Silver Meteor

We took the train to Savannah. The Silver Meteor that goes from New York to Miami. We left DC after a sleepless night working on school and work projects and a full day of turning those projects in at work/school. The 11 hour trip was not very easy. Since we traveled in coach, we had to try to sleep in the seats. The cars have as much or more room than a first class airplane cabin and the seats are rather large, with flip out leg rests ala "lazy boy" and a foot rest. It seems that these seats were built for large people, because neither Anya nor I could be comfortable. We had dinner on the train. The food was "nothing to write home about", may be "something to blog about". Did I just coin a phrase? The bathrooms did not have water and were rather smelly.

I asked myself afterwards if driving 9 hours would have been better. I still stand by my original claim, that 11 hours of relative uncomfort in a train is better than 9 hours of driving.

The make up of passengers surprised me. The train was relatively full with the conductor assigning seats to people when they arrived and he found out their destination. I think they were arranging people in such a way as to not wake up those who are going to Miami before they needed too. So when it was our time to get off they could turn on the light in the otherwise dark train, as most of the passengers in our car were going to Savannah or Charleston.

Most of passengers were black. Not poor black, but lower to middle class black. I do not think these were people that could not afford Southwest fare to Miami, i think they were there by choice. If this Silver Meteor train had the kind of service you get on Acela trains, I would travel this way in a heartbeat.



The advantages to me were: I could cancel at any time before travel.
Advance fair gives lower prices and anything before 3 days- is advanced, as opposed to 21 or 14 days for air travel.
We left the house 50 before departure time and we had 20 minutes to kill once we were on the train. There was no security or lines.
Trains have power plugs and you can occasionally get out and stretch your legs. The whole trip had a very lazy feeling to it, as opposed to high stress mood that aiports bring out in people.

Once we arrived to the concrete box that passes for train station in Savannah, I noticed a mural on the inside that showed various historical places in this southern tourist destination. One of the places was Union Station. I later found out from long time Savannah residents that the beautiful Union station was torn down after interstate needed to be build inplace of traintracks. There was some debate and now people mostly regret it. I saw some footage of it later and it was indeed a beautiful building. Union Station in DC has become a hub of commerce and is a nice place to visit even if not taking a train trip.