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The past four days, we have had a heat wave, followed by smoke, in the Willamette Valley. I took the opportunity to go to Newport, on the coast, using the Albany-> Newport shuttle bus from Corvallis to the coast, which is also an Amtrak cross-ticketed bus. It takes a little bit longer than an...

Currently, there is a city bus between Hood River and White Salmon, which, opposite to most city buses, runs only on the weekends. I think it is a summer time thing. When the Pioneer and Empire Builder were both running, did they have staggered schedules? Because one of the reasons for having a...

I imagine that Hood River would be an ideal stop on the Pioneer, because it would benefit tourist related businesses, which are very important, and also would be a big convenience for a lot of locals. I imagine that it wouldn't be too hard to share the station between Amtrak and an excursion...

I continue to make good use of my summer, or try to! I am putting this in here, even though Hood River isn't really in the Willamette Valley. Similar idea, though! The video is pretty self-explanatory, but Hood River is about 50 miles east of Portland. From a transit point of view, one of the...

Interestingly enough, the routes that I ride most frequently aren't the routes that I've ridden totally. On one trip, the only routes I've taken end to end are the City of New Orleans and the Lake Shore Limited (to Manhattan). I ride the Amtrak Cascades, Coast Starlight and Empire Builder...

And as I talked about in the Willamette Valley thread, a lot of that growth in air travel have been illusory, because it is only between hub cities, and flying between, say, Eugene and Pasco is not competitive with how that train journey would be---but the train trip is only offered once a day...

An intermediate distance train that would follow the Empire Builder's route between Portland/Seattle and Spokane seems like a very easy obvious thing for Amtrak, and the state DOT to pursue.

Oh, I think the Pioneer is a possibility...and it would certainly make my life easier and more interesting. But I just wanted to show how the settlement pattern is different in Eastern Oregon and Washington. Especially for rail enthusiasts (and other people) whose main experience is east of the...

This next bit is a little less exciting, but I think it is still interesting: This is from the return trip. It was dark after I boarded in West Glacier, so this record begins NE of Pasco the next morning, and mostly shows the Columbia River Gorge. A few noteworthy things: The most scenic...

It is buried deep in my video, so here is a shorter clip of it: This was a black bear encounter I had, only about 1000 feet from the park gate.

I don't know about the average, but on my trip, it was 10 minutes early into West Glacier. The worst Empire Builder delays were doing the oil boom in North Dakota, it appears to be getting better. One thing to know about Whitefish is that it is at a high latitude, and also at the Western edge...

I wouldn't recommend it in general, either, this trip was kind of a stretch for me, but I wanted to see it and this was the only way I could. One thing to mention about Glacier and its environs---it is expensive. Just from Google maps, it seems that everywhere in West Glacier, Hungry Horse...

The only thing that came to mind was that the engines looked different? Smaller, more stream-lined and more modern? But since I haven't taken the Empire Builder, I don't know how new that is. Coming out of Portland, the train was only half, so it was just two coach cars, a diner, and a sleeping...

This was a very intense trip that lasted a little over 48 hours, leaving Friday afternoon and coming back Sunday afternoon. I have done two day trips where both nights were spent on a train before, both times going to the Bay Area on the Coast Starlight. But looking at schedules, I saw that the...

I haven't posted any updates to this for a while, mostly because I've had the chance to do longer distance travel this year. In what is perhaps the least epic Amtrak ever, I took an Amtrak Thruway bus between Albany and Salem, which is a 45 minute ride. I actually grew up near Salem---which is...

Ah, too bad we didn't have a chance to meet! I could have maybe done the Albany-Eugene segment! I noticed the same disjunction when I was in the area in March, at Balboa Park, there was really no sense that the BART and MUNI were connected, they were just two lines that happened to be in the...

This actually relates to what I was saying about how much money YouTube pays for ads. Since the YouTube algorithm adjusts which ads it shows based on what videos people watch, I think that travel or tourism related videos get more money. Airlines, hotel chains, cruise lines---all are willing to...

In case anyone was interested in the finances of doing this: Most sources I can find say that, once a YouTuber is monetized, they get around 3-5 dollars per 1000 views on a video. So a video with 10,000 views makes about 50 dollars. And a video with 100,000 views makes about 500 dollars. So as...

This channel has amazingly diverse content: It includes both local and long distance rail, in many countries, as well as planes and buses. They are low-key videos, first person footage, with voice-overs, and talking about a lot of technical specs.

Tom Scott is not exclusively or even mostly a train or transit YouTuber, but he has more than a few videos about railroads and transportation in general, and they are of high quality. Tom Scott is great because he uses the YouTube format so well---he combines the personal feeling of a YouTube...