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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

This isn't really my kind of writing, so forgive me if my response is somehow impertinent, but there is a very good reason to cross the U.S. by train, which is that this is an enormous, beautiful continent and the train takes you to otherwise untouched parts of it that aren't visible any other way. I took the California Zephyr from Denver to San Francisco (technically Emeryville) a few years ago and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Truly unforgettable.

I hope I get the opportunity to do the Empire Builder and Southwest Chief routes at some point!

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I've flown across the country many times, but have only done it on the train once. I ended up doing a loop going from Boston to Washington DC to Chicago to Sacramento to Los Angeles to San Antonio to Chicago and finally to Boston.

The whole trip took 10 days, with 7 nights on the train and 3 off the train. In the roughly 8,800 miles of that trip, it was amazing to see so much of the country that I'd only flown over. Time also seemed to stand still, as I really lost all sense of place and time. It was the most relaxed I've ever been in my live.

I agree that if anyone was to do just one overnight train trip in the US, they should do Chicago and/or Denver to Emeryville. In fact, that was the leg that seemed to have have the most tourists, vs. the route across Texas which was more people going from point A to B that didn't want to spend 12 hours on a bus.

One bonus of the trip was having a glass of wine and some cheese with Gene Shalit on the final leg. Apparently he was a regular and knew many of the station and train staff by name.

> I agree that if anyone was to do just one overnight train trip in the US, they should do Chicago and/or Denver to Emeryville.

The other routes I've done are Charleston -> Savannah, Fort Worth -> Austin, Boston -> Chicago -> St. Louis, Boston -> Portland, St. Louis -> KC, and many trips to every stop on the Northeast Corridor. They were each interesting in their own way, but I just like trains and for a more general audience I'd say the Zephyr is really on a totally different level.

> I agree that if anyone was to do just one overnight train trip in the US, they should do Chicago and/or Denver to Emeryville.

Also (from experience) you might be able to get your job to pay for it if you work in Chicago or Denver and are attending an SF area conference. Roomette instead of coach is the way to go if possible.

Agreed re: Zephyr.

I took it from SAC to CHI last month, even riding coach it was a pretty good two days I spent mostly fasted, drinking black coffee while programming in the observation car. It's the perfect duration for a short fast and that eliminates a bunch of the bathroom and food needs, just caffeinated coding with great views. And in the end I've gone from CA to IL for ~$150 with a mountain bike checked to boot.

Something worth noting is the dining car still wasn't available to coach travelers on my trip, only sleeper cars could access it. Vestiges of the pandemic according to the announcements. It felt a bit like skimpflation to me, but they still had the little snack bar below the observation deck available to all.

That is amazing! Hope the view didn't distract your ability to focus since it is so gorgeous.

Does the train have WiFi? Or you are just coding offline?

I don't know about US trains, but many European trains offer free Wifi. I hope the ones in the US do too.

It’s not important whether the train has a WiFi router or not. What is important is what the WiFi router connects to. I don’t know what is common on European trains, but in the US they connect to whatever cell–phone network is closest. That is ok in urban areas, but in the US there are wide stretches of countryside where nobody lives. Somehow the phone companies never end up building cell towers in the middle of the deserts or on top of the Rockies. The train could easily be 50 or a 100 miles away from the nearest cell–phone network at any given time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=amtrak+rockies&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=amtrak+sierra+nevada https://www.google.com/search?q=amtrak+desert&tbm=isch

The train does have free WiFi, but my experience with it is pretty bad. You're also often remote enough that you can't use a cellular hotspot, so I wouldn't ever travel on Amtrak assuming you'll have a reliable Internet connection the whole time.

The train’s wifi is just hooked up to the same cell networks anyway. Maybe soon they will have Starlink instead.

Starlink appears to require the dish to be stationary.

It doesn't.[0] Nothing about Starlink inherently requires the dish to be stationary. Starlink is being integrated into several airlines[1][2] over the next year, and I'm certain other airlines are exploring Starlink as an option... the existing in-flight internet options are terrible, so Starlink could make a real difference there, especially over the oceans.

Proper support for moving vehicles probably benefits significantly from a dish designed for that, but airlines, trains, cruise ships, yachts... there are many markets where such a dish would be valuable, so Starlink would be pretty dumb not to be designing one that works well for that.

Hawaiian Airlines certainly isn't planning to just bolt the existing dish to the outside of the plane and hope for the best.

[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1529089543969943553

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/spacex-signs-hawaiian-airlin...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/21/spacex-first-starlink-inflig...

Current subscribers are only authorized to use their dish in one specific area. However, this has more to do with capacity planning than anything else. Starlink recently announced a slightly more expensive plan that allows the user to roam from area to area without contacting customer support to reauthorize them for each new location. And as someone else pointed out already, the are definitely working on providing service to customers on boats and planes and other moving vehicles. I doubt they will ever make a dish designed to be mounted on the roof of a car, but larger multi–passenger vehicles are an obvious move.

