Fast forward many years, I've been in Europe for 4 years and Sasha and I are planning our travels home via the US. Despite my train leanings, catching any Amtrak train in the US during our visit there was not a foregone conclusion however. Despite having done similar-ish things before, when the idea was broached Sasha was unsure about the longer distance trains in particular - at that stage she felt flying would be a better option to maximise our time in the US and its fair to say that was quite a logical thought process. This was before we narrowed down exactly where we wanted to go and how we might go about it. The biggest "absolute must" for Sasha was the Grand Canyon (followed closely by Hawaii) - for some reason I didn't know if the Canyon would actually manage to fit into our travel plans, and whether it might be best to leave it for another time. But Sasha was insistent - anything else could go, but the Grand Canyon had to stay. For me, visiting family in Toronto, Canada and San Francisco were must do's also. This had a big bearing on how we planned our holiday and anything that was logical along the way or necessary in order to get from one to the next then was included, so long as it too might have been a point of interest.
The California Zephyr did not go anywhere near the Grand Canyon, but I traced out a suggested itinerary that saw us going on it from Chicago to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles or Las Vegas, on to the Grand Canyon and then back to Los Angeles to fly to Hawaii. The problem - it required some amount of back-tracking, costing time and a lot of money - neither of which we had a great supply of. We'd included Chicago as a likely destination from Toronto, and the nearest major town to the Grand Canyon was Flagstaff. The nearest major airports though were Albuquerque, or Phoenix - which was still a fair hike from Flagstaff so would require further onwards transportation, probably by bus and the flights weren't cheap. Catching buses across was possible, but would require changes and the whole distance would take more than a day. Enter Amtrak's Southwest Chief - a train similar to the California Zephyr and one that was going to be able to drop us right off at Flagstaff. It was a sleeper train too, going right from Chicago all the way through to Los Angeles. We could hop on one train, sleep on board, watch the scenery go by and get dropped off at Flagstaff with little fuss. While sleeper compartments were priced well into the airline ticket arena, with a little playing around I discovered that either side of our estimated ideal day of departure from Chicago we could score ourselves a hefty discount on saloon car seats - seats which recline to 40 degrees and you sleep in them. After I decided I'd rather take the earlier departure to give us more time in Los Angeles or San Francisco, we booked the tickets. Being the best mix of ease and price, this is how we came to trek across a huge swathe of the US by train!
About Amtrak and the Southwest Chief
The Southwest Chief is the Amtrak successor to the Santa Fe Railroad's Super Chief, and has always gone between Chicago and Los Angeles over the same route. Santa Fe is now Burlington Northern Santa Fe, better known as BNSF. The Southwest Chief is one of Amtrak's three longest distance trains, and in terms of the train itself it is much the same format as the California Zephyr. Hauled by two diesel locomotives, the train uses double deck carriages called "Superliners", which has most of the passenger areas on the top deck and facilities on the bottom deck. The make-up of the train was essentially in two halves - the sleeping cars at the front, a restaurant car, a panorama/lounge car, and then the non-sleeping cars. In the sleeping cars, there are 3 kinds of rooms - "Bedrooms", a compartment with two bunk beds which fold into a couch during the day and have their own ensuite; "Family Bedrooms" with more beds, and "Roomettes" which are two single seats which face each other, which fold down to create a single bottom bunk and a top bunk folds down from the roof. These Roomettes don't have compartments as such, and in fact only have a curtain to separate off the corridor at night instead of a door. In the non-sleeping cars, its just airline-style saloon seating with all the seats facing the front of the train, with the seats in pairs of two. The seats though are substantial, not dissimilar to a lazy-boy - and in fact they have a footrest which folds out just like a lazy-boy. As mentioned earlier, the recline on these is 40 degrees which is quite a distance back. The main aisle of each car is on the top level - there is no inter-carriage connection on the bottom level. In the Restaurant car, the bottom level is the galley where food is prepared; in the Panorama car, the lower level has some booth seating and the Cafe counter. The upper level of the Panorama car is half booth-style seating with a table in the middle, and the other half is seating either side of the aisle which faces the sides of the carriage in order to view the scenery go past. Some of the outwards facing seats can pivot, and some are on an angle to the wall rather than square with it. The Panorama car is not a "Dome Car" of old US style, where you can peer forward or back over the roof of the train - its the same height overall as the rest of the carriages, but does have extra windows in the sides of the roof. This train would be our home for approximately 32 hours, from Chicago to Flagstaff.
Boarding the Train
Following this we had a quick wander around the station to work out where we would need to be in a hew hours when it came time for boarding. There was no information about which trains left from where or where to wait for them - and our tickets were pretty bereft of information, no platform number and no seat allocation even (though I had read typically you can choose your seats once onboard). We had a wander around some lounges and tried to look alongside the entrances to platforms but nothing was telling us anything, other than a couple of staff who were telling us we couldn't be where we were. Eventually we had to ask - and the answer was at the opposite end of the station, as this area was for those who had reserved sleeper berths on board the various trains. We found the concourse where we'd have to be, and then went off for a wander around the city around the station (looking for potential lunch places but we ended up at McDonald's in the station). With at least an hour and a half to go, we settled into some seats in the concourse and kept an eye on things.
