Train to Minnesota

Thursday I took the train from Montana to Minnesota.  The train was on time so that meant an early start to my day.  Still, I was ready when Patti came to give me a ride to the train station.  Or I thought I was. Halfway across Montana I realized I had left the bag of fruit at home.  At least I had left it in the refrigerator so I might have something edible when I return next month.  Or maybe not.

Since the train had not run on Wednesday those people were taking Thursday's train.  This close to the holiday season the train normally has a lot of passengers, today the train was close to full with all the extra people.

It was still kind of dark when the train arrived.  Inside the train the interior lights has not been turned yet for the day so it was difficult to find an open seat.  Many people were still sleeping and spread over two seats.  Several other people were in the same situation as me and we went up and down the car looking for the right seat.  I avoided sitting next to people going to Chicago.  Not all people going to Chicago are crazy, but enough of them are that the odds aren't good, and in the dark I couldn't tell the crazies from the normal people.

I chose a seat next to a woman going to Winona, Minnesota.  Once I woke her to get her to move off the second seat I discovered she was quite large.  She was nice - though attending college in another state (Oregon) and not really going off campus in over three years to exploring this new city and state showed a lack of depth, and she didn't have much of an outgoing personality.

A number of people got off the train several hours later at Shelby, Montana.  A pair of seats together opened up and I moved over to them so as not to be crowded in my own seat by a person who couldn't quite fit in her own seat.

That worked for a few minutes until just before the train left the station when a father and daughter got on the train.  No two seats were open together so the train car attendant went up and down the car until she decided to ask me to move and sit next to another guy in order to open the two seats.

*sigh*

I sat in that seat all the way across the rest of Montana and until we reached Williston, ND when the guy across the aisle left and two seats together opened up.  These seats were in the first row and near the door so they were not the best seats.  But I figured they would be the last seats to be filled so I took the seats.  That lasted until Minot when a huge number of people got on the train.  So many people wanted to get on that the train attendant had to move eight or so people to another car to find seats for them.

I got a seatmate.  A high school kid for whom this was the first time he had every ridden the train.  He later asked me if it was ok to go downstairs to get something from his luggage.  Yes, this is not an airplane.  You can move around the train.  And the bathrooms are also downstairs.

He rode the train all the way to Minneapolis so I had only one seat to sit in overnight.  And as I was in the first row I couldn't stretch my legs out completely as I couldn't slip them under a seat in front of me.  Still, I can sleep about anywhere so I made it through the night fine.

I had two seats from Minneapolis to almost Red Wing when the train attendant moved a young woman to the seat next to me.  Oh well, it was for only the last 15 minutes of the trip.

Also increasing as I went from Montana to Minnesota was the amount of snow.  During the night as the train went through Fargo, ND I looked out to see, under the lights, trucks dumping snow near the Red River.

While the train was on time when I started my trip it steadily lost time.  By the time I arrived in Red Wing the train was over two hours late after 11 am.  Tammy was there to meet me.

The Amtrak train was 14 cars long: three locomotives, a luggage car, the dining car, observation car, four sleeper cars and four passenger cars.