Saturday August 28, 1999

Day Sixteen: We set the alarm for 7:00 a.m. so we could sleep a little extra.  Of course we did not get to sleep early last night as we had planned, but at least we were packed and ready to leave for the station by 8:15. We hauled our bags down the elevator and across to the baggage room, only to find out that one of our bags was now too heavy to go by train. This had not been a problem before, so it was upsetting to have it happen this far into our trip. Well, we resolved the problem by removing some of the contents and packing them onto the train with us. And we paid extra for the overweight suitcase as well. (This is another topic for one more letter to AMTRAK to "clarify the situation" - i.e., express our displeasure.)  We again had coffee at The Second Cup, and I grabbed a banana and a pastry at one of the local markets. 

We boarded AMTRAK's Adirondack on track 18, got ourselves situated, moved twice to "better seats" and settled in for a quick ride to Albany, New York....well, trackwork and fate conspired again and we ran late the entire trip. The customs stop was pretty quick as our forms were in order  (Mary made the agent blush with her tale of our second honeymoon). The train was all coach cars, and not even long-distance ones at that. Some of the doors didn't work and the air conditioning had two positions - cold and colder. When we left Montreal it seemed cool; but by the time we reached the border, the customs guys thought they had stepped into a meat locker. The conductor finally put the heat on, without turning off the AC, to try to warm up the car. After a couple of hours it was too warm, so the heater went back off; but the car never cooled again. 

The track was CN to the border and CP in New York State. We followed the shore of Lake Champlain for a hundred miles of so, passing Fort Ticonderoga along the way. The rail is all jointed rail and the conductor, bless her heart, told us that we could not exceed forty miles per hour because it was over 90 degrees outside. (Sounded sort of fishy to me: I never heard of a 'Federal Law' about track speed, and certainly not on jointed rail.)  At Saratoga Springs we waited for track maintenance to move off the track ahead. The original builders of this line did not build in many long passing sidings, so we waited fifteen minutes for the northbound passenger train on the only siding available. At Schenectady, after leaving the station, we slowed once again to a crawl. This time the signals were not operating properly into Albany, so we stopped at each one and proceeded slowly. We did finally arrive at Albany, where they switched engines (to an electric Northeast Corridor engine) and they left so quickly I did not even see our baggage get taken off the train. I was glad to see it, and went right over to the baggage counter to get it checked into Chicago.

 Our Chicago-bound train, the Lake Shore Limited (so called because the route runs along the shore of Lake Erie) arrived into Albany in two sections. One came in from Boston (first) and the other came in from New York. The two sections were combined and we boarded the Viewliner car #2301, one of the two original prototype Viewliner sleeper cars built, which had arrived on the New York section. Once our train was re-assembled, we had two engines (one GE Geneses on the point followed by an F-40PH), one baggage car, two Viewliner sleepers, a diner, a lounge, six coaches, our sleeper, another baggage car, two express boxcars, and eight roadrailer trailers. This was one very long train. We waited in the Albany station for about 45 minutes after our departure time before the roadrailer trailers were added to our train. As a result, we left about an hour late and never made up the lost time (in fact, we lost more time along the way, thereby proving the old adage that "a late train only gets later".   The track seemed pretty good, as the trains went the maximum speed most of the time. However, the suspension on our old sleeper was not too good. We shook the whole night long and I only slept while we were stopped at stations or going under slow orders. Mary did not sleep much better. (Mary's note: understatement of the week!)  I tried to put a good spin on the fact that we had such an old car, it was "historic" etc., but that really did not go over too well, especially when the shower only had "too-hot" and "burning" as its temperature settings. The other shower on the car only had "cold" and "colder" and you also had to hold the button on to keep the shower water flowing.  We decided to wait for showers until we got to the hotel in Illinois!

The scenery through Ohio and Indiana and on into Chicago was interesting. Farms and small towns turned to medium cities and steel mills and finally to suburbs and the big windy city. The train goes by Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, and we made an unscheduled stop there to wait for traffic to clear ahead. After one more stop, in the AMTRAK yard to drop the express boxcars and trailers from the rear of our train, we arrived at Chicago's Union Station. In Chicago we rented a car and drove through traffic (ugh) to Rolling Meadows - a suburb where Mary's home office is located. We are now at the Holiday Inn for two nights. I am hoping to do some rail fanning as well as laundry tomorrow. I really liked seeing the big mills and all of the rolling stock that accompanies them. I've seen a bunch of CSX, NS and Conrail engines, as well as some from Wisconsin Central. I even saw one SP and two UP engines as we approached Chicago. Unfortunately, most everything went by too fast to take pictures from the train. We went slow through the AMTRAK yard just before the station and we saw lots of equipment there. During this portion of the trip we met a man traveling with his son. They were on an excursion just to ride the rails, and they had lots of information about the locations we were passing. At one point he came to my room and told me about the steam locomotive and old cars at the station we were about to pass. This was the point where CSX trains joined up with the NS tracks we were now on. Today's trip was fun, but I'll be glad to be sleeping tonight in a king-sized bed that does not go bump in the night.