Monday, September 4th, Chicago, Ill

When the sun peeked in through our window, I gave up trying to sleep and we got up and headed to the dining car for breakfast. The experience of sitting comfortably eating a nice meal while watching the scenery slide past on either side is something unique to train travel, and we both found it very pleasant indeed. After breakfast we continued to watch the northern Indiana countryside pass by as we traveled through Elkhart and South Bend to get to Chicago.

For the entire Washington to Chicago stretch, the rail bed was obviously very uneven and I expect that the railroads were putting in just enough maintenance to avoid having their freight trains derail rather than the much higher standard of a rail bed graded well enough to give a smooth ride for the passenger trains. I later read that freight trains typically travel around 50 miles per hour, and although the Amtrak passenger trains are capable of over 100 mph, they can only travel 60-80 mph due to the poor condition of the rail bed.

The pace of passenger trains is further slowed by the fact that the railroads who own the rails give priority to their freight trains. Our train repeatedly sat on a siding waiting for a freight train to go rumbling by. As a result, our overall pace was barely faster than driving a car on the Interstate highway, and if you factor in the time for our scheduled stops, we were traveling noticeably slower than if we had driven our car. Our train trip to Chicago was scheduled to last over 17 hours, but it actually lasted over 18 hours. We have driven the Washington to Chicago stretch many times and our car trips average about 13 hours, so taking the train was noticeably slower than driving even if the train had arrived on schedule.

Passenger trains in Europe, in contrast, run at much higher speeds on carefully graded rail beds; some as fast as 300 kilometers per hour, which translates to about 185 miles per hour! That is a whole lot faster than a car and fast enough to even compete with air travel when you factor in the additional time required to get from a typical airport to the enter of each city. But that kind of high speed service will be impossible in the U.S. unless the rail bed is maintained to a much higher level. Timewise, Amtrak cannot be competitive with driving a car, much less flying, and the future for rail travel in the U.S. is therefore bleak. That is sad given that from a safety and energy efficiency point of view, rail travel should be a major thrust of the transportation network of the future.

In Chicago we met up with Martin and Tanya and walked around the Loop a bit. We looked at the pictures they had taken during their recent trip to Denali National Park in Alaska and chatted about how they were doing in general over lunch at a Subway sandwich shop. I swapped 3 jars of homemade jam for the 3 GPS receivers that Martin had borrowed from us for their Alaska trip, and then we walked back to the train station to catch our train. Happily, Bill and Phyllis were waiting for us in the reception area, and since Linda had driven them down to the station we had a chance to talk over what was happening in her life before we all had to board the "Empire Builder" to Seattle.

Our train left as scheduled at 2:15 and we rolled north to Milwaukee where we picked up Lois. Fortunately Phyllis and Bill had reserved a true sleeper cabin, and it had just enough room for all 5 of us to sit and talk, which my family dearly loves to do. From Milwaukee the train rolled due west to Madison, Wisconsin. As we passed through the Wisconsin Dells area I tried in vain to take some pictures through the window, but that type of photography is chancy at best. I had somewhat better luck taking some pictures of the green, gently rolling Wisconsin countryside as we proceeded northwest toward the Mississippi River and the Twin Cities of Minnesota.

Exhausted from a long day and lack of sleep the night before, we turned in shortly after nine. Fortunately, the rail bed for the "Empire Builder" train's route was much more even than the rail bed from Washington to Chicago, so I was rocked gently to sleep rather than being rattled around like a pea in a tin can. I slept through our stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, even though Monika awakened and heard some rather noisy people settle into the cabin adjacent to ours. But they settled down quickly and in the end we both managed to get a good night's sleep.