Last week, I traveled from Arkadelphia, AR to Pittsburgh, PA on Amtrak. There were two legs: Sunday night I embarked from Arkadelphia on the Texas Eagle, arriving in Chicago Monday afternoon. Then, I spent Monday night on the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Pittsburgh. This was my first time on either of those railways: I’ve taken Northeast Regional and Acela between Boston and New York numerous times, and Keystone Service to Philadelphia once. This was also my longest Amtrak journey to date by far: Boston to New York on the Northeast Regional was previously my longest Amtrak trip. To be honest, I don’t know nearly as much about trains as some Amtrak enthusiasts, so this post won’t be very detailed in that regard, but I do really enjoy traveling by train and was excited to be able to do this.

The Schedule

My first train, the Texas Eagle, left Arkadelphia, AR just after 10 p.m. on Sunday, November 19th. That train ran mostly on time, with delays of only a few minutes at some points, and then actually arrived about 20 minutes early, around 1:30 p.m. (my memory isn’t very precise and I didn’t take notes for this post like I had intended to) in Chicago on Monday the 20th. This was the end of the Texas Eagle route, which runs from San Antonio to Chicago.

The Capitol Limited route runs from Chicago to D.C., and my train was supposed to begin its journey at 6:40 p.m. Monday. Due to mechanical issues they had to switch out the engine, though, causing a 75 minute delay. Then, Amtrak often doesn’t budget quite enough time for boarding, so the second train ended up pulling out of Union Station just after 8 p.m.

I’ll note here that this isn’t my first experience of an Amtrak train being badly delayed. One journey from Boston to New York that I took in fall of 2022 was significantly delayed for similar reasons. This is something to note if you haven’t traveled on Amtrak before, are considering it, and still have the stereotype ingrained in your psyche about trains always running on time. That may be the case in the Eastern hemisphere but in my experience it doesn’t hold up in the U.S.

I don’t mind the occasional delay so much, but I do have the qualm that Amtrak should be more proactive about communicating about delays. If you provide your phone number when booking your ticket, they will text you details about delays in your departure, but generally not until after the originally scheduled time. In Union Station the departures board updated a good 30 minutes before Amtrak sent a text out or updated the information available in their app. This also makes their delay alerts pretty much useless when it comes to arrival times. I always find myself using RailRat extensively when I take Amtrak, especially when there are delays because RailRat will estimate how much time the train might make up.

We were originally scheduled to arrive in Pittsburgh at 5:05 a.m., and I was assuming that we would be able to make up a bit of time after the delays at the start of the route – so was RailRat.net – but that did not end up being the case. I got into PIT sometime after 6 a.m., which was a very welcomed development for my sister, who picked me up.

Transfer in Chicago

I worked remotely on Monday, so when my first train arrived I found a coffee shop in Chicago where I could finish out my workday. This was my first time ever visiting Chicago, and it would have been nice to take Monday afternoon off to do more sightseeing, but I actually had to pull this trip together relatively last-minute so I wanted to avoid requesting PTO. I live and work in NYC, though, so thanks to the time difference I was able to log off at 4 p.m. and spend a little while walking around downtown.

One of the great advantages of taking the train over flying is the fact that, unlike airports, which are massive, loud logistical nightmares that must be relegated to the outskirts of a city, train stations can blend right into a city’s downtown, so that’s where they usually are found. Not to mention many train stations were built back when America took more pride in its public spaces, so many stations, like Chicago’s Union Station, which serves Amtrak, and New York’s Grand Central Station, which does not, are really quite beautiful.

It was exciting to get off the train, leave the station and be right in Downtown Chicago. It was easy to find a nice place to sit and work in walking distance, and then afterwards walk past the Buckingham Fountain to the shore of Lake Michigan – my first time seeing a great lake! – and then on to The Bean. Overall I spent about an hour and a half walking around, ticking the bean off of my “essential American things to see, for some reason” list and just enjoying the self-satisfaction of being in such a big and influential city for the first time. I could have comfortably spent another 45 minutes out in Chicago, even without the delay, but at this point I was tired of hauling my luggage (just a backpack and a small duffel, I’m a light packer, but still) around, so I made my way back to the station.

Price

I paid \$296 total for the journey. Because of when I was booking it, it didn’t cost much more than flying, which would have been about \$200. (This was a big part of what made this trip feel like a golden opportunity to try traveling by Amtrak.)

