Varna Trip Report, day minus one

Tomorrow I’ll be on my way to Varna, Bulgaria for a meeting of the ISO standards committee for the C++ programming language.  This will be my first trip to Eastern Europe, and I’m looking forward to it.

[itinerary]

I’ve decided to start out on the Texas Eagle, even though that will give me an extremely long layover in Chicago, because I don’t think I can trust Lincoln Service train 318 to make the connection to the Lake Shore Limited.  Also, riding on the Eagle, I can check a bag all the way to New York; but the Lincoln Service trains don’t carry checked baggage.

I’ll have an accessible bedroom on the Lake Shore, likely my first ride in one of the newer Viewliner II cars.  Several years ago I had a Viewliner I accessible bedroom* which has a separate room for the sink, toilet and shower; but from the diagrams that I’ve found on the Web, it looks like the Viewliner IIs have all the plumbing out in the room.  We’ll see…

I’m going via New York eastbound, and spending the night there, because I can’t count on the Boston section of the Lake Shore arriving in time to catch my flight out of Logan.

I don’t like flying very much, not because I’m afraid of it — it’s just as safe as riding on a train, and very much safer than blasting down a highway; but I couldn’t find good train connections between Western and Eastern Europe; so I’ll be flying all the way east of North America.  (There’s an overnight train between Sofia and Varna which I would have liked to take, but even getting to Sofia by train was a problem.)

I like to fly Icelandair across the Pond for a couple of reasons:  I actually like getting off the plane and stretching my legs in Keflavík; and I’m fortunate to be able to afford Icelandair’s Saga class if I don’t try to afford other stuff that I don’t really want that much anyway.  Trans-Atlantic business class on other airlines would probably be out of my price range.  I like to fly out of Boston because that’s the shortest flight between the U.S. and Keflavík.

The trip home will be basically the reverse of the eastbound itinerary.  I had originally booked an accessible bedroom on the Boston section of the Lake Shore; but I got a robocall from Amtrak saying that there would be a schedule change.  It turns out that there’ll be trackwork going on that day, which is not unusual in the summer, so I’d be on a bus from Boston to the Albany-Rensselaer station and board my sleeper there.  I decided instead to get business class tickets on a Northeast Regional train 171 to New York, and then on the Ethan Allen Express train 291 to Rensselaer.  (I had trouble making that change initially, but it finally worked out.)  I’m hoping that, once I get to New York, I’ll be able to check a bag on the New York section of the Lake Shore all the way to St. Louis.

The only drawback is that I’ll miss a few baseball games.  (I’m not the sort of fan who knows all the players’ WARs and where they went to high school, but I enjoy watching the games.)

[Timetables for the Texas Eagle, Lake Shore Limited, and trains 86, 171, and 291]

*I had booked a roomette from Boston to Chicago; but the Boston sleeper didn’t run on that day.  Passengers with sleeper tickets got special seating in the business class car and a complimentary meal in the dinette; and then in Albany-Rensselaer where the two sections of the train are combined, the plan was to move us to one of the New York sleepers.  When we got to Rensselaer, it turned out that they were one roomette short; and since I was a single guy traveling alone, and I was young and able in those days, I was, quite reasonably, the odd man out.  They put me in coach and refunded the sleeper fare.

I wasn’t happy about that, but there was no point in screaming at the ticket agents in Rensselaer…it wasn’t their doing, and indeed they probably found out about it shortly before I did.  I guess word about my behavior got passed along because the crew out of Rensselaer were unusually gracious to me. 😎

One of the accessible bedrooms was vacated in either Elyria or Sandusky, so during the stop in Toledo, one of the crew moved me from coach to that room; and I rode there for the last few hours of the trip at no additional charge.  I also got a free breakfast in the diner.

Good news for my Varna trip…

… but it started out scary.

I thought of changing my Amtrak reservation on-line, but when I looked it up, Amtrak’s website said that it couldn’t be found. I was afraid that one of the St. Louis ticket agents had cancelled the whole trip, so I called 1-800-USA-RAIL.

