First in my itinerary came the Pennsylvanian, which took me from Newark's Penn Station to Pittsburgh's ass of a station. The ugly box there with a faulty vending machine (no pretzels for me) held me and many other passengers, some Amish, for about six hours in the middle of the night while our next train, the Capitol Limited, made its way to pick us up.
Wikipedia told me that the Pittsburgh train station has been converted into condos. Passengers must wait in the Greyhound-style room because the grand old station lobby is now the condo lobby. What a deplorable bargain.
When the train finally arrived, we whisked through the night to Chicago, passing the Erie lakefront I'd bicycled along in the summertime. I managed to fall asleep right as we entered Cleveland, which was too bad because I wanted to see its myriad bridges lit up against the night.
Chicago lay covered in piles of snow, which delighted my Californian inexperience with such things. Usually when I have layovers in Chicago I love to wander around the Loop and feel like a brash pedestrian, crossing streets amidst a sea of businesspeople. But this time I holed up in a boring café and read the news for a few hours while the door blasted us patrons with icy wind every time someone entered or exited.
I usually do a good job of ignoring the people around me on the train to the extent that I need to, but there were some doozies on this trip. One woman with a deep, gravelly smoker's growl went on and on with a set of dudes about wanting a cigarette. One of the dudes contributed a smoker's bubbling cough every so often, while the other one, a tall, black trench-coated artist of some kind, made loud
misanthropic remarks.
We lost a lot of hours somewhere in Kansas, and by the time we got to Albuquerque we were way behind schedule.
I've found that it is better to retain one's equilibrium aboard the train than to suffer angrily through the delays. I think it's ridiculous that passenger rail in the United States has been so limited by private ownership of rails, where Amtrak must fit into scheduled "windows" or lose place in line entirely, leading to indeterminate wait times in the middle of nowhere. I'd love to time travel to the 1930s and have my pick of any number of luxury liners with fanciful names evoking the blissful speed of the mighty locomotive.
The modern incarnation of passenger rail did get me home eventually, just four hours after the scheduled arrival in Los Angeles. Total time across the country: 72 hours including both rail time and station time.