There go 200 of my closest friends
I took my second Amtrak overnight of the year - This one from San Francisco to Denver. Usually I do this with my wife or dad, but this time I tricked convinced a friend to join me.
I advertised the trip a few different ways as we were planning - "a massive waste of money", "a mix of camping and a very long flight", and "a chance to talk to random strangers". My friend has been looking for an excuse to take some time off work so he didn't really need any background, but it did help set expectations.
One of my favorite things about these long distance journeys is the lack of internet connectivity. Planning for this, I had brought some books and a deck of cards. But after we'd put our phones into airplane mode during the first stint of no service, we switched from jumping at every buzz in our pocket to deliberately deciding whether to reconnect at stops. After the first few instances I stopped bothering and kept my phone on airplane mode until we reached Denver.
Another great part of taking long-distance Amtrak is the conversations. We were among the youngest sleeper passengers, and folks were eager to share their life stories, or talk about their travel plans, or just bounce around topics until we found some shared interest and chatted for hours. Thankfully, the hours were indeed plentiful. We ended up calling the train journey "the small talk olympics".
The news would have you think that USAians can't just sit down and shoot the breeze without drawing political battle lines, but something about the tight quarters kept things civil even when politics did come up. Given that you can't avoid people in the 1D space that is the train's single aisle, people knew that they couldn't afford to make enemies.
The topics of conversation shifted through the day - On the first day they were "have you done a sleeper train before?", and "what's the best thing on the lunch menu?". At 6 AM the next day in the observation car it's "so you didn't sleep either?", "top bunk?" and "how long till sunrise?". And at 10 AM "did you get the spicy bloody mary or the regular?". Some questions are suited for all hours - "how far are you going?", "why'd you pick the train?", and "where's home?"
Shortly after sunrise the train stopped unexpectedly and met an ambulance at a road crossing. I later overheard another sleeper passenger say they could hear their neighbor coughing and vomiting the previous night. I guess they (the passenger or the train crew) made the decision to call a stop and they have some way to coordinate that kind of meetup with emergency services.
For the ultra-luxury-hotel price, my friend was surprised at how this was a bit more toward the survival/camping end of the spectrum. There were coercive announcements to the seated passengers about how they better be good neighbors and not block seats with their belongings when new passengers were getting on, that we were running behind schedule, that lunch was delayed, and the waiters in the diner often wrapped up our conversation with new friends with a frank statement that we needed to clear out of your table to make room for the next seating. The rooms were tiny, the halls narrow, the soundproofing poor, the temperature too hot in one carriage and too cold in the other, and the toilets were a masterwork of skidmarks. The conductors and staff were sort of the first line defense for major issues but they were stretched so thin that passengers would often help each other with logistical questions or moving heavy bags. I think the conductors' first and most important priority is keeping a bunch of strangers who are spending a long time in close proximity to each other civil, and I don't fault them for having limited time for nice-to-haves.
It's hard to stress just how cramped things were. Other than the observation or dining car, all the space was either a narrow hallway or someone's personal space. I made a habit of getting out of my friend's hair every few hours to let him decompress. We had a few "smoke stops" or longer breaks where you could go pace around at the train station, but these were generally short since we kept having to pull aside for freight trains or were running late for other reasons. Our conductor would announce them ahead of time like "in 20 minutes we will be stopping in Reno where you can feed your nicotine addiction". My friend remarked how the USA had leapfrogged Europe in decreasing smoking, to the point where gently ridiculing smokers on a federal service isn't controversial.
Sleeper passengers get three table-service meals a day in the dining car included in the ticket fare (coach passengers can go to, but they have to pay for each meal). These rule. Not because of the food specifically - while the congressionally-mandated steak option for dinner is generally good, the rest is so-so. My friend asked for help choosing between the burger and patty melt for lunch and the waiter said the only difference was the bun and how the onions were cooked. We figured they do a lot of ingredient reuse to keep logistics simple.
