Joyride

The Hoosier State. Note the full-length dome car behind the locomotive. 
Photo courtesy Indiana Dept. of Transportation.

Quite some time has passed since I last posted a piece about riding a train. That was because I hadn't ridden any new trains in quite some time. Last week I did at last: I took the Hoosier State between Chicago and Lafayette, Indiana, just for the hell of it.

The Hoosier State is an unusual train for Amtrak. Its locomotives and cars, done up in attractive orange-and-brown livery reminiscent of the old Illinois Central during its heyday, are owned by Iowa Pacific Holdings, an outfit best known for luxury cars coupled to Amtrak trains and booked for luxury prices. The train, subsidized by the state of Indiana, runs four days a week 196 miles between Chicago and Indianapolis on the days that Amtrak's three-day-a-week long-distance Cardinal from Chicago to New York doesn't run.

Amtrak provides engineers and conductors as well as the tickets, but the service crew is from Iowa Pacific. (Tickets on the Hoosier State, by the way, cost no more than they do on the Cardinal.)

And so I decided to take a joyride just to see what the Hoosier State was like, stopping at Lafayette at 10 p.m. and getting back on the return trip at 7:36 a.m. rather than detraining at Indianapolis at near midnight and reboarding at 6 a.m. Each journey ran about 3 1/2 hours.

Last week was the first week for business-class passengers, who are accommodated on the second level of a beautifully restored full-length two-story dome car from the 1950s. They're served free drinks (alcoholic, too) and meals there while coach riders can buy dinners and breakfasts in the dining area on the first level. The coaches, by the way, are also nicely refurbished former long-distance cars from the 1960s, and the seats are roomy and the legroom ample.

Business class inside the full-length dome car.

Servers wear old-fashioned white jackets.

The service, from a quintet of veterans and eager young attendants, was pleasant and efficient. While the cuisine is hardly gourmet, it's prepared fresh on the train, is served in china dishes on white tablecloths and is acceptably tasty. The bud vases on the tables contain real flowers. There's free wi-fi, too. No complaints there, none at all.

Real roses in the bud vases on the tables, something we no longer see in Amtrak dining cars.

There were just two downsides to the trip. One is that I had to spend two nights and a day in Lafayette because the return trip to Chicago skipped a day, and Lafayette, while a honest and sturdy Indiana town full of honest and sturdy Indianans, is not the Athens of the Midwest. There isn't much for a city boy to see except the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, a Victorian mishmash of six different architectural styles. It is so homely that it grows on you, and I spent a couple of hours photographing it from every angle.

The endearingly ugly Tippecanoe County Courthouse.

The other drawback is that rural northwestern Indiana offers no spectacular views from the train, unless one is a connoisseur of farmland. It didn't matter on the nighttime trip down, but on the way back the morning sun rose mainly on cows and cornstalks. (I have the same complaint about Illinois and Iowa.)

It's still dark when the northbound Hoosier State arrives in Lafayette. The consist: GP40H locomotive, two coaches, full-length dome car, coach, another GP40H.

It's hard to understand why a full-length dome car, most suitable for gorgeous mountain scenery, is employed on this boring run. Maybe it's because Iowa Pacific has one and might as well use it. That is fortunate for people who have to go to Indianapolis, especially those who can swing business class.

I'm glad I took this bucket-list trip. I'm also glad I don't have to take it again.

(Later. From time to time Amtrak safety inspectors find something wrong with an Iowa Pacific locomotive, and there apparently are no replacements, so the Hoosier State becomes a bus to Indianapolis. If you'd rather avoid "bustitution," call Amtrak the day of the trip to make sure the actual train is running.)

What's in a color?

Letter from a reader:

"I recently found a copy of Zephyr (perfect condition, with the original cover) in a small book shop here on the Central Coast of California.  The bottom portion of the book was buried, so I could only see the title, but the color told me exactly what it would be about.  No, I an not a “foamer” or an FRN, just somebody who never lost my boyhood love of trains, and who recognized that particular shade of yellow. 

"I really think I was born about 50 years too late, and would have loved to travel when the great name trains took Americans on trips where the journey was just as big as the destination.  Unfortunately, I don’t get to travel by train much, but your book has made me want to take a train trip soon and go somewhere just to see what’s there out the window.  

