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"Only 3 1/2 countries" still on customary units seems quite a significant undercount. There are indeed only 3 that use them for almost everything --- but I suspect there are more than we can count on our fingers that are only half-metric. Canada had good intentions of going fully metric, and...

Arizona is a big snowbird destination -- but there isn't any one place it draws from, the way the Northeast sends people to Florida. I think Chicago-Phoenix is a much more promising option than Seattle-Phoenix, but it's still a 36-hour trip. If you are looking for one-night ride in the west...

Just a slip of the finger, I am sure, but for anyone not familiar... the rare daylight scenery pictured is the Kootenai River, between Bonners Ferry and Libby.

I appreciate the 'official' confirmation that 2 units through to Seattle did happen regularly for a while. (I was in Alaska until 2011, and in Idaho 2011-2016, so didn't see it on a daily basis during that timeframe.) Unlike you, I have yet to ever ride a Seattle Builder with 2 locomotives. I...

They do not. You can see the Seattle section on the Skykomish webcam daily, and it is routinely pulled by a single locomotive, even when it carries one private or deadhead car in addition to the baggage+5 superliners that has been this summer's standard consist. The days that I have seen two...

I think we have a winner here. In the Superliner I era, we had ex-ATSF transition coaches. Now we have transition sleepers. (It was, in my experience, rare that passengers were ever seated, or even allowed into, the transition coaches, except on really crowded Coast Starlights - so you could...

As others have said, the lounge goes to Portland, as it always has. Private cars for Seattle (and deadhead cars for other Amtrak trains in Seattle) are carried ahead of the baggage car. Private cars for Portland are carried behind the Portland sleeper. Never double switching in Portland: the...

Definitely not an issue unique to the PNW. There are some cities all over the country with bad last-mile problems --- especially so if you want to build new stations rather than restore abandoned inner-city stations --- and others that do really well. It's a rare situation where Amtrak has much...

The 'bad ride on the rear' problem seems to me to be a Viewliner-specific issue... I have never had a problem in the Portland sleeper on the Empire Builder, and don't remember feeling much difference between front and rear in Heritage days. The horn is noticeably louder when you are up front -...

That and, um, the tracks aren't for sale and in all likelihood never will be. Dennis Washington is doing quite well for himself with them - and BNSF is wishing it hadn't given him a 99-year lease.

The last time I needed a taxi in Seattle (pre-covid), I found a modest row of them waiting as soon as I stepped outside, much as seen in the above photo --- and the cab driver had a text message up on his dashboard screen, telling him what time the Builder was arriving and how many passengers...

The Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority is seeing dollar signs in its dreams, now that Biden's infrastructure bill is alive: https://www.kpax.com/news/montana-news/montana-rail-authority-gains-new-members-eyes-infrastructure-funding I can't imagine a NCH restoration actually coming in ahead of...

A decade ago they were still very common on Alaska and Horizon. Not just Fairbanks - Anchorage - Seattle, but lots of run-throughs like Anchorage-Seattle-Phoenix, so that they could advertise lots of direct service. They never made you disembark at the intermediate terminal for those. A quick...

This is a new, and very sensible, change. I rode five offseason Builders in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Four of those the transdorm was 31 (the fifth I was in the Portland sleeper and didn't get a chance to see.) The first time I remember thinking "wow, wonder why we have two Seattle sleepers in the...

At least on the Builder, the practice is to treat 17-24 sort of like "an extension of the top level of the full sleeper", with access only via the door in the full sleeper and walking forward, not via the lower level of the transdorm. Under those circumstances "1-10 upstairs, low teens...

Usually means that one of the units is deemed unreliable enough that a spare is needed (or that the host railroad requires the spare for some other, usually-weather-related, reason: late in a previous millennium, UP required the Pioneer to run with 2 units in winter.)

The pre-covid schedule rotated the trainsets, so that it wasn't the same equipment spending the night "away" in Eugene every night. The current schedule would make it easy to assign one set to each Eugene-Seattle round trip and one to the Portland-Seattle trip, and maybe Oregon would prefer...

I was rather surprised to see that Salt Lake Express - which started out running buses and vans between southeast Idaho and Salt Lake City - has a) expanded so much since I last checked, and b) quit displaying a traditional style timetable sometime in the past two years or so. (Last time I had a...

Yes, too late now - timeline only mattered if it was before the railpass sale ended :)

Well, they got off on the wrong foot with me... I tried to open an account just to put my $299 rail pass, and the "instant" application is now an "up to 2 weeks review" and I had to buy the pass with another card. Not like I'll have any problem giving them $1000 of charges in the next 3 months...