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Night train report

I'm not sure where to put this post. It's about travel, but trip reports are by European country, and this report is about travel in the US, but it does relate to subject discussed on the transportation forum.

Last week I flew from Denver to Reno to visit my brother, then came back to Denver on the California Zephyr (Amtrak night train).

On this website, we talk a lot about checked vs carry-on bags. I flew on Southwest, which has free checked bags. It seemed like there were still a lot of people carrying on bags. There was a sizer, of sorts, at the gate. It was not a box, but an 'L' shaped template with a silhouette on the vertical part and a footprint on the horizontal part. I checked my bag on it; it fit (no surprise). I didn't see anyone else checking their bags, and I saw a lot of bags carried on that would not have passed. So much for enforcing the regulations.

We had a sleeper on the trip back. I'm not sure it was worth the extra cost for the en-suite bathroom. It was hard to use it in the crowded compartment, and it was very small. The bathroom on the hall, for use by roomettes, was bigger.

Other than that, the trip was great. The meals, which were included, were very good; service was great. I had no problem sleeping. And once we got to Colorado in the morning, the scenery was spectacular.

Posted by
3335 posts

Hi Lee, I haven't been on the Zephyr yet (my H. has). I love taking the roomettes across country and north/south. I only have 2 or 3 routes left (seems I always end up on the Santa Fe route out west, so I still have trans continental (Zephyr) and Glacier routes. Pretty much covered the shorter and north south routes. It's so nice having breakfast in bed while passing through wonderful scenery! Glad it worked out for you. Wray

Posted by
1976 posts

Thanks for the report, Lee. How long was the train trip between Reno and Denver?

I took an overnight train from Champaign-Urbana to New Orleans with a friend about 8 years ago. The ride took 17 hours and we booked regular seats so needless to say we didn't get much sleep. But we were in our mid-20s so we could handle it! The scenery once we got into Lousiana was spectacular - swampland, marshes, with strange trees we don't have in the Midwest. It looked like a primeval landscape. There was an observation car with skylights on top so you could see almost everything; we spent a lot of time in there on the way down.

Posted by
19274 posts

We got on the train in Reno at about 4 pm PDT and got off about 6 PM MST, so it was 27 hours, but we spent an extra hour in Salt Lake City waiting for standard time to "catch up" with the schedule (we went off daylight savings time that night), so it normally would have been 26 hours.

The observation car was great with the skylights, particularly going through Glenwood Canyon, with it's shear rock walls.

There are three kinds of accommodations, reclining coach seats, 2 person roomettes with common bathrooms, and 3 person rooms with en-suit bathrooms. The coach seats had an enormous amount of leg room. The roomettes had two facing seats and were only a little wider than the seats. The lower bunk in the room was wide enough for two, but the bathroom was extremely tight. Several times I used the bathroom on the aisle because it was bigger.

Posted by
10200 posts

This sounds super cool. Thanks for sharing Lee. Sounds like something I might be able to tempt my parents into doing with me.