Trip Report: April 23 to May 8, 2003
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
TO PITTSBURGH AND GREENVILLE, SC
Day 3. Friday May 25. Denver to Chicago.
We awakened this morning at 8am to find ourselves hurtling across the rolling plains of Nebraska. We were joined at breakfast by a financial analyst who had just filed 319 tax returns for his customers, and was ready for a vacation.
As we enjoyed a breakfast of Vegetable Fritata and Sausage Patties, we stopped at our first timetable checkpoint, Hastings, Nebraska, where we found we were still nearly seven hours behind schedule. This continued all the way across Nebraska and Iowa, 6 12 to 7 hours behind. The only padding in this schedule is between Naperville and Chicago, where the schedule allows 1 12 hours to cover this last 28 miles. So if we can count on a 1 hour pad, we can figure arriving 5 12 to 6 hours behind, which would get us in as late as 10:10pm. Perhaps there is hope to make the 10:30pm departure of the Three Rivers.
Now all there is to do is read, nap, and work on our laptop where the Sprint Digital cell phone signal is available. Friday is relatively quiet after a short-term flurry of panic phone calls and E-mail messages about the World Health Organization's travel advisory to Toronto. We have many clients traveling to Toronto this spring. One became so worried about SARS, he actually cancelled his trip, which he had planned last year, and which was scheduled for a month from now. The WHO has caused considerable consternation in Toronto, a city of 2.5 million. We have clients who live there. We called them and found that they were going about their business as usual. They also said the last new case happened 26 days ago, and think the TV news channels are blowing this out of proportion. I figure that when the population of Toronto begins to evacuate, as it is doing in Beijing, then I too will worry.
For lunch on this new menu, we tried the corned beef and Swiss sandwich with chips, cole slaw, and pickle, freshly prepared on board. Delicious. Believe it or not, after two Chocolate Bombe desserts on this trip, I could not handle a third, and settled for Vanilla Bean ice cream.
We were seated with a couple from Littleton, Colorado, who were on their way to Galesburg to visit relatives. He was a former Chicago, Burlington and Quincy manager of rolling stock.
Since we are going to be traveling during -- and far beyond the dinner hour tonight, we were happy to hear the announcement that there would be a complimentary meal served in the diner to all passengers, beginning at 5:30pm. Sleeping car passengers would be served first, followed by coach passengers, and finally the crew. (This was a far cry from our previous trip on this train in 1996, where, after boarding in Reno, our sleeping car attendant had not thought to obtain dinner reservations for us, so we had to wait in the Café Lounge for an hour and a half for the crew to finish their dinner before we could be seated. We were told, back then, it was "Union Regulations." And it was also the reason Sylvia collected our own picnic before boarding this trip but things have improved.)
This was Sylvia's first experience with an "off the timetable" meal on a train, and Ted's second. He'd experienced this on the late-running California Zephyr in the pre-Amtrak 1960s. Tonight we all are served a Salisbury steak with rice, gravy, and vegetables, plus a choice of coffee, tea, or milk. Although served quickly and efficiently on paper plates, it was quite delicious. The steward called us in by car numbers, and we were quite impressed. You won't find it happening on an airline these days!
A passenger services representative has boarded the train and set up a desk in the lower lounge car. She is calling for connecting passengers, by train number, to come to the lower lounge to find out what kind of arrangements are being offered. This is another first for us, the real possibility of missing a guaranteed connection which might result in an overnight hotel stay. So we are impressed that Amtrak is pre-handling this before the train arrives, rather than expecting a crowd of confused passengers to deal with it at the station. This is another service airlines don't provide.
The passenger service rep made an official announcement at 8:50pm Central Time, that we would arrive in Chicago at 10pm, allowing 30 minutes to make the transfer to The Three Rivers, leaving at 10:30pm. This has been a relief for us, for although there is much to see and do in Chicago, we really wanted to be in Pittsburgh this weekend. This message was forwarded by E-mail to Ted's brother, who replied that he would meet us in Pittsburgh when the Three Rivers arrived.
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