Incidentally, Starlink dishes showed up on the landing barges used by SpaceX some time ago; they use them to stream live video of the landings now.

Mostly coding offline, but I did have a cellular hotspot that managed 4G LTE for most of the trip. I didn't investigate the train's WiFi since my needs were covered.

There was one state I didn't seem to have any cell service at all, Wyoming maybe? It seemed very similar to driving cross-country via i80 in terms of cellular coverage, with a few additional dead-zones where only the train goes. But in those spots the scenery is so beautiful you won't miss the cell network.

That's a pretty incredible price, was it a special offer?

Not a special offer, just booked a month in advance before the train filled up.

That is the lowest bucket for the Zephyr, a fare of 220 or 270 would be more common: https://www.amtraktrains.com/threads/long-distance-train-coa...

It required very little effort to get the ~130 coach rate though, the biggest price knob seemed to be booking far enough in advance.

What was far more challenging was getting a "trainside checked bike" ticket. The Amtrak web site just kept saying sold out for the +bike option no matter what I tried. But I had no trouble getting the same rate +bike when I went to the SAC station IRL and spoke to a ticketing agent. Apparently my problem was ending the trip at NPV instead of CHI, because NPV can't handle checked bikes. The web site is awful WRT +bike tickets. Maybe this will prove helpful for anyone reading wanting to go ride some distant trails via Amtrak.

Yeah, if you're flexible on time, far enough out, and willing to ride coach, it's definitely doable. Summer is also peak season (more sunlight); avoiding June-August helps too.

Amtrak's system is terrible when something you want is not available, it usually reports "Sold Out" or "No Train Service" when the actual issue is that there is no train that day, or no facility for checked luggage, as you describe.

Yeah, Amtrak is one of those cases where actually calling or going into the station is highly worthwhile, as the station attendant has more knowledge and options than you do on the website.

They're even allowed to book "impossible" tickets if you're nice (for example, checking a bike to the last station before the one you want that has checked bikes, and working with the conductor to move the bike into the normal train can be done if the train won't be that busy).

> They're even allowed to book "impossible" tickets if you're nice (for example, checking a bike to the last station before the one you want that has checked bikes, and working with the conductor to move the bike into the normal train can be done if the train won't be that busy).

That's useful information, and re: bikes something a conductor alluded to on my ride to CHI, when I asked why I couldn't just get off at NPV with my bike which was my actual destination. He was perfectly willing to let me have my bike stowed somewhere out of the way if I hadn't already checked it for unloading @CHI.

It’s definitely skimpflation (great word, btw). They eliminated traditional dining service entirely on several other routes. Instead of sitting at a table with other passengers having a nice conversation while waiters take orders and serve meals, everyone now gathers quietly in the dining car waiting for a single waiter to prepare tv–dinners and shout out room numbers.

Per https://www.amtrak.com/onboard/meals-dining/dining-car.html, it looks like traditional dining is available west of Chicago/San Antonio.

Yep. I was super disappointed the last time I went cross–country. The service was so bad that I haven’t bothered since then.

Note that while the Zephyr between CA and Denver is a breathtaking journey, the span from Denver to Chicago is nothing but an infinite plane of corn punctuated by a crossing of the Mississippi. If you're just in it for sightseeing, you can skip half the trip.

For some of us taking a train across the Mississippi was part of the point of the journey, but yes, the scenery is considerably better from SF/Emeryville to Denver.

Yup, Amtrak from Chicago to Emeryville is probably one of the most impressive routes one can take, and I feel sad for folks who will never get to experience it.

> I took the California Zephyr from Denver to San Francisco (technically Emeryville) a few years ago and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Truly unforgettable.

The first time I took the Zephyr and they announced we were going over Donner Lake, I thought they were kidding. A place were people resorted to eating each other out of isolation, and I'm gliding past it slicing a steak with a waiter refreshing my water.

I would recommend the Empire Builder, I've never heard so many spontaneous collective oohs and aahs on a train after coming around a corner or out of a tunnel.

But why then not pick the car? The US are mind-bogglingly car-centric. If you want to explore them, chances are you need a car even if you then want to hike, bike or do whatever.

On our road trip from Miami to Seattle (via New Orleans, Los Angeles) the only National Park that wasn’t offensively car centric was Carlsbad Caverns, even though they did want to blow a hole in the mountain in the 1930s to change that. (Maybe Shark Valley in the Everglades, too. Though in both cases you need a car to get to the entrance.)

I get the remote wilderness (no matter how touristically attractive) needs cars. It‘s just that if you take the train you can’t really get there. Unless you get out and rent a car all the time.

I certainly didn’t enjoy any of the cities. They were all car-oppressed hellholes that aren’t much fun to be in.

Road trips are long and require focus.

I've done plenty of long US road trips: Chicago to Seattle, Chicago to to East Coast, Michigan to Florida, Seattle to southern California, a loop of the southwest starting and ending in Vegas, etc.