"Thank you for a great read, and thank you for being such a great observer of things and people.  I am sorry that I didn’t know your work before, but I will be sure to look for your other books in the future."

Cheers, and Happy (T)Rails,

Fred Potthast, Cayucos, California

Truth to tell, I never thought about the color used on the cover of the original 1994 hardcover of Zephyr. My editor at Times Books, Paul Golob, said it was chosen by the art department because yellow stands out sharply on tables of new issues at bookstores. Mr. Potthast's letter sent me a-Googling, and it turns out that that particular "Armour Yellow" was used on both Union Pacific R.R. and Southern Pacific Ry. passenger streamliners in the 1950s and 1960s, and is well known to railfans. The UP still uses that shade on all its freight locomotives today.

By the way, Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, now in a third edition updated as an e-book in 2012, is my best-selling ebook. Railroad books are never blockbuster best sellers, but there's still a devoted audience for them.

AUGUST 13: Mr. Potthast sends this reply: "To me it looked like UP Yellow, but not freshly shopped.  It looks sun-faded and covered with dust and diesel smoke, like the SD40 helpers that sit in the San Luis Obispo rail yard waiting to push freights up the Cuesta Grade.  Because you mentioned it, I looked up the SP yellow color on the interweb (Wikipedia—Santa Fe Southern Pacific Merger), and yes, I guess maybe the color does look more like the yellow on the SPSF "Kodachrome" merger paint scheme.  Regardless, the color choice for the dust cover may not have been intended to mimic either of those, but it sure seemed that way to me."

Lumberjack Steam Train

I do not ordinarily care for roadside attractions, especially in the middle of nowhere. But when last week I found myself in Rhinelander in rural north central Wisconsin, it seemed only appropriate for a rail buff with a small boy's heart to drive the 30 miles east on U.S. 8 to Laona and ride the "Lumberjack Steam Train."

This turned out to be a surprisingly interesting operation. The locomotive is a superbly rebuilt coal-fired 1916 Vulcan 2-6-2 Prairie, a rarely seen type still running. The destination, a lumber company camp converted into a fascinating living history museum, captivated me as well as the families it was designed for.

Although the ride is only fifteen minutes long and covers barely two miles of ground, the cars are well-kept antiques, and one of them is an open air carriage converted from an outside braced wooden boxcar—perfect for someone learning to take and process video with a digital camera.

And so here's my maiden effort at moviemaking. (There's plenty of railroading sound, and there are subtitles, although I still have to learn how to add narration.) Click on HD and then Full Screen for best effect.

If you go: Rides to the logging camp start at 11 a.m. Monday through Saturday (closed Sundays), rain or shine. There are three other departures: one at noon, the next at 1 p.m., and the last at 2 p.m. Return trips are at 11:20 a.m., 12:20 p.m., 1:20 p.m., 2:45 p.m. and 4 p.m. Tickets are adults, $21; children 4-12, $9. Discounts are available for seniors, families and groups.

Why I fled to Canada

Click here to go there.

Tour of the Line

I'm off to the Soo today to check another item off my railroad bucket list: Algoma Central's train from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, 296 miles north to Hearst deep in the province.

The marketing department at Canadian National Railway, owner of the historic Algoma Central, bills the round trip as a "Tour of the Line." But this is no ordinary tourist train for Yankee rubberneckers, like the same railroad's Agawa Canyon Tour Train. It's a workaday local that stops everywhere a passenger flags it down. It could be called one of the last "milk trains" on the continent.

The Algoma Central line drives deep into the Ontario wilderness, serving hamlets and resorts and fishing camps inaccessible by road. Rather than trunks and suitcases, the two baggage cars on the train carry provender and other supplies, canoes and kayaks, and, in the winter, snowmobiles.

There is no dining car, requiring the hardy traveler to pack his own provisions over the 10-hour run to Hearst.

A few weeks ago the Lady Friend and I drove around Lake Superior, partly as tourists and partly as researchers into a future mystery novel in which Sheriff Steve Martinez tails a suspect who is presumably looking for good places to stash bodies. Maybe there's a way to work the Tour of the Line into the plot.

Further details ahead.

