Riding Amtrak's Crescent

It's been a long, long time since my wife and I have made a long-distance trip on Amtrak. Not since the early days of our marriage had we the time and money to make such a trip. Since we needed to be in New Orleans from Jan. 25-30, we booked on the Crescent for the round trip. What follows are a few thoughts and observations of the trip.

One should not book a roomette to share with another person unless one is very fond of the other. The walk-in closet in our apartment is larger. Fortunately, my wife and I like each other quite a bit, and we enjoyed the experience. Since it was a bit weird using the toilet, we decided it was better to walk forward two cars to the closest coach restroom. After the attendant had made the beds down, changing into nightwear was a challenge. An advantage of booking first class was that meals were included. There were three or four entrees for each meal, and they still actually cook them rather than zap them in a microwave. Presentation was nice, though not quite five-star. Nor was the food.

The Crescent does not yet have Wifi, but we had an e-reader and several books, so that was no hardship. We actually found the entire trip relaxing -- reading, dozing, watching the scenery pass by. Our train was running well over two hours late, the result of a crossing mishap involving a commuter train ahead of us in Virginia. We wondered how folks who were boarding at such places as Charlotte, N.C. (2:20 a.m.) and Clemson, S.C. (5:39 a.m.) found out about the delay. Were they at the station waiting and wondering?

There seemed to be a thousand grade crossings between Manassas, Va. and New Orleans. Even though our Viewliner sleeper was six cars back, the blare of the horns was constant, making it hard to doze off. On the southbound run, our car had a flat wheel, and between that and the bounces and lurches as we heeled into curves and slammed across turnouts, sleep was intermittent. At least half a dozen freights blasted by us as well.

Norfolk Southern's dispatchers did the best they could getting our southbound train over the road. The delay in Virginia had cost us our slot in the schedule, and we were almost three hours down at one point on the trip. Several times during the day, we plodded along at 35 or 40 mph behind a freight, until the dispatcher was able to run us around it at a passing track. A couple of times we were stopped for a few minutes for a meet with a northbound train as well, but our final arrival in New Orleans was only about two hours and 10 minutes off the advertised.

NS runs a lot of freight trains. I didn't keep track on the southbound trip, but we saw quite a few. On the return trip on Feb. 1, we passed seven southbound stack trains, plus two mixed freights, and we ran around three northbound trains -- and that was just during the daylight hours. I was impressed by the amount of industry along the route, especially below Atlanta. It ranged from sawmills and pulpwood yards to foundries, pipe yards and chemical plants. There were feed mills and fertilizer plants and even a place that manufactured wooden cable reels. And nearly every town had a team track, where off-line customers could handle freight.

A couple of final notes. I've never seen so many diamonds, something I was watching for after the article in February's Trains. We banged across several in and around New Orleans, and in Birmingham we found no less than three CSX freights waiting at the major junction near the station. There were quite a few others in Mississippi and Alabama. At Hattiesburg, Miss., we spotted Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern No. 300, a small Baldwin 2-8-2, looking somewhat worse for the wear and missing its jewelry on display adjacent to the station. In Tuscaloosa, Ala., I spotted one of those SD-40's that NS recently acquired from BNSF. Still in green and black, it looked like the victim of a tagger. Its original number was spray-painted over, and its new NS initials and number were similarly painted on the cab side. Pretty tacky. On arrival at Philadelphia, we discovered that one of our checked bags had failed to alight with us. The checked baggage office handled that situation with aplomb. They contacted the Crescent's conductor, who found our bag and handed it off to a southbound train at Trenton, NJ. It was back with us in less than two hours. The whole trip was enjoyable, and I think we'll do it again sometime.