The original road trip in the USA was travelling on the railroad. Made romantically famous by Beatnik poets and musicians jumping a train and riding around the country. It was also the mass transportation network carrying a growing population from the East Coast to the new land of opportunity in the West.
Amtrak’s history can be traced back to the 1960s when railroads were losing money on passenger service due to declining ridership and rising operating costs. In 1970, Congress created Amtrak through the Rail Passenger Service Act to consolidate the many private passenger railroads into a single, national network: Of the 366 train routes that operated previously, Amtrak continued only 184.
This is a record of our first journeys on the train in America.
The YouTube vlog attached to this post is still in the process of completion! We need to remove Johnny Cash’s I’ve Got a Thing About Trains, but it’s taking a while to piece together our own audio – watch this space!
Listen to the Soundtrack for our journey on Apple Music – Best played on random!
Planning the Journey
Our first train journey ever in the USA was to be from Richmond Virginia.
When we originally looked into travelling across the States by train, we thought the best way to do this would be by buying a 30 day Amtrak pass, which gave you 10 segments in a 30 day period for £500. However, when we looked at this closely and read the fine print, it seems that a segment was any journey on a single train. Which is great if you wanted to travel all the way from New York City to New Orleans (1 segment) and then on to Los Angeles (another segment), it would be ideal to travel the land and breath of the whole country. Our journey was always going to be different! For one thing we had planned to visit places that were no longer served by passenger trains like Nashville, therefore we would need to travel to those by bus. And we wanted to see some of the smaller places, and one segment is any single trip on the same train which could be as short as 20 or 30 miles. We started making an Excel spreadsheet with our desired journey trying various ways of reaching places by train where we could and bus where we couldn’t. On most of the Amtrak routes there is literally just one train per day. Bearing in mind with the previous example, this train might travel from New York all the way to New Orleans so an overnight journey is required on part of it. It is possible to get a sleeper carriage on an Amtrak train, but even with the one month ticket there is an additional charge for that, and it can be quite costly. And then we started thinking, do we actually want to travel overnight on a train? We felt it would be far more enjoyable to actually see the whole country from under our feet or from the window of a train of the bus, travelling at a speed more in tune with our body and our day-to-day life experience than at the speed and height of a plane.
When it came to planning, the useful thing about a single train every day is that regardless of which day in the week it was, the train time was the same. (There was a similar scenario buses also). Still working on around 30 days, as it was always the intention to get to Tucson Arizona for Christmas, the holiday, we were able to cost it all out and found that it worked out cheaper to book in advance single ticket for train ride and for bus connections. Sometimes a train ticket for a journey of 1.5 hours could be could cost as little as £15. Once our itinerary was set soon, we started to book our ride. Some of the prices already rose by a few pounds one or two weeks from our initial planning, but this may well have been a fluctuation in the value of the pound against the dollar. To book our train rides we installed an Amtrak app on our phones but tended to make our reservations on a larger computer screen where it was easier to see everything. It was slightly disconcerting that there was no option to reserve a seat as we do in the UK And Europe. But we just crossed our fingers and hoped that unlike our own country we wouldn’t be put in the position of having to stand for whole journeys. Once our tickets were bought and paid for they all appeared with QR codes and information in the Amtrak app.
In Richmond we needed the Staples Mill Station, not the more central one on East Main, which was a few miles from the Centre. Because we were using this suburban station to start our trip, we had managed to find a car rental company closer to the station for picking up and dropping off our car that we drove down OBX to Roanoke Island and back. On our return to Avis, we had the choice of a bus journey, a hike, or the Avis rep offered to give us a lift; but as the weather was good and we had plenty of time, we decided to walk through a quiet residential area of Richmond. This was good practice, taking the weight of our packs on our backs, as we had been doing very little hiking back home in the month proceeding.
First Impressions
The station was very clean and tidy, it also felt very modern and strangely small with a couple of handful of passengers waiting for the train. There was toilet, vending machine, water fountain and lots of friendly staff in their uniform. It was a passenger station although there were also platforms for freight.
We took the 89 Palmetto train for our first three trips. The first one being from Richmond to Florence South Carolina, the second from Florence to Charleston South Carolina and the third from Charleston to Savannah Georgia.
At Richmond station there was an information screen and it was heartening to see that our train was on time. Heartening because we had read various articles about train travel in the USA and how trains can get delayed by minutes and hours. But this was not to be our experience, at least not yet. 10 minutes before the train was to arrive there was a tannoy announcement encouraging us to gather and we would let across to platform 4 and to a particular spot on that platform where we were to board. When the train came in the Amtrak employees led us to a particular carriage and as we boarded, we were asked where we were going which determined whether we were sent to the right or to the left. Anyone with heavy bags was offered help to get them onto the carriage and quickly after boarding found seats, which felt like armchairs in comparison to what we might have in England, and settled in.
Enjoying the Ride
There is a Café car on the train where you can buy a hot drink and a snack. We spent quite a lot of time sitting in that car travelling from Richmond to Florence, looking out of the window and doing a bit of work on the mini iPad. This included reviewing some of our many pictures that we had taken so far.
We had a great chat with the member of staff in that café car as he is a football fan, not American football but our football . That topic brought us together for a brief moment with us discussing Leicester City and him talking about Chelsea, which is his team.
Next we ride the Crescent 19 train from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham Alabama. Onwards from Birmingham, we will be riding the train to Meridian Mississippi and then from there to New Orleans, Louisiana.