Lake Superior Rail Museum

Of course a rail buff couldn't miss the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth, Minnesota, on his way around the aforementioned lake. Those with a suitable reverence for rail travel may now click here for a ticket to my dispatch on the subject at TrainWeb.org.

'eZephyr' is almost done

Just three weeks remain to the planned launch of the ebook version of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. The last few days have been busy:

Creating an index for an ebook famously requires heavy-duty sweating, and I decided not to try to replicate the one in the original print Zephyr. Rather, I laboriously taught myself how to create a Table of Contents with Word. (Laborious because I don't really know Word very well. I'm one of those users who learns only what he needs to know and then forgets most of it.)

But Calibri, the free ebook creation software that turns Word-generated .html files into .mobi files for Kindle and .epub files for Nook and most everything else, does not do tables of contents very well. Calibri recognizes standard chapter headings such as "Chapter 1, Chapter 2," etc., but won't pick up a Preface, an Introduction, an Epilogue and so on.

There may be a way to make Calibri do the job by going into the software code, but I am not smart enough for that. So I Googled the problem and found a reader's suggestion: Use free software called Sigil to read the .epub file created by Calibri, then tell Sigil what headings to recognize for a table of contents, and finally save the .epub file.

The next step is to feed the .epub file back into Calibri and tell Calibri to save it as a Kindle .mobi file.

Success! Now I have a .mobi file for Kindle and an .epub file for Nook—both with full tables of contents linked to all chapter headings.

Later on I'll do the same for Sony Reader and Kobo, and maybe learn how to use Apple iBook Author to create a fancy interactive ebook with sound and perhaps even video.

Zephyr's not finished yet. Monday I head out on a ten-day trip aboard the California Zephyr to get some more photographs and also interview a few folks for the Epilogue. I'll also stop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for a few days to take the waters and see a couple of Amtrakers featured in the original book. Then I'll head on to San Francisco Bay for a weekend.

Being an author is hard work but it has benefits.

On the track of Old Abe

My TrainWeb trip report on our ride from Chicago to St. Louis and back on Amtrak's Lincoln Service is now online.

As promised, a rail report

The 19th century Baltimore & Ohio roundhouse at Martinsburg, W. Va..

For train lovers, the report on our journey from Chicago to Washington, D.C. is now on my rail travel blog at Trainweb.org.

By the way, the GPS atop my camera as described in a January blogpost does work aboard a moving train. When a photo is examined in Lightroom, I simply click a button and Google Maps shows me exactly where the picture was taken. Life doesn't get better than that.

Year of the Train

An eastbound California Zephyr approaches Castle Gate, Utah.

Some people think I was born with a flanged wheel on each leg instead of feet. They're not far wrong, for 2012 is shaping up to be the Year of the Train for me and the Lady Friend.

We are longtime rail travel lovers. We love to watch scenery unfold before our eyes. We love to go to bed on the prairie and wake up in the mountains. We enjoy meeting new friends in the lounge and dining cars. We simply prefer relaxed and unhurried travel.

And we don't miss the exciting experience of strangers prodding and fondling us at airport security.

We're starting the travel year in early February with a round trip on Amtrak's Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington in sleeper roomettes. Our tickets include dinner upon departure and breakfast upon awakening.

Many people think Amtrak sleeper accommodations make train trips far more expensive than flying, and in many of not most cases that is true—but not on this route. We booked early, in December, and got  refundable round-trip sleeper tickets for $588. Two refundable economy round-trip tickets on United or American would go for $577. Of course, two nonrefundable "super saver" airline tickets would be $380, but add $50 (each way) cab rides to O'Hare and the cost rises to $480. Without meals.

The lesson: Don't assume that taking a sleeper room on a train is always going to be more expensive than flying.

Next up is a short 5 ½-hour coach round-trip in early March aboard a workaday Amtrak local, the Lincoln Service from Chicago to St. Louis, where I'll be delivering an address. Roundtrip rail fare: $40.50 each for senior citizens. Roundtrip air fare: $162. Plus cabs to and from both airports.

Pricewise, the Lincoln Service wins. Timewise, air travel is faster—tt's only half an hour. But those taxis might add an hour to the overall trip, and then if you get to each airport an hour before departure, you're looking at 3 1/2 hours in transit. Plus the aggravation of TSA's wandering hands.