I've done road trips throughout my life (Seattle to Socal was less than a year ago) and do smaller (~3hr 1 way) ones on a regular basis (Seattle to Portland or Vancouver). I've also taken trains in the US and in other countries and it's a different experience.

Having to focus on the road for more than an hour at a time wears you down. If you have a car full of people such that you can rotate drivers, it's bearable but that just means sharing the load. In comparison, in a train I can simply relax and enjoy the sights and the trip. If there's a beautiful mountain I can focus on it without worrying about a car or animal in front of me. If I want to eat or drink or use the restroom I do without having to wait miles to find somewhere to pull over. If I want to read or use my laptop or have a beverage (even alcohol if I want), it's fine.

I've driven Seattle to Portland dozens of times. I've also taken the train several times. When I drive, I arrive in PDX tired. When I get off the train I am invigorated and ready to start my day (even though when I've done it I usually had to get up at 4 to catch a 5:30AM train, times which usually don't exist for me and should seemingly leave me tired)

As far as exploring cities: while infrastructure in the US is bad, there is a strong correlation between cities worth exploring and some form of bus/bike/scooter rental. Train stations are also usually centrally located. If I want to explore I go walking and there's plenty to do within a few miles of the station. If it's further out I grab a bus. If I'm there for multiple days AND there are far-out things I want to do I could rent a car but it's almost never been necessary. Amusingly the only time I did a combination train-car trip was in Germany, where I wanted a vehicle to bounce between small towns the train didn't hit (but took the express train back from Berlin to Munich). In America it hasn't come up because the kinds of towns that don't have public transit are overwhelmingly either so small you can walk anywhere or so generic and boring that I don't get off the train except to stretch my legs.

Yes, I'm sure that folks can find counterexamples. I'll poke a hole in my experiment with East Lansing, MI: A fairly standard college town with a beautiful walkable campus.....and an Amtrak station in the middle of an industrial park a fair walk from anything good. Even then, though, it's a 1.5 mile walk to the middle of campus or 2 miles to the bar district, so it's still not the end of the world.

Heck, I already hate having to stare at the car in front of me for the 45 minutes or so it uses to take me to drive home in my US town. At least there's a bus that works well enough, so now I spend most of my commute reading a book out commenting here.

Driving works, but I'd much rather take a train. Too bad they are generally terrible here. I've been to Europe; it can work!

My opinion having driven across the country on interstates, road tripped, and taken the train -

Interstates are utilitarian travel for getting where you want to go without much sightseeing, because you're hauling cargo or transporting your vehicle or whatever. Yes, there is some sightseeing. And if it's your first time seeing a new landscape it's always going to be awesome. But ultimately interstates are very insulating.

Road trips, as disjoint from interstates as possible, are a great way to see scenery, but they take time. Even two weeks to get across the country is too short. I'd say you want a month minimum.

Train trips are a nice middleground for getting a taste of the road trip scenery (but not the waypoints) within a short amount of time, where you have a little more time to spare than flying (several days cross country), but not much.

The train often does not parallel the highway. There are some remote parts of the country, particularly through the mountains, that can only been seen by rail. And because we have nothing comparable to a TGV or Shinkansen, you get to relax and see everything at a leisurely 40-60/mph, "rocking to the rhythm of the rails"[0].

[0]https://youtu.be/fF1lqEQFVUo

The train ride is less of an exploration, more a viewport into, a meditation on what is happening outside the window.

I've done the road trip - a slow meandering journey spanning tens of thousands of miles across the United States and Canada across many months. It's wonderful, but it's also fully engaged while being very hard on the body to drive so much. The engagement is obviously the point, but it's a particular way of travel.

I've also done the Zephyr in both directions, lakeshore limited, etc. on sleeper trains. It's very relaxing, but you also don't get to actually interact much with what is going on outside. But that's not such a bad thing at times. Sometimes it's exactly what you're looking for.

New Orleans is car-oppressed?

Parent was talking about national parks along the route. And, yes, although a few have shuttle buses--which may even be required--most require a car to do a lot more than take in a scenic overlook. Indeed, even in more compact parks (e.g. Crater Lake) just getting to a central jumping off point will be hard without a car.

(New Orleans itself is pretty explorable without a car.)

I have also driven from St. Louis to San Francisco and back. It's just a very different experience. They aren't really the same thing.

The first time I saw a bald eagle was from the observation car of the empire builder along the Mississippi south of the twin cities! I hope you get the opportunity as well.

OTOH I used the empire builder purely for utility for a time, and the price wasn’t bad to go about 70 miles, but several times about 10 years ago it was 16, that’s right 16, hours late for an hourish journey.

I've driven across the country, twice, and I can recommend that too. It's no prob if you have good luck with hitchhikers. I took two guys aboard outside Chicago and we rotated driving & shotgun & sleeping all the way to L.A. stopping only for food, gas, beer, and playing frisbee at the St Louis arch. Coast to coast took just about 72 hours.

Reminds me a little of the experience described in song “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. Although I think they’re on the bus, but much the same experience.

Another good reason is if you find yourself on a no-fly list, without trial or recourse.

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