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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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