Then there'll be a ten-day trip in late March on the California Zephyr to San Francisco Bay, in the service of getting trackside photographs for the upcoming e-book version of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. We'll stop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for a couple of days to take the waters as well as gather information and photos.

On the train we'll spend one night in a roomette and three nights in a large bedroom, all of the latter paid for by points amassed over five months on our Amtrak Guest Rewards Master Card. If we were paying cash, a round-trip in that big bedroom would be a staggering (but refundable) $3,532 for two people. Refundable round-trip air fare for two would be about $1,900, or if one wanted to take one's chances and book a nonrefundable ticket, $1,020.

All that scenery and relaxation on the long Western train trips is costly, no doubt about it. But if saving time is not an object, you do get three days of rolling comfort with amiable fellow travelers as well as Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevada vistas rather than four intense hours at 30,000 feet among indifferent strangers in cattle-car conditions. Some people would consider that priceless. We do,

Winding up our travel plans for the year: A fall round trip on VIA Rail's The Ocean from Montreal to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a ten-day ground tour of the Maritime Provinces. We'll of course fly from Chicago to Montreal. We could get there by Amtrak (Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to Albany and Adirondack from Albany to Montreal), but that would require a night's layover in Albany, not exactly the City of Gold for us.

It will be costly, of course. VIA's overnight trains are as pricey as Amtrak's, but we haven't yet decided which sleeper accomodations we'll choose—a standard bedroom for two (meals included) or a roomier, more upscale compartment in the classic 1950s Park round-ended dome/observation car that brings up the rear of The Ocean. More about this later.

Of course, I'll put up full reports on all the trips on my rail travel blog at Trainweb.org.

VIA Rail Park observation cars (here on The Canadian at Capreol, Ont.) also bring up the markers on The Ocean from Montreal to Halifax.

'Zephyr' to rise anew

Had some good news today. Crown Publishing, parent of Random House, has reverted all rights to my 1994 railroad travel book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, clearing the way for me to update and republish it as an e-book.

This means, of course, that I'll have to ride the Amtrak California Zephyr from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay and back at least once and maybe twice (and if I'm lucky, thrice), stopping to re-interview Amtrak personnel featured in that book for the update. Such a task will hardly be onerous, and I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

What I'm not exactly looking forward to is restoring the old manuscript. I do have a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk (remember those?) somewhere in the safe deposit box, but as I wrote last week, magnetic media are not terribly durable over time. All those little byte-sized electrons have a tendency to leak out and roll under the bed, never to be retrieved.

So it looks as if I might have to scan every page of the book into my computer, read the scan with character recognition software, then clean up the text with the help of crowdsourcing, the technical term for shamelessly begging loyal readers to lend their proofreading skills to an impoverished author.

But this task is sure to keep me off the streets and out of gin mills for the next few months. Look for Zephyr II to appear at the e-book vendors sometime next spring.

Feeling the tug of the train

I'm back from Upper Michigan at winter quarters in Evanston, Illinois, and getting ready for another workshop--the one for train travel writers and photographers that I'm co-teaching with rail lensman Carl Morrison at the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, Missouri. It runs Oct. 16-21 and there's still room for participants, if you're interested.

Now that the three mystery novels are now available as e-books (Kindle, Nook and other platforms), I'm thinking about updating my 1994 nonfiction book about life aboard a transcontinental train, Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, and re-publishing it as an e-book. That is, if I can get Random House (which seems to have no interest in bringing it out as an e-book) to revert the rights to me.

That would keep me busy for quite a while. The manuscript exists on a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk kept in a safe deposit box, but I have no idea if the disk is still good--magnetic media tends to spring leaks over time. I might have to laboriously scan the book, page by page.

Whether or not an e-book of Zephyr happens, some heavy-duty rail riding (and rail writing) lie in the future. The Lady Friend and I are planning a round-the-West Amtrak trip for next March--the Southwest Chief from Chicago to L.A., then the Coast Starlight from L.A. to Portland or Seattle, and finally the Empire Builder back to Chicago. That's six days and five nights enroute, with a stopover in either Portland or Seattle. I'll be in heaven.

We're also woodshedding a trip next fall on VIA Rail's Ocean round-trip from Montreal to Halifax,  with a 10-day tour of Canada's Maritime Provinces.

It'll be nice to get back into training.