No, the best part of the meals are the conversations and the views. The tables seat four and they just fill tables as people show up, meaning that you're dining with strangers. Nobody is taking Amtrak because it's the fastest or cheapest route from A to B, so everyone has a story to tell. And the views are spectacular - sometimes it's dramatic rivers and canyons, other times it's small towns and highways, but in both cases it's just such a wildly novel experience to be chowing down and watching the world pass by.
Some folks we met were:
- A burned out Irish guy who got his work to agree to a year leave of absence, and asked his pen pal in Chicago to help coordinate the trip. She booked him the trip she'd always wanted to take, and added herself to it. They'd done Canada, Chicago, driven down from Seattle to San Francisco, stopping a few nights at several places along the way, and now were returning to Chicago then continuing to the Tennessee. It sounded like a great trip. They were both big nerds who were excited to try Amtrak and I chatted with them a bunch of times. While I got off after one night, I think they realized the gravity of their situation when they weren't able to sleep the first night and still had ~24 hours to go.
- A couple from outside Santa Cruz, CA, traveling to take care of their grandkids in the Colorado mountains for two weeks so the parents could have a trip together. They were chatty and delightful. The husband had worked in construction and contracting his whole life, and after enough experience had become a big union proponent. I forgot what the wife did. But they were super insightful people - they talked about their grandkids and reflected on their challenges as parents, we talked about the state of the country and how they'd seen it change, and we talked about our broader travels (they're super adventurous and last time they went abroad was to Mongolia!)
- Two women riding in coach who had worked at Boeing in Seattle, seemingly as jills-of-all-trades - getting trained as needed on machining, drafting, project management, etc. They were traveling to see one woman's son in Morgantown(?) 70 miles west of Charlotte. They were frequent long-distance Amtrakers and preferred riding in coach since they thought it was easier to sleep in the seats than the bed, and they packed their own meals since they didn't like the diner food. We talked about how the aviation industry has changed, conditions in prisons (where one of their sons worked), working in a military-adjacent industry, drones in warfare, the most scenic spots on the Olympic peninsula, and what AI will bring.
- An Amish couple on their honeymoon. They'd gone to a town in the rockies for a week and hiked and biked around. I'm generally very interested in the topic of the Amish - while I think automation and technology in industry has benefited humanity, I'm skeptical about the social media landscape (and broader loss of community/third spaces) have kept people from having meaningful experiences with each other. The Amish, to me, are an example of a self-sustaining(ish) community that successfully reject large parts of modern society. The husband grew up with 5 brothers and is now in construction. We were passing by farms and he was able to explain a lot of what was going on based on the equipment that was out in different fields. Apparently his father had the sons work long hours on their farm when they were younger. His father wasn't primarily a farmer, and as my table-mate considered the imminence of starting his own family, he reflected about how all the field work had tired him out in his teenage years and kept him out of trouble, and said he was planning to set up some fields for his potential sons too. After the meal, my friend reflected on how the wife didn't speak much, but when she did the husband never cut her off or spoke over her, and how that did happen with most of the other couples we spoke with.
There was an interesting dynamic in the observation car where sleeper (~$1000 for 24 hours) and seated (~$100 for the same) passengers mingled. Occasionally at the end of the conversation people would be surprised as I would walk toward the front of the train (toward the sleepers) after saying our goodbyes. Some coach passengers were there by choice but others really needed to take the cheapest form of travel, or couldn't fly for other reasons. I think the vibes were more of curiosity on this front, but I can't help but think this was a bit of an asymmetric conversation (ie they had to be on the train, while I chose to be there). But I'd never otherwise really talk to folks that different from me, and so maybe a saving grace is that this is Good For America.
We had booked a hotel in Denver within eyeshot of the train station, and as it so happened our room had a view of the train platforms (maybe the hotel guessed our preference correctly based on our arrival time). A few minutes after we got to our room, our train slowly pulled out, continuing on its way toward Chicago, and my friend - who is not one for small talk - tiredly remarked "there go 200 of my closest friends".