It was about fifty minutes after I initiated the call before I finally got connected to a person at customer service, but I’m glad I stayed on the line. The person I talked to knew immediately what my problem was, retrieved the reservation, put it back in effect, and added trains 171 from Boston to New York, and 291 from New York to Albany-Rensselaer, business class on both new trains.  And there was no additional charge:  he said he had “taken care of it” for me. 😎

And while I had him on the line, he made another change to a trip to Kailua-Kona, HI that I’ll be taking in November, and which involves Amtrak trains in the continental US.  The westbound trip will now start one day earlier, which I wanted to do to give myself some buffer if something bad happens to train 5 that day.  That also gives me a whole day to get from Amtrak’s Emeryville station to SFO airport, so I should be able to do that on the Emery Go-Round and BART instead of taking a taxi.

That cost me an additional $450 or something since I’m now in a higher fare bucket, but the good news is that I got room D instead of room E, and the electrical outlet will be on the “correct” side of the room.  All I still have to do is get a reservation for one night at the hotel across the tracks from the Emeryville station.

So now I’m a happy camper again. 😎  My day-minus-one post should appear this coming Tuesday.

A Problem with my Varna Trip

It often happens in the summertime that trackwork on the railroad that runs across Massachusetts affects the Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited; and when that happens, the Boston cars deadhead to New York and get turned in Sunnyside.

It turns out that that affects the penultimate leg of my return trip from Varna, Bulgaria.  I’ll now be on a bus from Boston to the Albany-Rensselaer station where I’ll board the 449 sleeper.  That’ll be minimally acceptable, and not Amtrak’s fault.

But I’d rather ride on a train.  I stopped by the St. Louis Amtrak station this morning and asked the ticket agent to change my reservation to a business class seat on Regional train 171 to New York, then a coach seat on 49, the New York section of the Lake Shore, to Rensselaer.  He said that Amtrak’s reservation system wouldn’t give him 49 as an option, which made no sense to me because I can see it when I do my own query on Amtrak’s website.

I just thought of another option that I’ll try to get tomorrow morning:  171 as above, then a business class seat on train 291, the Ethan Allan Express.  If he can’t find that either, then train 235, one of the Empire Service corridor trains, will also work.  We’ll see…

We once had a ticket agent named Jeannine (sp?) who had worked for Amtrak for quite a while and really knew what was going on.  I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut that she’d have understood immediately what I wanted and given it to me lickety-split.  Unfortunately, all of the folks currently behind the ticket counter seem to be newbies who know less about the railroad than this passenger does.

Garl Latham

I’m saddened to report that long-time passenger rail advocate, Garl Latham, has died.

Although it would be presumptious of me to say that I was his friend, I met him several times at various TXARP meetings in both Dallas and Fort Worth; and I was looking forward to seeing him again a couple of weeks ago at a conference in Fort Worth that I couldn’t attend.  Garl greeted me personally on my first arrival at the current Amtrak station in Fort Worth, and I met him on his first arrival at the current station in St. Louis.

Garl was a deeply religious person, but apparently one who took Matthew 6:5-6 to heart.  I knew him as a very humble and caring person who never threw his religion in your face.  Our discussions were all about trains, and I learned a great deal from them.

My heart goes out to Garl’s family and close associates.  I know he’ll be missed…heck, I miss the thought of his being around, and I was never more than on his periphery.

More on My Aborted Trip

We can’t blame Amtrak for this one.  The storm damage in Little Rock would almost certainly have caused the Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the tracks that the Texas Eagle uses between Joliet, IL and Dallas, TX, to tell Amtrak not to send the train.  (Superliner rolling stock has a pretty high profile and can be blown over in extremely high winds more easily than single-level equipment can.)

