Amtrak Lake Shore Limited Brand New Viewliner II Roomette New York City To Chicago

hey guys we are in new york city here at moynihan train hall getting ready to hop on the lake shore limited we're headed over to chicago [Music] all right we're here in one of our favorite metropolitan lounges and one of the things that we really like about it is they do have not just um cold food but they also have hot food as well so i got a couple sandwiches for us one is a santa fe um chicken santa fe chicken and then um this one is spicy cheese look at that that looks really good with fig um with big spread so i'm gonna be eating that that sounds really good and then we have this um caesar chicken caesar pinwheel and we've got these chips and let me tell you right now if you're here and you get an opportunity to try these chips and you don't mind something spicy these are amazing um they also had a strawberry and mint infused water and then they also have unsweetened tea which is a no-no in the south but they have some flavor syrups that you can use to flavor it for different things today i did mango and then they have some cane syrup if you want to sweeten it so i fixed that and i think we're going to dig in and enjoy this fun little spread you can gain access to the metropolitan lounge here in new york in a variety of ways one is if you have a sleeper car ticket that automatically grants you access another is if you have amtrak guest rewards and you have a high uh membership to your status you can always get into the uh metro lounge that way and if you're coming here to new york you really do need to check this one out we think it's the best train lounge in the world it is just beautiful so many amenities and great food but take a look at the views from up here from the second story bye [Music] [Music] yes [Music] all right guys so we are super excited because we get to show you guys the brand new view liner two here on the lakeshore limited we actually as we were boarding there was a sleeper car before hours the other sleeper car and i looked in and i was like okay that's a viewliner one which means usually that we would be in the viewliner too and when we got down here we were like ah it's the brand new one so we are very excited to be on this one you can kind of tell what some of the differences are but i'll give you a tour here in just a minute um of what it looks like in this new one but it just has such a nice kind of feel to it almost feels like a nice uh you know like when you get clean sheets on your bed like that crisp feel it feels like that and then we also have like all the new um bedding that they have and the new blankets and sheets and all that kind of good stuff so we'll show you all of that in just one minute here we'll give you a big tour of the new brand new of you liner two on the lakeshore limited okay guys so let's start the tour first of all this is the seat i'm sitting in because i always see is it facing the direction of travel and note how wide this seat in is so the other side is actually going to be a little bit narrower than this one it's a couple inches narrower on that side than on this side and then here you've got a nice big air vent and you can always just turn that off if it's too cold for you but this is really quite nice for when you're sleeping down here i have always found it very helpful to have that fit right there and over here you've got a reading light which you can turn on and off here and then you've got your area light there and then this is to call your attendant you push this button and with this one here this is for the pa announcement so if you want to hear them in your room then you would leave it then you would press it so that it's pressed in if you want the announcements off you leave it out like flush with the outside and then right here you've got a switch for the ceiling light turn that on and off of the whole room and then for a night light which is a nice little light up above here you can kind of see what the thermostat in your room is set to and actually down here you've got this little kind of you know armrest it's a large armrest and i actually am setting my backpack there right now but you have two outlets and then you also have another vent here and it's kind of like a car vent where you can move it this up and down and then side to side so just like you would in a car but here also like in a car you get to move this up and down so you can shut it kind of close it or you can open it full blast or in the middle whatever floats your boat feels good to you okay next up we've got this hook here they give you a couple hangers you can hang jackets here or whatever you want to hang here i'll leave this stuff here for rob to give you a tour when he's in his upstairs penthouse but i'll keep showing you some cool stuff down here all right so this side um so you're looking at about two inches difference between this seat and the seat and the reason for that is this so in a view line or two you are not going to have a commode a toilet in the room with you so in the viewliner two normally you would have a toilet in here with you but you do not have that here which is nice because i can't ever decide if i like it or not but the reason why that's nice is because you've got this space down here storage space you can stick a bag down there no problem and then this is going to be the steps for rob to get up to his bed now over here you're going to find the sink there are cups here and then with this little switch you're going to open that up and there is