would turn out to be a bit of a problem later.
Our previous two Superliner bedrooms have been in Room D, and we immediately discovered a problem with the mirror-imaged Room E: the power outlet placement is wrong. Lisa started to run an extension cord to where we wanted power. This was when she discovered that the power outlet was dead anyway. This meant doubling the extension cord (fortunately I brought long cords) to run it from the other outlet at the sink, over the door and around to where we needed it.
This was only one of several improvisations Lisa made to make our bedroom usable. The flow-control lever that opens the vent on the heating/air-conditioning was missing. She used her multi-tool to get it open. The stuffy room became more livable very quickly.
We once again had to shim the door dividing us from Room D to make it not rattle.
Next was an issue specific to Superliner I sleepers. (The previous legs were in Superliner II sleepers or Viewliners.) Superliner I's have a support that engages a bracket to hold this end of the upper bunk in place. This one squeaked annoyingly. Lisa used the wrapper from a bar of soap to shim and quiet it.
This next issue was far beyond Lisa's ability to fix. There was no water in the car! Shortly after we departed Chicago (on time), Lisa discovered that our room had no water, and some investigation showed that the entire car was dry. Lisa quickly got several extra bottles of water so we'd have some water, while I informed one of the conductors. I told him that I understood he wasn't the car attendant, but that he should know the car had no water. He told me that he would look into it at the first station stop.
With all of the rushing about and Lisa trying to rig fixes to all of the minor mechanical problems with our compartment,
travelswithkuma took up a perch on the high shelf over the car to supervise operations.We ate our "flexible dining" meal and hoped for the best for our various fixes and that the conductor could track down the problem with the plumbing.
As the train pulled out of Kankakee (admittedly not very visible in this blurry photo), we found that we had water again. The Superliner's water system needs air to drive it (which is why it tends to spit water at you out of the faucets). Because we didn't have a car attendant, nobody had pressurized the system. The conductor, or at least someone on the train crew, was indeed able to fix it after one of our early station stops.
With our plumbing working and most of the worst of the mechanical issues worked around, Lisa finished making up the bunks and we turned in for the night.
One thing about falling asleep on a moving train for me is that when the train stops, I often wake up. That happened in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois...
...and also at Carbondale, the first of three crew change stations. With host railroad CN trying to give as many people the Christmas holiday off as they could, there was less freight traffic than usual, with the City accordingly running way ahead of schedule and having to "wait on time" at the crew-change points.
We didn't have to change cars at Memphis, Tennessee, the second crew-change point, but we did decide that while it was early, we might as well get up because the stop had woken us both up. Lisa turned the room and I took a shower. After that I had to go order breakfast, then come back later to collect it and take it back to the room because there was no attendant to do so. Because the City's two sleepers are a regular sleeper and a crew-dorm in which Amtrak sells a few spaces to revenue passengers, spreading one attendant across two cars, there was nobody to help the passengers who had no experience with sleeping-car travel. Mind you, we'd rather have no attendant than a sick one.
More than once during this trip, passengers seemed to mistake me for a crew member. I answered their questions, but pointed out, "I don't work for Amtrak. I'm just another passenger." In one case, I gave the wrong answer, when I answered what I thought was the question, "Where is the restroom" when what the person was really saying was "Where is the restaurant," i.e. the dining car.
Along our ride today we saw several "graveyards of the rusted automobiles" mentioned in the Goodman song.
Also quite a bit of goopy-looking swamps.
But also a small collection of preserved railway equipment at McComb, Mississippi.
Unfortunately, the depot-museum has been apparently recently badly damaged by fire.
Thanks to the lack of rail congestion, we had an extra-long "fresh air" stop at Jackson, the final crew-change point.
I had enough time to trot down to the head end to photograph Amtrak engine 117, which pulled our train today. I'm not used to long-distance Amtrak trains having only one locomotive, being more accustomed to needing two locomotives to haul longer consists through the mountains of the west, but there aren't any mountains to speak of on the 934-mile haul from Chicago to New Orleans paralleling the Mississippi River.
The Jackson stop, timetabled for only nine minutes, lasted a full 40 minutes before we pulled out on time at 11:20 AM.
We were nearly there, and I wondered if there would be any last-minute delays to prevent an early or on-time departure.
Today's City runs on a different schedule than the Illinois Central train that inspired Steve Goodman, so it runs in daylight through Mississippi and Louisiana, rather than "through the Mississippi darkness, rolling down to the sea." Here, we traverse the "pass" that connects Lake Maurepas to Lake Ponchartrain.
We did end up having to hold for a while in this less-than-salubrious spot near New Orleans Airport waiting for our train's northbound counterpart, number 58, to pass on it's way toward Chicago before we could creep in to the Big Easy.
The stub-end nature of New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal means that the City has to first pull into a wye track past this building...
...then back in past the Superdome to the station.
We still arrived some 45 minutes early.
After waiting for a taxi, we were fortunate to have one arrive that was big enough for us. The driver warned us that people here don't wear face masks, as there's no public mandate, and even where there are mandates, people are ignoring them. He took us to the Crowne Plaza Astor Hotel on Canal Street, in the heart of the city. As he did so, I considered that most of the clothing I'd brought with me was intended for daytime high temperatures of 5°C, not 25°C such as we were getting in New Orleans.
We checked in to the hotel and went up to the room they assigned us. As we eased the luggage cart into the room, things did not look good. It was a tiny little room with barely enough room to hold the bed. Lisa immediately noticed that the room hadn't even been cleaned. We went back downstairs, told them about this, and they gave us another room in the other wing of the hotel. (The Crowne Plaza appears to be two historical hotels stitched together.)
Thank goodness the original room wasn't made up. While not a suite like we had in Chicago, this room is much better that what we first got. It has more than enough room for us to spread out and not trip over each other, space for me to work, and space for our luggage.
Kuma Bear sat on the bed while we unpacked.
There is a shower-tub as we requested.
The bathroom does suffer from having no rails from which to hang any of the towels, but at least it isn't one of those trendy new designs that seems to think you shouldn't have any flat surfaces on which to store anything in the bathroom. Neither the Crowne Plaza Chicago nor the Omni Shoreham suffered from this problem, I'm happy to say.
And finally, there's a nice view of the streetcars running on Canal Street outside the hotel.
While it is a nice room, Lisa says it's easier to sleep when "the rhythm of the rails is all she feels."
Christmas Day isn't the best day to be traveling. Also, we made our travel plans before the Omicron variant of COVID-19 appeared. Had we known what we do now, we might not have made this New Orleans detour. The people here in Louisiana don't seem to care about the danger. On the other hand, they don't seem to care if people wear masks or not, rather than having a governor like that of Florida who seemingly wants to ban people from protecting themselves from deadly disease entirely, and to prohibit private businesses from protecting their customers from getting sick. In any event, a number of our original plans for things to do while in New Orleans are likely to be scratched.
The hotel was able to provide us with a mini-fridge, which will help a lot. We made a couple of brief sorties to CVS and Walgreen's to get some groceries. We made dinner in the room from what we got from the stores and what we brought with us on the train from Chicago.
We have a total of four nights here in New Orleans. Tomorrow is likely to be a day of sleeping a lot, after which we'll decide what, if anything, we can do safely while we're here.
