Trip Report: November 8 - December 10, 2006
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
31 Day Grand Tour on Amtrak and the Mississippi Queen
Sunday December 3 to Thursday December 7
Greenville to Seattle
Sunday December 3. 11:15pm.
Tonight we begin perhaps the longest contiguous journey on Amtrak in our memory, four nights and three days to Seattle. Driving to the Westin Poinsett, we have the doorman call for a taxi, which takes us to the Enterprise location where we transfer our luggage and drop the car with the keys and contract inside. From here it is less than a mile to the Greenville Amtrak Station. We check one bag through to Seattle, then settle down on a bench outside awaiting the on-time arrival of the northbound “Crescent” at 11:10pm. The other waiting passengers sit inside the stifling station.
Our car attendant loads our luggage into Viewliner Sleeper Bedroom A, car 2010, and we settle in for a good night’s sleep, marred only by the cycling of the floor heat. Although we turn the heat thermostat down to its lowest position, the heat comes on anyway, running the temperature up to 75 F., then turns off, letting the temperature drop to 71 F. The car attendant turns off the heating system, but it continues on its merry way, oblivious to any demands from its operators.
Monday, December 4. Our arrival into Washington, DC, is 20 minutes early at 9:40am. We are transported via a Redcap’s cart to the Acela Lounge, where we set up a work station in Conference Room No. 2. One of the many reasons why I was happy to leave the Midwest to live and work on the West Coast is the fact that eastern buildings are kept too warm for me in the wintertime. Conference Room 2 is no exception, at 76 F. But it is private and quiet during this off-season period and we get a lot of work done while waiting for the Capitol Limited’s departure at 4:05pm. My tiny USB powered fan moves a tiny amount of air toward my face.
Washington Union Station is undoubtedly the finest railway station in the United States. Completed in 1908 by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a grand entrance to the nation’s capitol, by the 1981 it was an abandoned derelict: padlocked, full of puddles from leaking roofs, and home to only local pigeons.
In 1981, Congress enacted the Union Station Redevelopment Act and the station reopened in 1988 to again be the grand entrance to Washington, DC, (the Capitol Building is the sight that greets your eyes upon stepping outside), as well as a busy Amtrak Station, a bustling Metro station, and a shopping mall with movie theaters and a multitude of dining venues. Strolling through this magnificent structure was a reminder of the beautiful stations of Pittsburgh that I remembered as a child, Pennsylvania Station, and the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Station, though on a much vaster and grander scale.
Washington Union Station
Packing up our office and vacating the conference room, Ted discovers a quiet anteroom in the north end of the building, B. Smith’s Restaurant, an elegant, white- tablecloth venue. What must have this room been built for originally, with its 30 foot high ceilings, elaborate electric chandeliers, bas-relief rosettes, and vast sunroom windows facing the north? I looked it up on the Internet:
B. Smith's at Union Station features a combination of Cajun, Creole and Southern cuisine. Located in Washington, DC's Historic Union Station’s former Presidential Suite, B. Smith's grand Beaux Arts style dining room with its 30-foot ceilings, period chandeliers and turn of the century elegance, is a National Landmark and has been called one of the most beautiful dining rooms in America. In its own separate space, the bar at B. Smith's serves as a gathering place for Washington's political movers and shakers, celebrities and people who just want to have a good time.
B. Smith's Restaurant
The History of Union Station's Presidential Suite
In the early 1900's and before Air Force One, the President and his family traveled across the United States aboard luxurious railroad cars. Like the 40,000 other daily travelers in Washington, DC, they boarded their train via Union Station. But prompted by the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, the directors of Union Station felt is was unsafe for the president to board his train through the general terminal and instead commissioned construction of an adjacent Presidential Suite, the room that now serves as B. Smith’s dining room.
The Presidential Suite, though ornate in architectural detail, was originally sparsely furnished with wicker and rattan furniture to insure clear visibility of the President and First Lady by their security detail. In 1939, the room was refurbished more luxuriously, somewhat as you see it today, to receive the King and Queen of England.
In the years that followed, the Presidential Suite was used to welcome dignitaries visiting the U.S. Capitol building, located only a few blocks away. In 1988, the Suite was opened for the first time to the public.
Union Station’s Great Hall is decorated in the style of Christmas in Norway, including a standard gauge model train layout with Norwegian freight and passenger trains running through beautiful mountain scenery which included a bobsled run, with working model bobsleds.
The Redcaps are not as well organized here as in Chicago Union Station, but eventually we were carried to our Superliner Sleeper 2900, Bedroom E, of the “Capitol Limited”, for its departure at 4:05pm. Our room on this sleeper was at a constant 75 F., in spite of the heat being turned off, but we just got used to it. We carry evaporation cooling cloths which we can tie around our necks like scarves, which help somewhat. When in the East, we must live in warm rooms like the Easterners.
Sleep came easily after our active day, but I did wake up just as we were departing Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Station at 11:55pm, on time, and I was able to see, from the S-curve out of the station and across the Alleghany River, the magnificent lights of the skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle.
Tuesday, December 5. By this morning the “Capitol Limited” is running about an hour behind schedule, but we are not adversely affected by this, as we have plenty of time before the “Empire Builder” leaves at 2:15pm. The sun is up as we stop in Elkhart, IN, so we have a good view of the New York Central System museum, which includes a Penn Central GG-1, a beautifully painted NYC Electro Motive E-8 passenger unit (as seen in “North By Northwest”), as well as a Budd Company round end stainless steel observation car, such as the NYC used on the “New England States” and other fine streamliners of its Great Steel Fleet.
