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I have two words for you: diaper rationing. 30 minutes late on a 24 hour trip is not horrible. That's only 2% late. But 24 hours late on a 18.6 hour trip is 129% late. That's packing a lunch, eating it, then eating the snacks you packed because you know Amtrak runs late very often, then having another five meals on the train that you didn't plan for, because you never expected even Amtrak to screw up this badly. And this was before mobile hotspots. It was finishing your book, then finishing all the puzzles in your GAMES Magazine, then rereading all of yesterday's newspaper, down to the obituaries from a city you don't even live in, then staring out your window at the featureless nothingness of the Great Plains. Your traveling companions go from "what an adventure!" to "maybe air travel with a baby over a holiday weekend wouldn't have been so bad," to pandemic cabin fever, to plotting the violent overthrow of the conductor with the guy you just met in the next car. A ranking executive of Amtrak would literally have to kiss me on my literal ass and hand me a free first-class private sleeper cabin ticket before I would even set foot in another one of their siding-idlers ever again. I did the math later, and determined that, while it would not have been accurate to say "it would have been quicker to walk", a professional touring cyclist would have been able to beat the train in a race, even including an 8-hour rest break, if he was taking all the performance-enhancing drugs and riding a faired recumbent bike. |