Chicago

It’s not that I can’t live without email for 16 hours. (Really, I can.) It’s that there’s always a horrific amount of email to deal with after that long a period.

Chicago’s usually a fine city for a quick stopover, but not if you have big luggage like I do at the moment. Union Station does have lockers, but they’re often full, and on a summer Saturday like today there’s no chance of getting one, especially since a whole Boy Scout troupe entered the area just before I did. I didn’t even bother trying.

But it’s a lovely morning in Chicago, and the final train of this trip is coming up soon.

Incidentally, Amtrak is on the whole an underrated company. Well-travelled Americans are used to moaning and lamenting concerning the way we’ve dismantled our national rail system in favor of an infinite car/truck orgy. Fair enough; there’s a serious point there. But in the process, we fail to notice an obvious fact: Amtrak trains are actually nicer and more comfortable than European or, I daresay, even Japanese trains. Not as fast or reliable, but more comfortable.

Granted, those countries have much better coverage and more frequent trains. But I still say our trains are nicer, few though they are.

The onboard service with Amtrak is generally pretty good (though once in awhile the semi-crude attitude is what you’d expect to find in a rural bowling alley). What’s usually much worse is the in-station service. In Chicago the Amtrak people are often rude and snippy, though it was even worse in Providence. The recurrent corporate pattern at the station level seems to be people who very brusquely tell you to do something, then even when you do it they subject you to a long speech about why you were wrong not already to have realize a priori that what you had done the first time was the most stupid thing ever done on the planet.