Boston to New Orleans on the right-of-way

I've been riding the Amtrak Crescent train from New York to New Orleans since 2pm yesterday, and I arrive at 7:30pm tonight in New Orleans, with an extra hour thrown in for the time change. Including the trip on the Northeast Corridor train from Boston, my total train time logged 35 hours. I was a bit disappointed to find that the Amtrak cars on all the East Coast trains are a lackluster variety that resemble an airplane fuselage. The long-distance cars like mine offer more legroom, but the cars are low to the ground and quite bumpy. In reading Wikipedia I learned that these cares were manufactured in the late seventies and early eighties in two batches, so now thirty years later they are antequated. The windows are small and rectangular, rather than the larger sightseeing windows that you find on the California Amtrak trains, which upgraded to double decker cars around 1991. Neither compares well to Canada's ViaRail, which I remember being much quiter and somoother. It was often the case on ViaRail that all you heard was the squeeking of the car connectors, especially when the ventilation system shut off, which seemed frequent. So in summary, it would be nice to see Amtrak update its fleeet, and I'm going to read a .pdf on its fleet upgrade plans as soon as I have broader band.

We're just pullling into Laurel, Missippi, whose stop is a somewhat modern looking brick building with a big Amtrak sign in front, as if the town itself wanted no part in promoting the train station. Mississippi and Alabama have a lot of trees and are flat, so it's interesting to arrive in a town with some cleared land. Occasionally, especially, in Georgia, I got a glimpse of some plantation style homes, but generally the properties by the tracks are quite humble, as are the towns through which we pass. The people on the train are diverse, but almost entirely black or white. Most are from the South and the accents are present but rarely overwhelming. I didn't interact with much of anyone, except my seatmate, who was an African American woman in her 40s or 50s traveling from Delaware to visit home in Mississippi. The most interesting remarks I overheard was the woman in front of me, saying she was going home to Mississippi because a friend or relative's husband had been killed when beaten in his home by robbers--the victim was in his sixties. I also heard and elderly gentlemen exclaim that he just saw a movie in a theater for the first time since 1993, when he saw Forrest Gump. I hope it was as good a movie.

More on the nature of things--I find that my fellow passengers are middle to lower class here in coach. Many of their dietary habits are poor, some of their manners are as well, such as letting there cell phones go off on a frequent interval. But they are all friendly and the mood is amicable. At first I was disappointed to see no tourists like myself, although I do have business in New Orleans. Then I decided that people using a train to simply get somewhere is a wonderful thing to experience. Most people seemed to enjoy the journey. There are only two sleeper cars on the train, which was also disappointing, since I noticed them sell out well in advance online. This points to the humble service of the train, whose main purpose is to get people to small towns whence they migrated for city jobs. But it would be nice to see the train better accomodate more economic classes of passenger. I would certainly take the sleeping car if I were traveling with a companion. The coach car can be a delicate balance of enjoying the company and being bothered by people's home habits that they bring to a public space. I still think of the train as a luxury, and it can be tough sometimes to see it as commodity travel like the airlines are. I think some of this could be solved if we have long distance high-speed rail or sub-high speeed rail, as they seem to have throughout Western Europe. The only way to really be able to pick a more granular level of luxury though is to have much more service, to get tenfold more people using trains. I think this can happen in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. If we make the networks comprehensive and zippy, and give good transit connections in the city, we can make the passenger railroad something with a very public face. We also need the rental car market to evolve so that people going to rural places can get a car painlessly, without having to worry about rental car agencies at small town stations being closed on weekends. We should be able to reseve onnline and swipe a card to go. But that's the least of my worries. Mainly I want to see our train system grow on the backs of environmental concerns, desire to have a high quality travel experience, and springboard off a spiraling oil costs.