Well Sunday night I did make it back on the Cardinal (which was following a quick trip down on the 3:00pm Hiawatha Service, much emptier since a Saturday) after an amazing fun night and day spent in the Dome Car Ocean View in the perfect location on the train as the very last car. The train itself was on time into New York but the schedule did have an extra hour of padding because of Daylight Savings Time that we needed almost exactly. If the train had been on time we would have spent this hour sitting in the spectacular art deco station there, we still arrived early enough for me to run in and get a few quick photos. The New River George in daylight was as scenic as any of the scenery I’ve seen on my adventures but I was not totally blown away by it. The dome was fun for watching the scenery but the windows were so dirty that I was better off running back to the Amfleet Coaches to get my photos. Needless to say I didn’t do that and just stayed in the dome car. I also had fun meeting plenty of other rail fans, including some that had ridden the train out and back on the same day just to ride the dome. The whole dome car experience is definitely a trip I would recommend and hope to be able to do it on the Adirondack as well in the near future (needless to say I am not ruling out doing the Cardinal again).
I have switched gears from actively traveling for the past month to archiving my travels and going through the over 12,000 photos (those station photo essays require lots of work) that I took on the trip. The first goal is to write up a comprehensive photo journal type trip log for every train I rode during the trip. Here is a teaser of the TripLog:
While writing this portion of the TripLog on the Empire Builder, I added too and made new these three Amtrak Stations:
- Wishram, WA–(15 photos)
- Pasco, WA–(22 photos)
- Spokane, WA–(Page Rebuilt with 50 new photos)
- Havre, MT–(page rebuilt with 14 new photos)
Enjoy!