Workin' on the railroad . . .

Amtrak No. 4, the eastbound Southwest Chief, stops to pick us up at Winslow, Ariz.

. . . all the livelong week. That's why I've been missing in action for so long. The Lady Friend and I took a brief trip aboard Amtrak's Southwest Chief to La Plata, Mo., and Winslow, Ariz., and the trip report for Trainweb is here.

New TrainWeb dispatch

A new travel post, about our short hops earlier this week on a pair of workaday Amtrak trains on the Atlantic Coast, is on my TrainWeb site.

Snag that low bucket fare

There's a new post on my train travel site. It's all about a new online tool that helps one score the lowest prices for Amtrak tickets.

On to Arizona

Wanderlust strikes again.

The Lady Friend and I have booked a trip to Winslow, Arizona, in early April. We will be traveling aboard Amtrak's Southwest Chief and I will be wearing my new official outfit as a Field Reporter for Trainweb.com and Railnews.net.

Actually the uniform consists of a big camera and a small press card, to be flashed at opportune moments in the hope of impressing officialdom.

Why Winslow? The town used to be an important stop on Route US 66 on the way to L.A., but the coming of the Interstates and the decline of passenger railroading nearly turned the place into a ghost town.

But it has struggled back. Its chief attraction is the restored La Posada Hotel, built in 1930 by the Fred Harvey chain as a waypoint on the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Beautiful (and properly chaperoned) young ladies known as Harvey Girls greeted weary travelers from both the highway and the high iron, and fed them in the roomy restaurant. We'll be staying there two nights.

The hotel lies spang on the busy Burlington Northern Santa Fe main line, affording camera-bedecked railfans (who me?) considerable opportunity for photography from deck chairs scattered about the property. The Amtrak station occupies part of the hotel grounds.

Good thing, for there isn't much else to do in Winslow proper. Homolovi Ruins State Park just north of town has been closed for the last year by budget-beleaguered Arizona, but is reopening March 18, and we'll pay it a visit. We are also renting a car and will either drive 67 miles north to see the Hopi pueblos near the Four Corners so magnificently celebrated in Tony Hillerman's mysteries, or head 20 miles west to Meteor Crater, the mile-wide hole blasted out of the ground by an asteroid 50,000 years ago.

There will of course be a full report.

There will also be a full dispatch on our night's stopover along the way at La Plata, Missouri, and the Depot Inn & Suites, headquarters of Trainweb/Railnet. I've been there once and enjoyed it mightily (reports are here and here).

'Booooard!

Aboard the City of New Orleans

Our train trip to New Orleans last week was the same as every other Amtrak ride we've taken in the last year: Fine, with a couple of niggles.

The niggles first.

The sleeping cars on the City of New Orleans both ways were reasonably comfortable, but they are showing their age. They were from the original two-story Superliner order of 1979-81, and were rebuilt some time in the 1990s. Now the refurbishing has lost its shine. The interior looks OK for the most part, but seams -- especially in the bathrooms -- are gaping and no amount of caulking can bridge them.

What's more, the in-room electrical outlets in our roomettes in both northbound and southbound sleepers were not working. Fortunately this was not a writing trip laboring over a laptop, or I would have been upset. I was able to recharge my iPod Touch in the "Cross Country Cafe" dining car, which has outlets at every seat.

The closet door of the southbound roomette wouldn't latch shut. This is why veteran Amtrak travelers bring along a roll of duct tape, the world's greatest rattle-dampener.

During the night on the southbound trip, one of the two footlatches that hold down the roomette seats to form a lower bunk slipped open, causing one seat to slide partially back and giving me the sensation of trying to sleep on the edge of a ski jump. This happened at 3 a.m. and I decided not to awaken the Lady Friend in the berth above me by calling the attendant for a fix. So I got up and read in an empty roomette until breakfast at 6:30 a.m. (Later I learned that it would have taken the attendant 20 seconds to push the bed back down and pull up on the footlatch to secure it.)

These sleeping cars clearly are due for another rebuild, but the refurbished dining and lounge cars were nearly spanking fresh -- no complaints there.

I did venture into one of the three coaches behind the lounge car to use a downstairs bathroom, and was horrified. All four bathrooms in the tattered old coach were damp, filthy and bedecked with tendrils and scraps of toilet paper. Either the riders had no manners or the attendant was too lazy or overwhelmed to police the place.