Just prior to when our train would be called and we'd all have to assemble in a line in one of two designated areas in the concourse, Sasha and I began to hover around the area where we predicted we'd be told to be. Sure enough 5mins after our train was called and we were told to line up where we were - we weren't first in the queue but we were pretty close. Once the long line had been fully assembled, we were then marched out of the concourse, down through the long hall to the other end of the station, down past the lounges and then we were stopped - and sent into the platform in groups of about 10 at a time, joining the back of the line with the sleeping car passengers. We then encountered a staff member who looked at our tickets, noted our destination and told us to go to the 2nd car. We then advanced forward with the line, only to find it was now being held up as people waited for the person outside the 1st car - but people we knew who weren't in the 1st car were waiting and not going around. So we went around, went to the person outside the 2nd car who asked where we were going - Flagstaff - looked at a printed out seating diagram of the carriage, crossed out two seats with a pen, told us the seat numbers and gave us rectangles of card with some handwritten letters on it (FLG). We then boarded our home for the next 30-something hours.
The Journey - Day 1
The Journey - Day 2
Summing Up
It was definitely a fitting way to cross across the North American continent, in more ways than one. It was quite nice to sit back and take in the scenery going by slowly, or in some cases not-so-slowly - the Southwest Chief is unique among all the Superliner trains in that it is permitted to travel at 145km/h along long portions of the route due to much of the railway the train travels along having the signal infrastructure to cope with it. Aside from the Acela high-speed trains, this is as fast as you can travel by train in the US. Its a journey where you can't avoid talking to people on board too, from all various walks of life - the passengers are a veritable melting pot of the US population and the occasional tourist. It might not have been the exact train I thought I'd cross the US on, but it was the exact type of train I thought I'd cross the US on - so for me, catching Amtrak's Southwest Chief was one of the highlights of our time in America.
It was no Queen Mary 2 however - while there was very little I could fault about the amazing experience on board the QM2, I can't say the same for the Southwest Chief. To me it seemed like the way the train was run hasn't changed a lot since the 1980's, and it was this kind of time-warp. I also don't think with the long distance trains like the Southwest Chief, Amtrak knows what it wants to be - its not trying to compete with the low-cost buses, but its not trying to offer a high-class relaxing travel experience either. Its somewhere in between, trying to sort of be both without being both. None of the sleeping compartments ooze luxuriousness, but neither does the reclining seats ooze budget travel. It seemed a bit of a model of inefficiency in many ways - which could be said for a lot of things in the US. But for Amtrak, who are constantly being told to improve their game and profitability, it seems weird that they have not embraced what would be seemingly simple changes which would have a big impact on improving the passenger experience. And lets face it, that passenger experience needs improving - the fact that quite a few people we met were riding the train for the first time, and were adamant it would be the last time is not a good sign for patronage growth. If you're not generating repeat customers, then there must be a point where you literally run out of people to ride your trains?
Some of these inefficiencies are not isolated to the Southwest Chief itself, but more Amtrak's style of doing things. And most of them are things done overseas on trains as a matter of course, and have been for years. The boarding experience is the classic example - for instance when checking in, why not be allocated seats then by a computer system or even beforehand like you would on any other train or plane? Why have 1 person manually check tickets when you could have a barcode scanner at the gate? why funnel people into one line on the platform, rather than tell them their carriage in advance so they can all head straight there upon boarding and hasten the process? There must be a more efficient system for running the restaurant car too, as that seems to tie up 3 waiting staff and 3 cooking staff - most of whom seem to be just waiting around in between delivering meals and even then, they are not too attentive. As for the bag collection - I can understand the security aspect, but the guy seemed to take an unreasonably long time about it and didn't want to listen to you pointing out where your bag was, but instead check every bag's tag to see if it matched.
Amtrak does have new management these days who are looking at shaking things up. The new CEO used to work for Delta Airlines, and seems to be looking at Amtrak in the similar way one would look at cutting costs on an airline. One big area they are looking at targeting - getting rid of the Restaurant car entirely, and replacing onboard food services with vending machines. Southwest Chief has actually come in for specific targeting by the new management - when we were travelling on it, Amtrak had openly floated the idea of shutting this train down, replacing it with a Chicago to Dodge train and an Albuquerque to Los Angeles train, with a bus connecting between the two. It was seen as the first move in a strategy to get rid of the longer distance trains and concentrate on shorter trains that would be more profitable - but it didn't sit well with parts of the Government, and by October 2018 Amtrak had to formally drop the idea due to political pressure. Still, changes are likely coming for Amtrak over the next 5-10 years and the seem to be focusing on moving the trains to be more bus-like in order to compete with that segment. In NZ, the trains that tried to do that failed, and its the ones that got reinvented into being upmarket tourist experiences that have thrived. The Rocky Mountaineer in Canada thrives in a similar manner, but it doesn't cater for the domestic A-to-B market. Amtrak's political masters will probably demand it still caters to that lower end of the market, so maybe Amtrak's future lies in upping the luxuriousness of the sleeper class offerings, perhaps with the Panorama lounge being dedicated to them only; while paring down the seat-only offering where we were. Do it right, and the sleeper class fares might be able to cover the costs of the lower revenue to be gained in the seat-only area. But will that be the focus? Only time will tell...
For all its foibles, I still really enjoyed it - even though in the end, it was perhaps too long of a journey (and we weren't doing the whole length of the trip). Mix it up, make some improvements, bring it all up to World Standard and it could really be something. But in that sense, catching the Amtrak encapsulated our experience of the US in a microcosm. Would I do it again? Well yes - and in fact, we were... but that tale will be told in a later blog!