I had actually shown up at the Amtrak station way early to beat the rains that were headed my way.  I had a sleeper ticket on the train, so I had access to the first-class lounge; and I wrote what would have been my day-zero trip report while I was there:

2023-03-31 13:20

Now begins my trip to Hurst, TX for the Southwestern Rail Conference 2023.  Although the venue is called the Hilton Garden Inn Dallas, it’s actually closer to Fort Worth.

itinerary

I’m way early for 21’s departure, but the storm that hit California the other day is now bearing down on me, and I wanted to beat the rain.  There’s still over six hours until we start boarding; but since I’m in the sleeper, I get to use the first-class lounge.

I’m leaving a day early, and returning a day late, because I couldn’t get sleeper space on the Texas Eagle on the days that I wanted to travel, probably because other conference attendees were quicker making reservations than I was.  Fortunately, the folks at the meeting hotel gave me the conference rate for both extra days.

I finally got my BU-353N GPS receiver that plugs into a USB port on my laptop, and I’ve verified that I can see my current location using mapping software called Maptitude, but I haven’t tried it out while moving yet…we’ll see how well it works.  Like on my recent trip to Seattle, I also have my Oticon TV Adapter 3.0 which will plug into the earphone jack on my scanner and generate a bluetooth signal that feeds my hearing aids, so this train geek will be able to listen to the conversations between the conductors, engineers and dispatchers without disturbing any other passengers.

I have room D in both directions, so the electrical outlet will be near the window, and I’ll need only the power strip with the surge protector and four-foot cord on the train; but I’m bringing along the power strip with a longer cord just in case there’s no place to plug in the laptop near the desk in the hotel room where I’ll be using it.  (That was the case with the the first place I stayed in Seattle which seemed like it was designed by marketeers instead of hospitality folks.)

Even though we should depart with about four hours left in day zero, I’ll use the day-one report for the whole train trip.  I expect to be in my hotel room by late afternoon tomorrow, or maybe early evening, depending on how late the train is.

According to juckins.net, so far this year train 21’s arrival into Fort Worth has averaged a bit less than half an hour early.  Here’s my own analysis with some abecedarian statistics.  Three no-data days are probably due to Amtrak’s server failure.

It turns out that the train actually made it as far as St. Louis, but terminated there.

I suppose that there are other ways that I could have gotten to Forth Worth, but taking an overnight bus trip (St. Louis’ Amtrak and Greyhound stations are in the same building) didn’t seem like something I’d want to do, and lots of flights would probably have been cancelled as well.  The very nice woman at the Amtrak ticket counter offered me a family room on today’s (Saturday’s) train; and since I was a day early anyway, I still would have made it to Texas in time for the meeting; but I declined because I worried that that train would be cancelled as well, although it appears that it’s running.  (21 is sitting in St. Louis as I write this, and Amtrak’s status page shows an estimated arrival in Forth Worth for tomorrow…no service disruption yet.)

Oh, well.  There’s a chance that the conference might be just feel-good speeches with not a lot of data anyway.  Attending it was mostly an excuse to ride the train.

Non-Trip Report

Well, that was a revoltin’ development.  Because of the storm that hit California the other day and is now around eastern Missouri and southern Illinois (at least that’s the reason I was given), Amtrak decided to just cancel today’s westbound Texas Eagle with no alternate transportation.  The woman at the Amtrak ticket counter was very nice, but the best that she could offer me was the family room on tomorrow’s train.  I decided to just cancel the whole trip.

So I won’t be attending the Southwestern Rail Conference after all.  My next trip that includes some train rides will be to Varna, Bulgaria the second and third weeks in June.

Bad Server!

I’ll likely be taking my next Amtrak trip starting on Friday; but a few days ago, a server for Amtrak’s Positive Train Control system crashed and stayed down for at least three days requiring that, basically, all trains except on Amtrak’s own Northeast Corridor were cancelled.  Scuttlebutt has it that the server is back up, and it seems that trains are departing from Chicago again.