your sink and you've got your faucets right there and you can store your little soap right there which is really nice and you've got more outlets on this side and then you've got your mirror light which is this light up above that turns on and then this red light is an indicator to rob above if the lights are off in the room and i have the sink open this light will indicate to him that the sink is open so he doesn't put his foot in it um and so this sink one thing you'll notice about it is it doesn't have a drain so um this sink actually the drain is see this little spot here it actually drains back and out through the train so when you're not using it you just put it up here they do give you a washcloth and a hand towel and then there's regular towels in the shower which we'll show you later and you've got a little hook here to hang those and then another mirror light which rob will have access to there on this seat here you do still have this nice vent here which again you can open and close and you've got the area light and the reading light so that gives you plenty there now what i want to show you here too this is another thing i like about the viewliner too is when you close this so normally this is kind of soft but there's a like a hard stick i guess i should say um a rod of some sort that's in here that keeps it firm so when you close it it actually you know sticks and stays firm instead of staying loose so that's kind of nice that you have that as well and rob will show you his curtains up above now over here is our tray table and this tray table is amazing if i can avoid the camera whoops is amazing it's right here and look at that and this is nice and and firm so it's not going to dangle you'll find sometimes on the viewliner one it just kind of hangs there and it's just kind of a crazy mess so that's that and that's pretty much the downstairs area there are some switches here also by the door there's a ceiling light there and a night light control here and then there the door locks and unlocks right here you open it and close it there and you've got these nice curtains here again it's got the kind of those hard little rods in there as well so that is the downstairs i'm gonna pass it up to rob and he's gonna show you what it's like upstairs in the penthouse this viewliner 2 is my absolute favorite room for being upstairs because there's a lot of features first of all this is much higher than a super lander so you're going to have a lot of space up there and it's really easy to get up there you can see these steps right here they're so big that there's no question what you're stepping on in the middle of the night if you're tired you're not going to miss these going up so to get up there all i need to do is first of all take this handle and pull it and that's going to allow the whole upper bed to come down and that's in the sleeping position now so this is how much room you're going to have on the lower bunk and then i'll have i think even more up in the upper bunk now all i gotta do is climb up the steps and go up to the bed so as you can see there is a lot of headroom up here and it is really easy to get up here it's the easiest one of all and once you're up here you want to take these little uh hooks and put them right up here whoops not like that though okay got that in and that is going to be your safety harness which is right here it does have a lot of slack to it so it'll feel like it's not going to catch you but it actually will catch you if you actually would roll off you wouldn't but it's not like up like this like a fence so that's interesting now up here we do have a huge area for storage so i put both of my bags up here my big backpack and my little bag and if i need anything in the night i can just use those a lot of people put like a real suitcase up there we don't do that we usually check ours on the v-liner because it is kind of hard even though there's a lot of space up there it is kind of hard to get that all the way up here because it's kind of a tight angle to do it at so on a viewliner we always check our bags on a super liner we bring them with us and just leave them downstairs so we also have a little pouch up here that's for your glasses or maybe you have medication or something like that and then again all of our controls are up here i have a light air a fan i have an attendant thing and that's the button for the reading light so the great thing about this is i am sitting straight up right now and if you're in the middle your head will bump a little but on the side my head is not touching the top of this now i am five nines if you're like six four or something like that you your head would definitely hit the top but if you're under five nine you're not gonna have any problem the bed also has an interesting shape up here it's got it's narrow on this end and then you can see it kind of widens down here so that's why i sleep on this end down here because it is much wider and you just have a lot more room one of the other great features about the uh the viewliner room at says the person on the top actually has their own windows which i love on the super liner no windows for the person on top so this will be great because ally usually goes to sleep before me she'll close those i'll leave these open and i'll be able to see everything i want to see so this is definitely my favorite roulette of all there's four room at types this is the best one if you're lucky enough to get this i really hope you enjoy it [Music] so one of the things that amtrak has updated is the