Training For Indianapolis

I actually set an alarm this time, so that I’d have enough time for a leisurely start to the day. Hotel restaurant was running short-staffed, so things were a little chaotic at times.

Checkout, like check-in, was done by a kiosk, so I didn’t have to do anything more than push some buttons and drop my room key card in a box.

A few days earlier I’d checked at the Amtrak counter, to make sure that my on-phone boarding pass was all I needed. It was, but they printed me a pass anyway, just in case, and pointed out the Metropolitan Lounge so that I’d know where to go on the day.

The lounge is nice. Chicago’s lounge is bigger, but not as well connected to the platforms; This one seems to have it’s own doors out into the platform area. Well, some of the platform area; We were on a platform, then back in the station, then down an escalator onto the actual platform we needed, possibly because the train was passing through DC, not starting there, so they needed a platform that did the same.

I’m in the last car on the train, a “bag-dorm” with 9 roomettes ( used by Amtrak crew as well as passengers ), shower+toilets, and the rest is for checked baggage.

Somewhere around the border of West Virginia, we moved into a storm. Must have been a fairly good one, because I could see the trees thrashing around out there on the hills. There was a very pretty rain effect when we went through a tunnel, where the drops of water coming off the train as it moved stood out against the black background because they were catching the light from inside the car, so there was this sideways rain of bright white droplets.

So, there’s this thing that can happen when you have a combination of trees and a storm, and that is that the train gets stuck behind fallen trees for multiple hours while they clear them and inspect the tracks for damage. Guess how I know this.

Carol the sleeping car attendant let me peek out the vestibule window to see the work crew up ahead.

After a lot of sitting & watching the scenery not rolling by, it got dark, and they got things cleared at around the time I went to bed. The mattress was pretty comfortable, especially given that it’s a topper pad over two chairs; Not very wide, so if I was lying on my side facing the window it felt like a big jolt would have me wedged in the footwell between the bed & the door.

Slept pretty well. I didn’t bother to close the curtains; There’s not much out there, so no light to disturb me, and nobody to be disturbed by me.

Breakfast was the pancakes with sausage, as seen above. These were presumably made off-site, packaged, & then reheated in a train in a tiny little kitchen about the size of a toilet cubicle. Still better than what Wetherspoon’s in Aylesbury can do with a full sized kitchen.

The Cincinnati folks were quite loud, so I could hear every bit of their conversation with Carol the attendant. I’m going to assume that they were bantering a bit when the conversation got to telling the conductor to tell the driver to hurry up, because I’m nice like that.

Apparently they’d ordered food delivery to the station during the night, because of course everything was shut & they’d expected to be asleep.

The worst was behind us. Unfortunately, what was ahead of us was even more trees across the line, this time in Indiana, from a storm that morning.

I may have been the only person on that train who was OK with the situation, mostly because it had almost no impact upon me. Certainly no negative impact; the delay meant that I could turn off the alarm, sleep in, have enough time for a shower, and get both unexpected breakfast and unexpected lunch.

The crew, on the other hand, were facing getting no break between runs; As soon as they got to Chicago they’d have to clean, restock, and reset the train for the trip back. And while I never saw it, I’m assuming that people were asking them about the delays & what was being done all the time.

The (kind of annoying) kid in the roomette across the hall was having real trouble with the idea of a train being this late and ,from his perspective, nobody doing anything about it. The idea that trains should just carry tree clearing gear because it would be faster came up a bit.