But what really amazes me is that, apparently, there wasn’t a backup.  The system I worked on before I retired was actually four complete systems, one for development, one for system integration testing, one for customer acceptance testing, and one for production.  Each of those had three servers:  one for the Web component, one for the database, and a third for running background tasks.  Each of those servers had at least one backup.  The DEV and SIT systems had one backup for each server; the CAT and PROD systems had four of each server constantly sharing data back and forth so that they were pretty much exact copies of each other.  That’s the way you do it.  It’s really old news and well understood.

Another possibility, which also wouldn’t surprise me, is that security was so lax that a hacker could have brought the whole thing down for a ransomware attack.  If that’s what happened, they probably won’t admit it.

In any event, Amtrak could have done better by getting a server from the folks who set up my own little website.  They’re much more professional, it would seem.

Early Planning for my November Trip

I’m starting to think about my November trip to Kailua-Kona on the leeward side of the Big Island. I can’t take Amtrak to Hawaii, of course; but I can ride the train to the west coast and fly from there.

[edited 2023-02-20]

There are five options that I can think of, and I’m strongly gravitating toward my current fantasy.

[another edit on 2023-02-21]

Thanks to commenter, sjdorst, and several folks on the AllAboardRailDiscussion@groups.io list, I’ve found out what the Emery Go-Round is and how it connects the Amtrak station to BART; so I now plan to use that westbound; and if the Zephyr is late enough that I’d miss the last Emery Go-Round bus of the day, I’d still have the taxi as Plan B so it wouldn’t mess up the whole trip.

Eastbound, it doesn’t really work because of the time of day and reduced service on Sundays, so I’m still stuck with a taxi fare of (probably) $120 to $150.

I’ve also decided to spend the night eastbound at the Hyatt House across the tracks from EMY.  It could be close to midnight, or maybe even after, by the time that I can even claim my checked bag and get a taxi; but my body clock will still be on UTC-10, so when I get to the hotel, I’ll probably still have enough presence of mind to get undressed and crawl into bed, and I’ll have more time for a leisurly breakfast in the morning.

I’ll still let it stew for a few weeks just in case I think of anything else I should consider.

I hope this is of interest to folks who might want to plan a trip involving Amtrak and I’m not just boring people with my personal problems.  If there are folks who do find it interesting, all my current travel plans, both actual and tentative, can be found here.

Issaquah Trip Report, day twelve

day −1
day 0
days 1 and 2
day 3
general remarks about the C++ meetings
days 4 to 6
days 7 and 8
day 9
days 10 and 11

2023-02-14, 06:30:

The Holiday Inn didn’t give me my wakeup call; and when I went to the restaurant for breakfast, I found that they had no printed menu.  Instead, one has to scan a QR code with a cell phone.  A woman came by with a tablet and starting punching stuff in, I guess to get me a menu.  After about three minutes of that, I just got up and left.

I went back to my room and dealt with several days of e-mail messages and did some moderation on the blog, then I checked out.  I decided that I didn’t feel quite up to the walk back to Union Station, so the hotel clerk called me a taxi.

08:30:

After checking in at the Metropolitan Lounge, I went to Sbarro’s which was open for breakfast.  I had scrambled eggs, sausage, potatoes and a really big Sbarro’s breadstick.  Everything was much better than what I could have gotten at McDonald’s just across the hall; but I didn’t finish the potatoes…that was too much.

Back to the Met. Lounge to try to catch up on my FtB reading.  I made it through everything except Pharyngula and stderr, then it was back to Sbarro’s for a really big slice of pizza.

12:00:

So here I sit in the Met. Lounge waiting for them to call train 21, the Texas Eagle.  That’ll probably happen about an hour from now, or maybe a little later.

As I said in the previous post, I switched today’s ticket from train 319 to train 21, principally for checked baggage service; but it’ll also be comfortable to ride in the sleeper.  I have room 13, a roomette on the lower level of the double-decker Superliner cars.

13:20:

They called boarding for train 21, and I decided to avail myself of redcap service.

We departed right on time…actually a couple of minutes early by my watch.  I guess it’s OK to do that at big stations once the boarding gates have been closed and there’s no possibility of any passengers arriving at the last minute.

