#4130

Welcome back, eh? Took off last week to boost Amtrak's earnings for 2006. My mother and I flew to Chicago and trained to Seattle on the Empire Builder, then to Los Angeles via the Coast Starlight and finished back in Maricopa (yes, a train station lives in Maricopa, Arizona) on the Texas Eagle. A nice adventure which I hope to document somewhere on the WWW. While in Seattle, nothing would do but to photograph a bus so I captured this image of one of their articulating craft. Didn't realize a right turn was imminent or would have waited to shoot and display it in full articulation. Note the electric trolly poles on the top! Seattle's streets flourished with buses and the train station held "Sounder" cars - commuter-style trains covering the length of the Puget Sound region. They don't seem quite as enchanted with their autos as Phoenix, but still not as mass transit sophisticated as New York or even Chicago.

Speaking of Chicago, we experienced the death/thrill-ride of a lifetime on the Blue Line! Our pre-train train adventure occurred as we traveled from O'Hare airport to Union Station in downtown Chicago. The trains are much like NY subway cars - a bit shorter perhaps but with that same well-worn, industrial essence. We sat at the end of the next-to-the-last car on the train, right beside the car-connecting mechanisms. Not sure if that combination of car choice and body location worked to enhance the violence of the ride or not. The train would speed up to what felt like 100 MPH and then slam down to 0 MPH in a single intake of breath. While roaring along the track, the car swayed back and forth, in extremis. Envision a game of crack-the-whip and we were the last man attached. An awesome beginning to a train adventure.

Just like riding the 6AM66, I found that people constituted the best part of our train trip. You just gotta love public transportation.