I packed food for the journey and didn’t end up buying any from the cafe car. I did get a black coffee Monday morning, for about \$3. I’ve bought food on Amtrak rides between NYC and Boston and it’s pretty reasonable.

The train ride

The train rides themselves were uneventful, mostly spent sleeping or watching the nighttime landscape go by. Since I was working on Monday, that held my attention for basically all of the daylight hours I spent on the train.

Before work I went to the cafe car for coffee; I was planning to check my email while I was waiting for the line to go down and then while I was drinking my coffee but the attendant working that day didn’t seem to want people to have computers out in the cafe car. She explained that there weren’t many tables and they were meant for customers, which is reasonable, but there were plenty of empty seats and I’ve never had trouble working from the cafe car between NYC and Boston, which is a much more crowded route.

Anyways, since I didn’t want to juggle my coffee and computer at my seat, this pushed me to take a quiet moment to sip my coffee and enjoy the ride, so it was a good thing after all. This guy who is apparently a gold prospector struck up a conversation with me; he apparently lives outdoors and looked and talked like he had come straight out of a Western novel.

Philosophical reflections about the train ride

I’ve noticed people are pretty chatty on trains, myself included, even moreso than on planes. On my second train, I chatted with the person sitting next to me for the first hour or so of the trip. Once on the Northeast Regional I was sitting at the cafe car and the woman across from me struck up a conversation by offering me a glass of wine. It was a great introduction! This is probably because I haven’t owned a car in a few years now, but lately whenever I travel I can’t help but dwell on how much traveling makes us rely on other people. If someone doesn’t let you on a plane, or train, or bus, or it doesn’t depart on time, or encounters delays along the way – you can’t do anything about it besides try again. Travel, especially over long distances, requires the joint efforts of so many people.

I do think that spending days on Amtrak makes people appreciate that. There’s no choice but to acknowledge that you’re on the train with whoever else happens to be there, for however long it takes. I do think it makes people more chatty. I think transit is also a kind of liminal space that frees us of the pressure to always be “doing something,” making it easier to idly chat.

The first leg of my trip was also a new experience in that, for the first hour or so, most of the people in Coach with me were people I never would have encountered otherwise. I started my journey in the small town that my wealthy, sheltered, and frankly quite racist grandparents live in. Though I’ve spent a lot of time there, it’s mostly been at or near their house, and I haven’t had many encounters with the regular people who live there. I hadn’t thought about this before but it does make perfect sense that many of the people on an overnight, Arkansas Amtrak would be there because they just need to get to, or back to, Little Rock and their families don’t have extra cars for them to use for the journey.

It reminds me of something that’s especially been driven home for me since I moved to NYC, which is the importance of coming into contact, no matter how casual, with people from different walks of life. There’s a reason that New York’s richest and most powerful silo themselves in private cars, or even helicopters, and spin myths that the subways and buses aren’t safe. If they were around regular people too much it would be hard to keep normalizing the levels of greed and luxury that most of us can hardly even comprehend.

Overall

Anyways, that’s enough rambling from me. For this last section I’m going to go over whether choosing the train over flying is worth it. Spoiler alert: I definitely want to do something like this again!

My biggest point of nervousness going it was that I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep on Coach class. I hadn’t been on an Amtrak superliner before, though, and those trains are great for sleeping overnight. I’ve done one overnight trip on the Northeast Regional, and I wouldn’t recommend that, but for a longer-distance journey it’s not hard to get a decent night’s sleep, even in Coach. The seats recline very far and have a foot rest that comes up. The caveat here is that I’m a shorter guy; if you’re tall you may not find it as comfortable as I did.

The one problem with Coach class is that you have to choose between the aisle seat, where it’s not quite as easy to sleep without the window to lean against, and the window seat, where you have to wake a stranger up if you need to use the restroom or get water or what-have-you. I think it’d be fun to try getting a roomette someday, which I had assumed I’d only do if I was traveling with a companion so we could split the cost.1 After this trip, though, I actually think Coach would be better with a companion since it wouldn’t be so awkward for the window-seat passenger to ask the aisle-seat passenger for egress.

So, on whether to get a room or travel in Coach: I would probably get a roommette for the middle night of a 3-or-more-night journey, for access to the sleeper car’s showers and the dining car, regardless of whether I was traveling with another person or not.