Once we left Amtrak property, we were on Canadian National track; and it’s typical for there to be lots of delays.  As expected, we got several red signals due to freight trains crossing in front of us.

The TA came by for dinner reservations.  I was surprised to see the “traditional dining” menu like we had on the Builder, and I was hoping that the Eagle was getting with the program.  No such luck…that was a mistake.  He came back with the “contemporary dining” menu (the microwaved stuff), and I ordered the baked ziti and meatballs for the entree and the vanilla pudding for dessert.

14:38:  that last stop waiting for freight trains was a really long one.  We’re just now pulling again and we’re only a little way past Summit.  We should be departing Joliet about now.

We mostly maintained track speed all the way to Joliet except for one slowdown, but that was just to get some instructions from the dispatcher.  It sounded like permission to pass a red flag or red signal, but they didn’t go through the whole track warrant business.  Maybe it was something else, or maybe the CN’s rules are more lax in this area.

We stayed about twenty minutes late all the way to just outside of Springfield where we had to stop and wait for train 318 to depart the station.  Amtrak’s status page says that 318 was indeed delayed, but that it had arrived at 17:11 which is just when we stopped to wait for it; so this might not take too long.

17:20:  here we go.

My 17:30 dinner reservation was called shortly thereafter.  Yes, the Texas Eagle does indeed still have a “cross country café” rather than a proper diner.  The baked ziti and the vanilla pudding were OK but nothing to write home (or blog) about.  It also came with a salad, and for dressing I had my choice of ranch and ranch.  I passed.

We actually arrived in Springfield at 17:25, and it’s raining pretty hard.  Amazingly, we departed at 17:27…only two minutes of dwell time.  I guess the passengers didn’t feel the need to dawdle in the rain.

17:56:  we hand another stop due to freight trains in the way, but we’re moving again.  We departed Carlinville at 18:11, now :33 late.

This train has no sightseer lounge with a café in the lower level, so they’re using for a “café car” the end of the “cross country café” closest to the coaches.  We have only one SA (I guess somebody called out), so the “café car”, the only food source for passengers in the coaches, is closed while serving passengers in the sleeper.  It seems to me that that just shouldn’t happen.

We stayed about half an hour late through Alton, then thanks to schedule padding, we arrived in St. Louis at 19:19, just six minutes late.

It took ten or fifteen minutes after the checked baggage arrived in the baggage room for the station agent to finally deign to open up and give passengers their bags.

My car was right where I left it in the long term parking (no surprise), and since it had been raining earlier and the streets were wet, and I hadn’t driven a car in a couple of weeks, I decided to drive home on city streets instead of tooling down the interstate highway.

All in all, this was a very pleasant trip for me, although I’m glad I didn’t have a coach ticket on the Eagle.  Yeah, we were hours late into Seattle, but I had planned for that so it didn’t mess up the whole trip.

My next trip will be early in April when I’ll take a round trip ride on the Texas Eagle to Forth Worth.  I’ll be attending the Southwestern Rail Converence 2023 in Hurst, TX, about a ten or fifteen minute taxi ride from the Forth Worth station.  What would folks like to read about?  More geeky train stuff?  More personal impressions?  Please do give this newbie blogger a hint about anything he’s doing wrong. 😎

Issaquah Trip Report, days ten and eleven

day −1
day 0
days 1 and 2
day 3
general remarks about the meetings
days 4 to 6
days 7 and 8
day 9

2023-02-12 00:37-8:00

I stayed up to watch the switching moves in Spokane (because I’m a grain geek).

Train 8 from Seattle arrived first, and 28 from Portland pulled in behind it.  After detraining the passengers bound for Spokane, 8 pulled forward and switched to another track where it was out of the way; then 28’s engine pulled ahead out of the way.  8 shoved back and tied on to 28, and 28’s engine shoved back and tied on to the combined train.  We now have Siemens 313 in the lead and GE 77 second.

Once we had the full train put together, they boarded the passengers getting on in Spokane.