bedding for the the linens for the beds uh so this is the new design so you know you've got the new style bedding you've got these lines here that tells you you've got the new bedding so these are the pillows and they're actually a little bit um fluffier than they were before they were smaller and just kind of felt a little bit emptier so these feel a little bit sturdier than the ones before and then the other thing is these blankets and oh my goodness so they come sealed like this and no you cannot keep these but they come sealed like this and let's see how we can break into this these are absolutely amazing and before what they had was a blanket that was more like uh the airline style you know like that little thin kind of flannel type thing you know when you do like a overseas uh trip the long haul trip you get those blankets so this is more like a comforter type thing and it is incredible it's so soft i don't know if you can see how that goes like you know against the grain and then on the inside it's more like this i like to use it with this side on my body because it just feels so soft it's almost like when you have like a um like a stuffed animal so um this is really nice i love these it's uh it just keeps you warmer now if you do tend to get warm and you don't want to use this there is a thin sheet just like a top sheet on the bed as well so you can use that and of course you don't have to use anything but if you get cold like me you're going to want to use something like this and these are so comfortable you are going to love them [Music] okay so i took a peek out the window and i can see that we are passing the hudson river but it's on the other side of our room so here's the thing is that normally you would head to the observation car but the lakeshore limited does not have an observation car and although we have pretty views off of this side i really do want to see the hudson so let's take the camera out to the hallway and i'll show you where you can watch out the other side okay [Music] so [Music] as you can see we have come to a stop out here beside me and we made it about an hour and 20 minutes before kind of just stopping in our tracks and that can be for a variety of reasons but one of the questions we get the most is when there's a delay how do i tell if we're actually going to be late and how do i tell what time we're going to get to a station and another question that goes along with this is how do you know how long a stop at each station is going to be so the answer is the same for all of that and i'm going to give that to you right now if you pull open your amtrak app right now at the very bottom if you hit this status button right there it's going to take you to this page and you just type in your train number which for us is 49 i want to know what time we're going to get to albany because i know that's coming up in a few hours and then you just hit check status and from that you can see that we're scheduled to arrive at 6 20 and we're scheduled to depart at 7.05 so it still says on time so so far this little whatever this is hasn't caused us to be late and i know now that when we get to albany we are going to have a 45 minute break there which is really cool we can get outside and run around if we want so that's really good to help you plan what time you want to have dinner what time you want to get some fresh air all that good stuff and a lot of people don't know how to tell when and how long you're going to be stopping that's how you do it just open up the app hit status and you can find out how long you're gonna be at any station okay so here is the dinner situation on the lakeshore limited uh what they do is they split it up into two shifts here now each uh train is going to be a little bit different depending um on uh you know the timing and everything we're on time so they are going to split it into two because we'll be getting to albany and have kind of 45 minute fresh air break 40 45 minutes for us today um fresh air break there so we're starting dinner around they started it at 4 30 and they're gonna run it till about 5 45 then they're gonna shut it down and reopen it at seven so we've elected not to do the early dinner we're gonna wait and do it um until after we do the albany stop which is really nice now uh for the dinner on this particular train which is the lakeshore limited um each crew does it a little bit different on this um this particular crew has chosen to just do like open so they have their open time and you can go and have dinner anytime during that open time so there could be a lot of people going at the time that you want to go or not it just depends and they just kind of go with the flow on that in some chains they'll have you do like reserve a certain a certain time so every crew does it a little bit different so it's kind of just something to keep in mind as you move along on your train ride and they haven't given us a menu yet so we don't really know what it's going to be pretty sure it's flexible dining though still on lakeshore limited and i am hoping there is andouille sausage that was on there a few years ago and i took it away i hope it's made a comeback we'll see in a few minutes the big question on everybody's mind is how much how much did it cost so i'm going to break that down for you we actually used points to buy this trip and it cost us 22 500 amtrak guest rewards points now if we had paid for it it would have been about 600 total for the two of us overnight from we're going all the way from new york to chicago so what about about 