travel by train

Just booked a ticket to Chicago to catch up with some friends in July.
Even though I know I won’t get into Chicago at the published time, this will be my first train trip, so I’m pretty damn excited!

The first time I traveled by train was to Disneyland. I loved riding the train, visiting the cafe car, and seeing parts of the country I wouldn’t see by car.

I traveled again by train in Russia, and it was so much fun.

I hope to take another train ride.

I’ve decided I’m going to travel with the money I have saved up. I’ve decided on Colorado and California so far.

I’d never traveled by train before, so when the possibility came up on our vacation my wife and I jumped at the chance. The trip from QC to Montreal is quick, about 3.5 hours, and for the most part the scenery was very beautiful: lots of beautiful houses, a great view of the river and river valley, and then rolling farmsides with cows and corn. And corn. And corn, and still more corn. At that point I was ready to pull out my book and ignore the scenery for a bit. But every once in a while I’d look over and see something worth seeing. Followed by more corn.

Overall I thought it was a great way to travel, and would like to do it again, on a longer trip, if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive.

I know this doesn’t count, but I stayed in a railcar hotel once in Chattanooga. That was a good experience, but I want to take a trip in a train with the hypnotic clanking, wheels rumbling, and clicking of the coupling joints. There is something relaxing about that. Perhaps I’ll schedule my next vacation with Amtrack.

Amtrak trains move so slowly. To get to Vancouver, BC (where I want to vacation to) from Salt Lake City (974 miles) takes almost 2 days to get there. It’s also not that cheap at $330 plus what ever else they add on once I order it. By car is 14 and a half hours and by plane 5 and a half.
I took amtrak once from Salt Lake to Denver and couldn’t wait to get off the train, especially when it goes to a crawl the last couple of miles. The “scenic route” had tunnels or rails under construction so we got bland desert.
I would only recommend this if you have a long vacation period open to you and enjoy sight seeing when it’s available.
I’ve heard good things about many of the trains in Europe and Japan and I would definitely take those if and when I visit those places.

I actually hate the reason why I started riding trains. My mother did not want me to drive on the freeway for various insane reasons and I wanted to attend a university in a city that was 60 miles away. Since I really wanted to go to this particular school I felt like I needed to do something to satisfy her fears of me going out into the world. So I suggested the train. It is actually pretty exciting the first time you ride a train. I never thought I would use such transportation, plus in the area I live I didn’t think that so many people used the train as a source of commute. Now the train is part of life weekly at least. You meet a lot of new people. I actually met the love of my life on the train. He is a conductor. If you really know how to connect with other sources of transportation it is really quite convenient in getting to places you want to go. Although there are times when the train seems to have a bad week because of slow orders, traffic on the tracks and accidents, which really delays people who are trying to get to work. The other thing is that a lot of time is wasted just traveling. I think about all the things that I could be doing beside the commute. The upside is at least you are not the driver and you can catch up on homework or reading.

New favorite way to travel!!

My newest train trip was the Amtrak Cascade from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA. Nice relaxing trip. My favorite train trip was on the high speed TGV from Paris to Lyon.

Looks like Vancouver might be a good destination for this…not quite set up for international travel at the moment. Not entirely sure if I’d need a passport, but it’s probably a good thing to go ahead and get anyway…