There is no reason to cross the U.S. by train, but I did it anyway

My (now) wife and I took the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago about 10 years ago. We purchased a private cabin. We were 8 hours late leaving Seattle and couldn't get into our cabin until we got to Spokane because of some sort of merge of trains coming from Portland and Seattle. Got to Spokane, got our cabin, another 6 hour delay. By the time we reached the upper Midwest, they were rationing food, literally cutting every meal (that…

The long-distance Amtraks are more like a rolling hotel or land cruise-ship in some ways. Highly recommended if you have the time - https://www.amtraktrains.com is worth the research, as Amtrak's ticketing system is literally a 70s airline ticketing system and if you learn how to play it you can get sleeper car reservations for relatively cheap. You can also find destinations that would otherwise be moderately difficult to reach - for example the Empire Builder stops at East Glacier in…

I wish Amtrak's cars were more like those in India, where seats transform into beds. It's low tech but so much better. On Amtrak, sleeping in coach sucks, and roomettes are way too expensive. But in India, what's basically a coach ticket gets you this wonderful bed. If you haven't seen one of these: During the day, everybody sits on padded benches that have these back rests. Then at night, some kind of consensus ripples through the train car, at…