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Seriously good advice. We almost always book a hotel in Chicago within the Loop and schedule our onward train for the next day. But it's getting pricier to stay within a reasonable walk from Union Station, unfortunately, so your idea of staying somewhere in the outer 'burbs has appeal. Any...

There are certain safety advantages in any crash involving rapid deceleration if you are sitting in rear facing seats. Being forced backward with the seat as a brace for your back is less likely to result in injury than being thrown forwards with only a narrow seatbelt concentrating that force...

On our recent trip westbound on the Builder, there were frequent announcements to that effect, and once a plaintive warning that people using the space for consuming food they brought on board would be removed from the area. (How, they didn't say...)

I would have thought that simply using a car would be less risky for drug smuggling, since there's no security checking before renting a car, either. Maybe folks without driver's license IDs need to resort to Amtrak for their smuggling transportation needs?

In our case, we were emailed a whole new ticket automatically.

I went back onto the website, using Chrome actually, and used the chat function to see if they could figure out what was wrong. After sharing my screen with the Chat person (luckily not Julie!) she confirmed that I'd done everything correctly but for some reason the website wasn't responding...

A friend contacted me, knowing I'd taken Amtrak LD trains before, to help him schedule a trip between Seattle and Memphis. He said he's been unable to get a train combo to turn up on the website. Now, I knew that there is an easy two train combination to make that route work: EB Seattle to...

Well, cheese isn't necessarily vegetarian. If it is clabbered with animal rennet, it isn't vegetarian, but if it is made with microbial enzymes, it is. British labeling of cheese makes it easy to tell the difference, using the label term Suitable for vegetarians when no cow's rennet was used.

Just returned from a trip on the westbound Empire Builder with the new menu. Overall, there are fewer options, not a good thing. And no indication that you are allowed to ask for a lunch item at dinner, especially unfortunate with options being reduced. But here is my review of the good, the...

One other aspect of the Bid Up process I should mention is that we had a connection on our reservation, leaving from Seattle on the CS in coach and the from Portland to Chicago in a roommate as booked. (Our nephew was going to meet us at the station in Portland to wish my husband a happy...

Tech non-savvy boomer here, with a tip: We're booked on the Empire Builder, Portland to Chicago in a roomette, and when I got the email that we could try for a bedroom I thought I'd go for it. I filled out the form, got all the way to the end, but the Place Your Bid bar wouldn't register. Tried...

The CZ is probably the single most popular long distance train for scenery, and it sells out sleepers fast. Assuming you mean this coming May, you need to hop on this right away. There is a new, non-Amtrak website for checking prices across a series of dates, railforless.us. It has just gone...

Is there any problem for passengers coming or going from Lancaster? We are headed that way in March and returning from that station late April.

Low costs airlines, post deregulation, have often been shortlived. According to the GAO, in the first twenty five years of airline de-regulation there were 160 airline bankruptcies, most of which ended up terminal for the airlines in question. The economics of airlines is not as simple as most...

It is true that winter is the rainy season on the West Coast, but where it is rainiest depends on which of two weather oscillations happens that year: In El Nino years, like this winter, most of the storms track southward into California, and the Pacific Northwest is comparatively drier. LA and...

Definitely call Amtrak Guest Rewards. You don't have to be using points, though of course you can. And they will apply your voucher, no problem. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother trying to book online or via agents rustled up by Julie. Just be sure to have your AGR number...

Yikes! I'm traveling to Portland seven weeks from tomorrow to catch the EB from there (and say happy birthday to a friend at the Portland Amtrak station). Wonder if I'll be in trouble if six weeks means instead "most of the spring."

Minimum liability coverage in general is completely inadequate to cover the predicted costs of accidents. Maybe a little more can be squeezed out of the defendant in a bankruptcy proceeding, but that's pretty much it, unless you have a business or are an individual with assets to supplement the...

On the anti-icing system problem, it already exists in some existing Boeing planes approved by the FAA for flight. Boeing and the FAA's rationale for allowing this is that pilots are aware of the issue and can turn the system on and off as needed. Unfortunately, all it takes is one flight crew...

That would have required keeping on the engineering and design staff at Renton, which would have been the kind of expense that depresses shareholder value and makes new aircraft expensive. Having to work with legacy computer code that new engineering graduates don't know meant that the later...