Otherwise I found no fault with the service crews in both directions. Our southbound sleeper attendant seemed to spend a lot of time chatting with other crew in the dining car, but he was always present when we wanted him. The northbound attendant was quite solicitous, checking with us often to see if we needed anything. And the dining-car waitstaffs were both efficient and friendly.

The cuisine? Acceptable American Road Food, nothing more -- and nothing less. I did not try the special New Orleans dishes. At lunch on the southbound, there was no salad to go with the gumbo, and at dinner on the northbound I decided the New York strip steak was likely to be the most reliable item on the menu. (Amtrak steak dinners are consistently superior to the other dishes.)

One does not ride the City of New Orleans for the scenery. Southbound in January, first light does not come until after Memphis, and the trackside views of Tennessee and Mississippi are unremarkable, unless one has a soft spot for derelict industrial buildings and auto graveyards.

Only in the last hour (or first, northbound) of the ride does the scenery become interesting as the train speeds through Louisiana bayou country and past Lake Pontchartrain. Hundreds and hundreds of egrets and pelicans nest in cypress swamps along the tracks. Getting good photos from the train is not easy, because the City of New Orleans pounds along seemingly at better than 70 miles an hour on the straight stretches. The scenery just zips by too fast.

There was a brief item of interest on the northbound train: three security dogs (two German shepherds and a black Lab) handled by a four-person team of Amtrak cops. They all watched the passengers passing through the portal at New Orleans Union Terminal, the dogs' noses close by. The two shepherds rode in the lounge car, their handlers telling passersby gently but firmly not to pet them because they were working. The Lab rode in the crew car behind the locomotive.

All three dogs debarked (excuse me) at the first stop, Hammond in central Louisiana, and did their sniffy thing in the hold of the baggage-coach behind the lounge car as we watched. It made sense. If drug smugglers or terrorists manage to slip through the Port of New Orleans, they might think loading their contraband or bombs at a station down the line would fool the cops. I suspect the dog teams inspect the trains at random, dividing their time among three runs that begin in the Big Easy -- the City of New Orleans, the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles and the Crescent to Washington and New York.

Or maybe it's all for show. When we asked a conductor in the lounge car if the dogs were hunting drugs or explosives, he rolled his eyes, waggled his eyebrows and said with a wry smile, "Sorry, I can't say."

The timekeeping? Both trains ran 20 to 30 minutes late most of the way, but thanks to schedule padding arrived in New Orleans and Chicago on time -- or close to it.

Streetcars of New Orleans

A classic St. Charles Ave. streetcar turns around on New Orleans' Canal Street.

For the tourist who is an unreconstructed rail buff, the streetcars of New Orleans are a powerful attraction, and of course I just had to ride them during my recent two-day visit to the Big Easy.

Actually, I had time to patronize just one of the three lines -- the oldest, the 7 1/2-mile-long St. Charles Avenue line, which has existed since 1835. One morning I rode it for several miles west from Canal Street along the Garden District all the way to Tulane University, and was struck by the fact that native New Orleanians, not just tourists, ride the line heavily. That should not be surprising, for each ride costs just $1.25, and seniors and PWDs get a discount. (In Chicago, the regular fare is $2.25.)

The St. Charles line has an interesting history. Originally steam locomotives pulled the cars, but when those who lived along the street finally had their fill of smoke and cinders, horses and mules were employed as motive power. That's backwards. Usually early streetcar lines began with horses and later moved to steam.

In 1893 the line was electrified.

Rail buffs notice instantly that the distance between rails is 5 feet 2 1/2 inches, not the conventional 4 feet 8 1/2 inches of American railroading. Supposedly broad-gauge tracks give a better, stabler ride with less rocking.  One of the other two lines, the Riverfront line, was originally built in 1988 to the 4 feet 8 1/2 inch standard, but was regauged in 1997 to broad gauge so that its cars could run on the other two lines to the storage barns.

The colorful red cars on the Canal St. and Riverfront lines are fairly new or recent rebuilds, but the classic green Perley Thomas streetcars on the St. Charles run date back to 1923 and 1924.