As far as whether to travel Amtrak over flying or driving: Personally I find the experience of traveling by train exciting and fun. Usually the obstacles come down to price, the length of the journey, and often-inopportune departure and arrival times.

Price: Amtrak is usually more expensive than flying, as far as I can tell, though I’m the type to wake up very early or take a couple of hours off of work to save money on plane tickets. I was pleasantly surprised that this train fare was not much more expensive than flying would have been: In the Northeastern US (Northeast Regional and Acela), Amtrak fare is notoriously extremely expensive if you book too last-minute, but that seems not to have been the case when I booked my Texas Eagle and Capitol Limited tickets just a couple of weeks out. So, YMMV.

Duration: Unless you are a train enthusiast whose goal is to ride the Amtrak network, duration is generally going to be a pretty big issue with Amtrak, especially compared to flying. Although Amtrak goes downtown-to-downtown, meaning no more dealing with trips out to the airport, it is slow. The only Amtrak train to qualify as high-speed rail is the Acela, and it only actually travels at high speeds for 50 miles of its route (20 minutes!) between New York and Boston. Usually an Amtrak train travels about the same speed as a car, if not slower, not to mention the stops.

Since I’m lucky enough to be able to work remotely when I need to, long train trips such an issue for me: I’d be perfectly happy to take a few days of time off from work for vacation plus a few days of work from “home” time from the train. However, my girlfriend works in education, a decidedly not remote-friendly line of work, so I am well aware that this isn’t an option for everyone. If we were to travel to Niagara Falls for vacation and wanted to do it by train, she’d have to take two additional days off from work just to sit on the train – understandably not ideal. Flying is the obvious choice if time is of the essence.

That being said, since Amtrak often does go about the same speed as a car, I’d say it easily wins out over driving in this regard. Several hours of having to watch the road, not being able to do anything besides listen to podcasts and make phone calls, are quite different from several hours of doing whatever you want – exploring the train, reading a book, sipping a coffee, or whatever stuff on the internet Amtrak’s free Wi-Fi (or your cell plan) will support. Although I like driving, and used to love driving, since I’ve settled in New York where I don’t need a car, I’ve grown to really not like the idea of spending my time stuck behind the wheel.

Departure and arrival times: The big wildcard with Amtrak is when the train will actually be at the stations that you need. Since train travel is not (nearly!) as popular as flying here in the US, whereas flights tend to have several options per day per airline, most Amtrak routes tend to only get a couple of trains each day per direction. In the case of my grandparents’ town, there is only one train in each direction per day! The Northbound train was at 10 p.m., which worked out fine for me, but the Southbound train departs at something like 3 a.m. – my grandparents wouldn’t have been able to drop me off, and I wouldn’t want to be awake at that hour anyways. But, trains have to be somewhere at the witching hour, and with only three trains running a route that takes 3 days, it makes sense that that “somewhere” will sometimes be your destination.

Or, if you’re going on vacation, you might have to leave at sometime that forces you to take the day off from work, like 11 a.m., only to arrive at your destination late at night when you will just need to go straight to your hotel.

If only Amtrak had more passengers, and could justify running more trains on each route! Then this wouldn’t be such an issue. Which gets to the final thing to consider: If you like the idea of rail travel in the US, which many young Americans seem to, then the best way to support that is to start traveling by train now. If you have climate dread and wish people were generally more comfortable with things moving a bit (or a lot) slower – then those are great reasons to take the train! As someone who wishes that the US had a faster, more comprehensive rail network, I was excited to put my money where my mouth is, per se, and actually demonstrate that by traveling by train instead of flying. Maybe that will be a draw for you, too.

Overall, for me, I would definitely like to travel on Amtrak more, and I am sure I will continue to do so occasionally, but for the time being it won’t be able to replace flying. I’d like to keep traveling by train whenever the opportunity strikes, but unfortunately right now that’s still a big “when.”

I hope this was of interest, or at least provided a useful data point, for anyone who has considered traveling on Amtrak but not done it yet, or at least not very much. Feel free to drop me a line with any questions you may have – my email is tyler (at) (this website).

  1. Today I learned that even if you get a room or roommette for two people, that doesn’t mean you get to each just pay half. They make the second passenger pay a pretty hefty fee for their ticket (in the case I tested, even more than the price of a coach ticket!) even though there is no seat associated with it. ↩