Last April, the Antiplanner took Amtrak from Portland to Washington DC via the Coast Starlight to Sacramento, the California Zephyr to Chicago, and the Capital Limited to DC. I repeated the trip this past weekend, only taking the Empire Builder from Portland to Chicago.
I came away from last April’s trip thinking that Amtrak’s personnel were excellent, the equipment was well cared for but not spectacular, and the food was a couple of notches below Denny’s. The Empire Builder trip produced inconsistent results: the personnel were good but there were problems and the equipment was a need of a rehab (and was poorly designed in the first place). The food, however, was better and perhaps was only a very small notch below Denny’s.
Before Amtrak, railcar suppliers had made a science of developing seats that were comfortable to long-distance travelers. In 1945, a company called Heywood-Wakefield, working with the Association of American Railroads, gave Harvard University anthropologist E.A. Hooton funding to develop a comfortable seat. Hooton measured 3,867 people and proposed ideal measurements for seats that would support a wide range of people. Continue reading