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked the city in 2005, all the lines were badly damaged and the red cars were ruined by floodwaters. The green cars, however, had been stored on high ground and escaped damage. Not until late 2008 were all three lines fully restored to service.

New Orleans clearly loves its streetcars. The Lady Friend and I noticed that the motormen and motorwomen, like service people everywhere in the city, are unfailingly kind to everyone, locals and tourists, and are quick to give directions when asked. That, in our experience, rarely happens in Chicago or New York.

That shouldn't be surprising. New Orleans still has not completely recovered from Katrina, and its people know that the best way to attract tourists again is to make them feel welcome and perhaps valued for something more than their money.

They sure did me.

FEBRUARY 7: The New York Times' transit blog reports that New Orleans plans to expand its streetcar lines in a big way.

The motorman's view down St. Charles Street in the Garden District.

City of New Orleans

Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

I never heard Arlo Guthrie sing Steve Goodman's immortal lyrics, but after the first of the year the Lady Friend and I will do the next best thing: we'll experience them by riding Amtrak's version of the City of New Orleans.

Our trip will be just a 19-hour, 934-mile overnight joyride for a couple of days in New Orleans. We'll enjoy coffee and beignets at the Morning Call, po'boys for lunch and Cajun cuisine for dinner, and we'll exercise our cameras in the Vieux Carre. Then we'll return to Chicago on the northbound CONO.

It'll be our first trip on Numbers 58 and 59, although both of us have ridden the Chicago-to-West-Coast trains, especially Nos. 5 and 6 (the California Zephyr) countless times.

As Amtrak hardware the CONO is nothing special -- several double-deck Superliners and one P42 engine, same as everywhere else except the East Coast, where single-level trains must run. There's one difference: the on-board cuisine is said to have a distinct Cajun flavor -- bread pudding and redbeans and rice, for instance. I'm a sucker for both.

The last three times I've ridden a long-distance Amtrak train, the on-board experience has been much better than it was in the early 2000s. The once spotty dining-car cuisine has improved to reliable American-Road-Food standards, and seemingly the service crews have been to both efficiency and charm schools.

Afterward I'll of course post a full report for the civilized travelers among you.

Boon for Amtrak?

"If you touch my junk I'll have you arrested!"

That latest airport catchphrase is unlikely to echo throughout an American railroad station, at least today and maybe forever. Why?

Even though detonating a bomb on a concourse of Chicago Union Station during rush hour could kill hundreds of people, today's terrorists have rarely been interested in going after railroad passengers, notwithstanding a few terrible incidents in Europe.

Disaster aloft is psychologically more devastating than disaster on the ground, and Al Qaeda terrorists want to make the boldest statement possible -- to kill people in the thousands and disrupt air travel. Let's face it: they have done just that last.

For the time being, the average commuter train or Amtrak passenger will rarely if ever see evidence of Homeland Security on the job. From time to time and just for show, agents will spot-check luggage and patrol platforms with dogs, but most TSA efforts on the rails are modest and take place behind the scenes.

This has not gone unnoticed among travelers. It goes almost without saying that the increasing tension and bother of flying commercial is going to be good for Amtrak's numbers. Riders between Chicago and Washington and Chicago and New York, for instance, are going to think about choosing eighteen relaxed hours aboard an overnight train rather than four agitated hours in an airport and aboard a packed airplane.

Aboard a train they can carry what they want (within reason, of course) in their luggage without worrying about setting off X-ray machines, alerting checked baggage searchers or running up overweight charges. They can get up from roomy seats and move around and interact with their fellow passengers rather than submit themselves to full frontal video viewing or the indignity of genital groping.

When they consider the choices, many passengers will very likely choose train time over airplane rage.

There would, however, be a downside to increased popularity: a huge jump in the numbers of railroad passengers is bound to strain Amtrak's limited capabilities. It barely has enough cars and locomotives to handle its present loads. Increased demand for already expensive sleeping car accommodations could well result in sharply higher prices for roomettes and bedrooms. Amtrak may be a government entity, but it follows the laws of supply and demand when setting fares.

Retirees, vacationers, foreign tourists, the obese and/or disabled, those fearful of flying -- all of which make up most of Amtrak's clientele -- might find themselves priced out of a mode of travel that has been both comfortable and affordable.

I hope that doesn't happen but worry that it will.