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(L) Pennsylvania Central GG-1 #4859
(Above) New York Central E-8 #4085 |
In Chicago Union Station’s expanded Metropolitan Lounge we find a quiet corner with a live electrical outlet and set up our office on a table. Chicago Union Station once had a class restaurant, the Gold Lion, but it is long gone, and now fast food is the only option here. They have not utilized the great spaces in Chicago Union Station as effectively as they have done in Washington and in Grand Central Station in New York, but at least there are minimal services here such as a food court and a sundries store, as well as the most efficient team of redcaps and electric carts at any Amtrak station.
Chicago Union Station
Chicago is digging out from a major snowstorm that occurred the day before yesterday, and the temperature on the platform is below freezing. We are whisked to Superliner Sleeper bedrooms D & E Ensuite in Car 730, the Seattle sleeper. (After all, this is the trip of a lifetime, as well as our 35th wedding anniversary!) Whereas we left on the Portland sleeper and had to walk through numerous cars to reach the diner, on our return we are now on the Seattle-bound sleeper right next to the diner. What a convenience!
We arrange Room E with the sofa and the desk for the laptop, Room D has the lower double bed made up. Many of our high-end clients book suites for themselves -- in fact I just booked one today for a new clients from Lake Forest, IL --, so now we are finding out what a luxury this is ourselves for the first time. I can tell you we are now thoroughly spoiled and may never be able to go back to the old way.
Advantages of the en-suite arrangement:
* Enough elbow room so you don’t have to coordinate every move with your room-mate.
* You can both dress in the morning at the same time instead of taking turns.
* Two enclosed toilet/shower cubicles, so you can dedicate one as the shower without having to mop up the water each time you use it, and the other for the toilet.
* Your lower bed, or upper and lower if you prefer, can remain down all day in case you want to nap, or just pile up some pillows and read or gaze out the windows.
* With one room as a dedicated bedroom, you can easily approach the washbasin in the other room without negotiating the inches-wide space between the lowered bed and the washbasin.
*With the other room as the dedicated day room, you can leave your laptop set up on the folding out desk.
*You can bring several pieces of luggage into the suite and still have room for walking around.
*If you each prefer your own lower bed, the room can be arranged that way for overnight accommodations.
*If Mr. A, in Bedroom D, wants to sleep, while Mrs. A wakes up at 300am and decides to stay up and gaze at the moon-lit plains dusted with snow, she can move to the couch in Bedroom E, pile up some pillows, and relax without disturbing her snoring husband.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 846am, Minot, ND. This is a frigid routing across the top of the United States, but our room is maintained at a constant 71 F. throughout the trip, even as ice crystals form on the outside of our windows. Grand Forks has a low of -12 F. while Minot is -7 F. We don’t even take advantage of the service stops to walk up and down the icy, slippery platforms for exercise.
Once, we are put into a siding to allow the passage of an eastbound freight, followed by the eastbound “Empire Builder”, but it is not long before we are back on schedule. After our car was replenished with fresh water in Minot, the ground crew forgot to turn the water valve back on, so we were without water until the next stop. Even then it took over an hour for the upstairs plumbing to thaw out enough to deliver water to our room, so we used the lower level facilities.
The “Empire Builder” dining service has not changed over to Dining Lite, the micro-management of dining car service by the feds, so we still enjoy the luxury of china cups and plates, although now the tablecloths and napkins are paper, except at dinner.
Our excellent car attendant, Patrick Ladd, asks us at 10:00am if we’d like mimosas (champagne and orange juice). “Of course”, we chorus, and enjoy them in our suite.
A letter to the editor of USA Today made a point of the news that our military is spending $2 billion per month in Iraq, (or was it per week?) Yet Amtrak’s budget has been called a burden on the federal treasury. Fortunately, the public simply does not buy this fiction any more. Frequently overhead from other passengers are complaints about how the airlines got funds the day after they appealed, while the feds fuss about our “expensive” passenger rail system and attach all kinds of strings and conditions to Amtrak’s starvation budget.
Yet, with the airlines increasing unpopularity, and freeways crowded nearly to the point of gridlock, it seems that Amtrak must be expanded if Americans want to continue with their option to travel around the country. Let’s hope the power shift in Congress will make a difference. (But, don’t just hope, keep calling your elected representatives!)
This afternoon first-class passengers are invited to a wine tasting in the dining car, with four Washington State vintages, gourmet cheese, crackers, and trivia questions by the crew.
“Name the rock-star group where all four members are deceased.”
The answer is: the four presidents carved out of the rock at Mt. Rushmore.
Heading west on this 25-hour day, we are traveling across the barren, snow-dusted plains towards a cloud cover, but it is always ahead and eludes us. At sunset, we approach some ghost towns with deserted old wooden cabins, and ancient automobiles in various stages of decay. Prairie settlements (too small to be towns) have mostly dark windows and few drivable vehicles parked. Perhaps nearly everyone heads for southern climates for the winter.
Thursday, December 7, 5:30am. We awake at 0-dark-30 as the dining car crew wants to finish breakfast early and clean up the diner for its return trip later this afternoon. Leaving Wenatchee, we begin the climb towards Stevens Pass and the Great Northern Railway’s Cascade Tunnel. (7.8 Miles Long - Elevation 2,881 Feet - 41,183 Feet Long – 7.8 miles. Completed 1929).
Soon we’re rolling down to Everett along Puget Sound. To the southwest we can see the snow capped Olympic Mountains across the Sound. After a brief stop at Edmonds, in a few minutes we are running through the tunnel to the King Street Station, where we disembark, collect our checked bags from Greenville and Pittsburgh, and go to the taxi line, heading for The Westin Seattle, our favorite resort within the city of Seattle.
We will spend three nights here resting up and reorganizing before leaving on the “Coast Starlight” this Sunday morning for Klamath Falls, home after 31 days!
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