We got under way at 01:24, only nine minutes late which, on Amtrak, approaches zero. 😎

06:30-7:00:

We’re on mountain time now.

Amazingly, we stayed on time all day, even waiting for departure times at several stations.  The only operational thing that surprised me is that we didn’t make the usual fuel stop in the yard just east of Havre.

The fellow who shared my table for supper in the diner was another programmer.  We had fun commiserating about the sorry state of code these days. 😎

ca. 21:00-6:00:  We arrived in Minot almost an hour early, so we’ll be here for a while.  The engines were refueled from a fuel truck, so I guess that’s the new thing rather than making the fuel stop in Havre eastbound.

2023-02-13:

We departed St. Paul on time at 08:50, but then we were stopped for a while because of a freight train in the way.  Me’re moving again at 09:05.

We stayed between ten and twenty minutes late all the way through La Crosse; but that can change on the SOO Line through Wisconsin to Milwaukee.  We’ll see…

Nope, no problems there.  We departed Milwaukee at 15:12, only seven minutes late.  We might even be early into Chicago thanks to schedule padding.

16:02:  oops, I knew it couldn’t last…emergency brake application…the conductor made an announcement on the PA saying that “a brake hose came apart” and he would have to “put it together again”.  Let’s hope that’s all it is.

16:10:  that wasn’t bad…we’re pulling again.

I heard on my scanner the engineer informing the dispatcher that “everything’s independent”.  I’m guessing that that means that they’re using the independent brakes, air brakes that apply only the engine’s brakes, to pressurize the regular train line, the brakes on all the cars.  I suppose that’s OK as a temporary fix since we’re less than one hour from our final stop.

<aside>
For non-train geeks, the way air brakes on trains work is that air pressure in the brake line holds the brakes off, and brakes are applied by reducing the pressure.  That’s why anything that dumps the brake line quickly, like parting of the line for any reason, applies all the train’s brakes as hard as possible.  That’s the “emergency brake application”, and it can cause a derailment because of later cars that haven’t had their brakes applied yet ramming into earlier cars that have.  (The “signal” that applies the brakes is an air pressure wave that travels through the brake line somewhat slower than the speed of sound, and freight trains can be miles long these days.)  That’s usually not a problem for passenger trains which, aside from being much shorter, have couplers that don’t give as much; but conductors still have to walk the train to look for any problems that might have been caused.
</aside>

We made our final stop in Chicago at 16:53, only eight minutes late.  For some reason, they spotted the engines four or five car lengths north of the entrance to the north boarding lounge, so even folks in the Seattle sleeper, the first revenue car on the train, still had an extra city block to walk.  It seems to me that there was no reason for that.

This was a most enjoyable trip on the Empire Builder, in large part because of the crew who had been working together for over a decade and liked each other, and also liked their jobs.  A happy crew makes for happy passengers.  I hope I left big tips all around.

On arrival in Chicago, I made a bee line to the Amtrak ticket counter and changed tomorrow’s final leg to St. Louis from business class on train 319, one of the “Lincoln Service” corridor trains, to a roomette on train 21, the Texas Eagle, and then promptly checked the bag that I had just claimed off train 8.  (The corridor trains have no checked baggage service.)  This old back will no doubt appreciate my not having to deal with it until I get home.

My back also appreciated taking a taxi to my hotel rather than walking the three blocks to the Holiday Inn just south of the station.  The taxi fare was just about five bucks, so I gave the driver another fiver as a tip for getting stuck with my short fare.  I’ll probably do the three block walk tomorrow morning since I’ll be rested and ready to go.

This hotel has been completely renovated, and the restaurant won’t be ready for supper until next month, so I just had some junk food.  I didn’t want to go out anywhere for supper.  Instead, I wanted to get to my room so that I could get these blog posts back in sync. 😎  I was assured that the restaurant will be open for breakfast in the morning.

I’ve also added a link to the group photo that I mentioned in the days 7 and 8 post.  These are most of the folks with whom I have the pleasure of being associated in my small way.