A traveling man's further adventures

Amtrak in Chicago is on life support. Did I just say that? Actually you could say the same of the entire railroad industry east of the Rockies and north of the Ohio. Trains are moving, but just barely. Today I don't give a hoot about the rest of the railroad industry. I care about getting to New Orleans on Pullman Rail Journey's cars, which will be attached tonight to the back of Amtrak's City of New Orleans, and I arrive at Chicago Union Station supremely confident this is going to be a great day. So confident, in fact that I leave my home in Virginia without a coat. The expected high in Chicago today, says my weather app, is 4 degrees. How stupid of me, it turns out.

The monitor in the Metropolitan Lounge is like a death notice. Inbound long distance trains are late by hours, eight hours for the Empire Builder from Seattle and Portland. Also delayed are most--almost all--outbound trains. The explanation I get from Mark the red cap is that locomotives are king of the realm, so many having failed in the bitter weather. That, plus late arrivals, has Fourteenth Street Coach Yard robbing Peter to pay Paul. I imagine there are also some passenger cars with frozen plumbing.

One of you said after my blog about last week's trip to and from Chicago (see "Amtrak 29, stop. Right now. Sorry. Stop") that you can sign on for a trip and end up with an adventure. How true. This week's return to the scene of the crime is already an adventure, except that I don't know the script. Certainly a late start. I'll play it by ear. I have some hours to wait (I caught an early plane in the event of bad weather) so I check my bag in the Metropolitan Lounge and divide my time between reading and walking around Union Station. For those of you who haven't been there in recent years, the huge old cavernous waiting room with its 100-foot ceiling is used mostly for special occasions, and today it's curtained off for some corporate event this evening. Commuters stream directly in and out for Metra trains on the north tracks and Metra and BNSF Railway trains on the south tracks. There are waiting rooms on both sides of the station for coach passengers and between them is the Metropolitan Lounge for sleeping car passengers. These three waiting rooms are literally the only public places that are heated. I feel sorry for the Amtrak ticket agents working in 40-degree misery.

By 5 o'clock the station is bedlam. All the escalators are set to go down, and the riot of people heading toward their trains, some at a run and the rest at a determined gait, is almost frightening. Actually it is frightening, because I had discovered a Dunkin Donuts in the food court and am trying to walk with a donut in one hand and coffee in the other. As I try to cross the prevailing path of commuters I say to myself, lose that coffee and you'll look like you peed in your pants.

The Cardinal for New York via Cincinnati and Washington, my nemisis a week ago, is still listed on time when I return to the Metropolitan Lounge, 10 minutes before its scheduled 5:45 p.m. departure. At 5:44 the monitor says DELAYED beside its name. No surprise. Each of the trains, except for a Hiawatha Service run to Milwaukee, has said DELAYED today. Most trains come into the station, are loaded, and leave 30 to 45 minutes late. But pity the poor people waiting for the westbound Empire Builder, due out at 2:15 p.m. It is still missing, and there's no word when it will be ready. You look around the lounge and it dawns on you: Still to leave are the Builder, Cardinal, Capitol Limited, City of New Orleans, and Lake Shore Limited. Between them they have at least ten sleeping cars, and yet inside the first-class waiting room this evening are maybe 30 people, max. Nobody who can help it is traveling in this bitter weather. Except me, of course.

By 6, as I make my hourly walk around the perimeter of Union Station, the riot of homeward commuters has begun to let up. In the lounge I see a man put down a heavy satchel and take from it a folding table. What's he going to do, I wonder, sell paperback books? He turns out to be David Ortiz, the general passenger agent of Pullman Sleeping Car Company LLC. I had been told tonight's train would have four couples and myself as customers, and the other eight folks appear and are checked in. Then I introduce myself, give David my bag to put aboard the sleeping car, and head to Union Station's cocktail bar for a martini. No good trip starts without one.

Walking back to the Metropolitan Lounge I literally collide with Ed Ellis, the founder and president of short line group Iowa Pacific Holdings, the parent company of Pullman. IPH offices are on the next block, and he has dropped by to see what awaits us. I ask Ed which of the almost 200 vintage cars Pullman has bought will come out of the shops next. He says a Northern Pacific dome sleeping car and a Milwaukee Road skytop sleeper-lounge will both emerge this summer. Bearing what colors, I ask? Why, the company colors, he replies, which means Illinois Central. Ed is a Paducah, Ky., boy whose first job was switching cars for IC the summer after high school, and his loyalty to the railroad whose tracks we will use tonight is unabashed.

Mark the red cap sees me. I'm sorry, Fred, he says, pointing to the monitor. The City of New Orleans now says DELAYED, no surprise. I turn back to Ellis. Somewhere on Pullman Rail Journey's web site (www.travelpullman.com) I had seen that Chicago-New York service would start in 2014, and I ask about it. Amtrak had said no to Pullman's request to ride behind its Lake Shore Limited via Cleveland, Buffalo, and Albany, for reasons of train length in Pennsylvania Station. Ed says Pullman and Amtrak are discussing a routing on the Capitol Limited and Pennsylvanian via Pittsburgh in one direction and on the Cardinal via Washington and Cincinnati in the other, with perhaps a stopover in Washington. I wish Ed well and tell him that Washington routing would make it easier for me to transfer my wealth to his company.

Ed and David leave to see what's holding up the City of New Orleans. I turn back to my book, a just-released thriller, "The Secret History of Las Vegas," that the New York Times had praised (justly, it is turning out). So I am unprepared for Ed's hand on my shoulder. You're not going to like this, he says. Our trip is cancelled. Not the City of New Orleans, but Pullman's cars on it. Ellis was told that the only working switch engine at Fourteenth Street had conked out before it could attach the two Pullman cars to the end of the City, and only the Amtrak cars would operate tonight. David says we'll be put up in a hotel, meals included, and leave instead tomorrow night. Wishful thinking, I ask myself? This could happen again tomorrow!

There's still time to head toward home tonight on the Lake Shore Limited, the last of the long distance trains to leave Chicago tonight (maybe, because there's still the Empire Builder). But first, I go to the ticket counter and ask whether there's room on the Crescent from New Orleans a day later than I had booked it. Yes, says the shivering agent, for $152 less than what I had paid originally. Then I call the Marriott in New Orleans, and they say I'll be welcome there a day late. I contact K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen and put my dinner reservation off by a day. Finally, I call Cathie at home in Virginia. I guess you're having another adventure, she says. I guess I really am.

So now I'm at the Crowne Plaza on the Near North Side, Jay Leno has just said an emotional farewell and signed off of his last Tonight Show, and I am thinking about tomorrow. No coat, gloves, or hat. All day to kill. The forecast: a low of minus 6 and a high of 12. Two thoughts come to mind: With time on my hands in Chicago, I'm always drawn toward Streator, Ill., on the former Santa Fe, 90 miles to the southwest, where there's a train around every corner. And Hertz has a counter at Union Station. I've got a plan!--Fred W. Frailey