I figured that, as the street car which runs right to New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal goes right up Canal Street, outside the hotel, getting to the station would be easy.
Except they don’t; Not anymore.
It’s just that the maps & signs don’t tell you that. If I hadn’t told one of the other streetcar drivers that I was waiting for a different car, to the station, I might never have known.
She took me a few stops up to where it did go, and gave me a transfer ticket at no extra charge because there was no way I could have known.
Got there in the end.
There isn’t a lounge as such at New Orleans, though they do have more comfy seating (and nothing else) in the Magnolia Room.
I’d like to point out, for the record, that they tend to board sleeper & business class passengers separately, so while it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to me to sit out in the main hall, it would have complicated getting onto the train.
I figured that there’d not be lunch on the train, so grabbed something from Subway.
I’m only mentioning it because this Subway had beer on the menu.
The room seems familiar.
This time I was in one of the ‘Transition Sleepers”; There was also a regular sleeper car.
The transition sleeper, near as I can tell, has 20+ Roomette sleepers on the top level, half for passengers and half for crew (there’s a wee curtain), what looks like an accessible bedroom downstairs at the same end as the bathrooms, and then a sodding great ‘crew lounge’ at the other end. There was one of these on the Sunset Limited to New Orleans, used as the crew car exclusively until the septic system in our car packed it in.
They’re ‘transition’ cars because they have a top-floor door at one end, to meet the next double-decker car, and the other end has a door lower down, to meet a single-level car, usually the baggage car.
And now we have some photos.
Hammond, LA.
Jackson, MS.
Played around with the panorama setting again.
And this is somewhere on the approach to Chicago, I think.
This was an odd trip.
For a while there I thought I was the only passenger in the car; There was another guy there, but attitude and lanyard made me think he was Amtrak staff getting a ride somewhere. It did eventually attract a couple more people, but it was still an empty-feeling car; Or half-car, the crew were down behind the curtain, or down in the crew lounge downstairs.
The sleeping car attendant was dividing her time between ‘my’ sleeper and a coach car. She’d wander through occasionally, but that’s about it.
This was the first time I’ve needed the blanket in a sleeper.
Actually, even with the vent closed and the dial turned all the way to the ‘warm’ side, it was still cold enough that I snagged the blanket from the top bunk too, and hunkered down until the covers were over my ears.
The dining car was different.
All the other dining cars I’ve seen have a slice of ‘kitchen’ in the middle of the car, and seating booths filling the rest of the space. This one was half dining booths, half ‘cafe car’ booths, and the slice in the middle was a combined ‘kitchen’ and cafe kiosk to sell drinks & snacks.
The ‘kitchen’, in this context, is really a dish clearing zone and a place to unload the dumbwaiter from the actual kitchen below.
There was an observation car, of the sort that usually has a cafe in the basement, but that bit was marked crew only on this one.
The dining car was also different for another reason.
The folk staffing it really didn’t give a shit – Least interested Amtrak staff I’ve seen to date, and that includes the bus drivers at 7:10am. Minimal attention paid, got my order wrong and were so quick to drop off the plate and vanish that I’d have had to go look for them to let them know. Tried to get a coffee refill at breakfast, but that would have involved eye contact or responding to someone speaking.
We made it to Chicago a little late, for which they were apologetic. It was maybe 45 minutes.
I’ve had planes be later than that, and those things move at hundreds of miles an hour.
Thanks to my wondrous sleeper ticket, I could use the lounge at the Chicago end too, so I loitered there for a while to let any morning commuter rush die down, then ventured out to head for my hotel.
The main reason for coming back to Chicago for this weekend was to catch up with Steve & Moni, so I booked at the same hotel I stayed in when I first got here in … August? …, because it’s reasonably close to their place, nice, and pretty cheap.
Primarily because it’s nowhere near anything like a public transport route, it seems.
It does have squirrels, which is a plus for me.
Thus, I took a train to the airport, and a taxi the rest of the way.
The intention was to shave 20 miles off the taxi fare, but a lucky question at the airport had an information desk volunteer suggest asking the hotel whether they had a preferred taxi company, and not only did they have such a thing, they arranged it for me, at a flat rate.
And I’ve now used Chicago public transport;