600 translate that to points it was twenty two thousand you can do it either way if you're not in the amtrak guest rewards that's a good reason to do it because we're doing quite a few trips this uh this summer and we got about half of them for free with points so that is a good deal but six hundred dollars that includes your meals and we also got access to the metropolitan lounge for free and had some good meals in there as well quick update on our timing i was just checking the app again and it does show that we are 11 minutes late so we're now supposed to get into albany at 6 31 instead of 6 20. so you can check that right on the app and see it and so we're still leaving albany on time but the main difference now is instead of a 45 minute stop there we will only have a 34 minute stop and that could probably be less even by the time we get there so if you really want to know what's going on with train check that it does update throughout the journey kind of up to the minute so you'll really know how long you have at each stop [Music] [Music] time to check out the bathroom situation in this v-liner too and it's a pretty good bathroom for amtrak standards this is bigger and i think more well-equipped than the super liners either the one or two and the v-liner one so let's take a look around here the toilet is sitting at an angle which is good because it's it's much easier to use that way there is a sink and i do like that there is room here you can you can brush your teeth and all that there's some sinks on some of the other bathrooms that are the faucet is really short and it really doesn't uh do well when you push the button the water actually stays on which is another bonus because it makes it way easier to brush your teeth it's going to turn off automatically eventually but having a stand like that is good there is a changing table if you happen to have a young one with you trash some soap and a mirror now there's a little light here if you this light is on then that means you've correctly locked the door if you're in here and that light is not on sometimes it's faint but if it's not on the door's not locked properly and you better readjust that so pretty good bathroom the shower is right across the hall so let's go check that out as well same deal with the shower there's a little light right here that if that's lit up door's locked along the door you just move this little button side to side the shower is nice because i'm standing right here in the changing area so there's a like a little area where you can dress undress gets held off all that and then the actual shower but you've got a trash can don't know what you'd stick in there while you're showering but you've got a little towel rack there there are towels in here for you they're laying right there on the seat little bar let's open the shower and see what it looks like very big wow this is one of the bigger showers i've seen on a train so i can get in this thing this is a huge shower i really like it i might use this tonight this is this is really big uh most of the time on amtrak trains you do have hot water some of the older cars you know maybe that's not going to work so well but this being brand new i don't think we have any problems this is a really nice shower i'm pretty impressed so going to give you a quick update on our stop so we are stepped here just past poughkeepsie and um we've been here for quite a for i don't know 10-15 minutes and then the conductor came on and said there's an accident with a different train up ahead and they're cleaning that up so we're going to be here for at least another 30 minutes so we're out here on the track there's actually another train here as well waiting for the cleanup up ahead so everybody's just kind of walking around stretching their legs and just getting some fresh air while we can it is a beautiful station so uh it's a good one to be stuck at there's some cool houses over here and the weather is just gorgeous today it's so good upstate new york and the spring you can't beat that that's really good well we've gotten some fresh air and since we're sitting here waiting they did keep the dining room open a little bit longer so we decided since it's 6 15 that's pretty much dinner time so we're going to come and we're going to have our dinner here we'll show you what we get here in just a second so let's take a look at what our menu options are it is flexible dining and we've got uh five different entrees to choose from for dinner we've got the slow braised beef short ribs enchiladas chicken aloe rosa sesame glazed salmon and pasta and meatballs and we also have our beverages here you do have unlimited like soft drinks and juices and water and then you each get one alcoholic beverage per person per ride okay so let's take a look at what rob and i chose i of course picked the salmon with jasmine rice and veggies i've got my all the dishes come with a side salad and you also get a roll as well as dessert now they've had this is a new one it's a butter cake rob took his out it's a butter cake uh pastry of a bakery in delaware so that's going to be interesting also rob got the pasta and meatballs and he got his salad and his roll as well so we're going to dig into this because it looks good it smells good and i'm thinking it's going to taste good hmm [Music] i went with the old favorite pasta and meatballs you can never go wrong with the amtrak pasta meatballs if you're on flexible dining that's my choice ally will tell you to get the salmon but this is where it's at so this is pretty good i