Well I should begin by saying seeing America by rail can be a very stressful experience and it does require lots of patience to get trough it. I will start off with saying one thing, if you ever decide to use a long distance Amtrak train, I do not want to hear any bad talking about Amtrak. Amtrak does not own the rails it travels on, except for the northeast corridor.
I will now start to unwind the journey on the California Zephyr, the beginning of the trip was very beautiful traveling through Donner Pass and going through a 4 mile tunnel in only 2 minutes flat! After exiting California we entered Nevada and began the trek towards Reno, which in my eyes is a very interesting city but to make it a bit more interesting, their station is built semi-underground and is situated right across the street from the national bowling center. While the lunch hour was very good, the dinner hour began the problems in the dinning car with the AC in the kitchen going out. The 7:15 dinner was pushed back to 8:30 and was still very good. Two very interesting cities we stopped in while in Nevada were Winnemucca and Elko, both the cities were small and the stations were stranger looking. Elko was just a bus stop and sign. Through the night we traveled through Utah and by the time I woke up we were about to enter Helper and about to enter Colorado. Now Colorado was were the journey began to go down hill with passengers. As we began the journey through the great state we became aware of how the altitude can affect someone when they are intoxicated. I will get back to that a bit later. The lower gore of Colorado is filled with lots of sights and lots of points of interest. Now Colorado is known for the Colorado river and the state spent $2.6 million on a highway that goes right in the way of the river and they do not have to worry of any problems with the highway since it is so advanced and very up to date. Going through Colorado means that you have to go through the 6 mile Moffat tunnel just to get to Denver. Now back to the drunks, while I noticed a group of passengers were becoming intoxicated I would have never expected them to disobey and tarnish a great journey across America. The person who was most intoxicated had to have a special service. The passenger who was seated behind me was a smoker and while I was in the lounge car decided it was alright to go smoke in the bathroom after being told and everyone being told its not alright to smoke onboard the train. When we stopped in Winter Park the conductor spoke to the gentleman and told him that the reason they got rid of the smoking car was because of idiots like him who disobeyed the rules and went and started to smoke in the areas which were non-smoking. Now after a while and after we had exited the Moffat tunnel the one most intoxicated gentleman was becoming more and more irate. Well the gentleman, decided it would be alright to fight with another passenger after the gentleman decided to hop into the bathroom and take a few puffs of something. What transpired from that caused all the conductor on board to rush to the lounge car and subdue the gentleman and bring him to the car I was in and give him a choice of calming down or being taken off the train by the authorities and he chose the law enforcement way. We had to be stopped outside of Denver in order to wait for the authorities to arrive. We were stopped for quite some time before the authorities came and carted the gentleman off the train and to the local jail. Now before we got into Denver, we were moving for an on time arrival into Denver before the incident. But after the incident we just became a very late train. By late I mean 3 hours late into Chicago. Now that I've given a rosy picture of that I'd like to turn to the ill run baggage handling that Amtrak has. Now I had checked my back into Chicago due to my final stop not offering baggage service. As we were entering Chicago I was hoping to have enough time to grab the bag and rush to my next train. Turns out a train that had arrived before us got their bags before I did. By the time they had called the last boarding for the train my bags had not shown up still and had to rush to the gate and graciously be assisted by the lovely gate agent Barbra. I would like to say that Amtrak needs to start to update the system and create a system in which gets the bags out in a more timely fashion. Thankfully I was able to get the bag a day later. As I traveled on the Capitol Limited I was able to see the many industries that are present in the area such as the steel mills outside of Chicago and the great highway system through Pennsylvania. To close up this post I would like to give a few sound words of advice: 1. Do not ever say Amtrak is the one to blame 2. Amtrak is NEVER EVER ON TIME 3. Always have a back up plan if your train becomes delayed 4. If you're a smoker, try and refrain from smoking on board the train because us healthy people are trying to live a clean life. 5. I do not want to hear how Amtrak is just a waste of American tax payer money. 6. Please please please try and help Amtrak survive into the future.
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