wonder if it's hot they're pretty hot but very very good so i've got that a roll salad and a new dessert which looks pretty good and there is a train next to us another amtrak train they're stuck here too waiting for this uh accident to get cleared up ahead of us and apparently the line is so long in the cafe over there that people are jumping off of that train coming into our train to the dining car and trying to get uh beverages from the staff here so they had a pretty good laugh about that but we are some of the only people in here there's only a few people in the dining car here for us so we are just having a nice dinner and enjoying that enjoying a little bit of a view of the lake but not much and hopefully we'll get back rolling here pretty soon there's cream here in the middle that looks quite good actually split it all up so it's easier to eat let's try it hmm oh my gosh that's really good cream filling butter cake it says we get this question a lot about tipping and we just ate dinner so i thought i'd cover it generally people leave two to three dollars per person per meal so we just ate and we split the difference in left of five and there are two attendants in there so we just leave it each meal instead of at the end and then with the room attendant we do either five or ten dollars per person per night so that's what we do with tipping and that's totally up to everyone though you don't have to tip or you could tip more than that if you wanted to okay so you're probably wondering are they gonna sleep in those seats no so we've got our two beds that we showed you earlier so the lower the two uh seats here these are going to slide in i'm going to do that here in just a minute and show you what that looks like and this is the bottom bed and the mattress for that bed is up above uh stored up there during the day bring that down put it down here and it's got the sheets and everything on it and the pillow we'll bring that down here that'll be my bed and then as rob showed you earlier we turn this pull it down and his bed is already set up up there so pretty easy peasy for the most part but um you can just have your attendant do this for you we just do it because we never know when we want to go to bed so we just make ours ourselves but your attendant will take care of me putting this together but should you want to do it yourself this is how you do it so there's a lever down here that you have to push and then as you're pushing that you're pulling this out once you release that then you can just press here and it'll slide down it's usually how i do it i don't know if the attendants do it that way but that's how i do it same thing on the other side foot on that lever and then let's see we can get this side down now the second side is usually a little bit harder than the first side because there's not as much space but you just keep pulling and then make sure you're pressing on that little lever as you're doing it still trying hang on there we go all right it's coming press press press and now we're ready for the mattress i'm gonna grab that pull up above i'm gonna lower this just a little just enough room we're making a mess here pull that pillow down and now go ahead and grab this mattress from here and bring it down down down down to the bottom of the sea now i gotta find which side is the thin side so this goes this way okay almost there get this all situated right here and you'll still have your space on the ledge here by the window so that's your bed here and as i mentioned earlier if you don't want that thick sheet this one is nice and thin you can practically see right through it so if you need just something real thin like that you're good to go with this one and then you just put uh your pillow right there here and i'm ready to go um like i said rob's is already set up up here i want to make sure i get one of these blankets though i don't want rob to take both blankets because these are so great i just love these so soft um so that's it that's how you set it up for night time ally has her bed made up down there already so that just means my bed is automatically made and it is ready to go it was night time outside and we're ready to lay down it is clearly nighttime outside it's about 8 11 and we went ahead and ate dinner we got off the train we're waiting for this situation to clear we're still in rhine cliff so we're definitely we haven't even made albany yet so i was gonna check and see what it said and uh it's saying right now that we should be there at 8 11 which it is 8 11. so that's not going to happen they're going to update it in a little while and we're going to be at least two and a half to three hours late just getting to albany which is not that far from new york city so we're definitely going to be late getting into chicago tomorrow i don't know how how late but this is a good thing to learn from our trip you do not want to ever make a tight connection on an amtrak trip because you can expect to be two three four hours late on most of the overnight sleepers that's just what happens because there's so many things that can go wrong unfortunately this one was some type of accident with a train in front of us but there could be cargo trains there could be equipment failure so many things can go wrong that you just don't want to make a tight connection so it's not bad for us i mean we were getting in at 10 o'clock tomorrow to chicago now we'll probably get in more like noon and that just means we can check into our hotel right away so uh just don't have anything you have to do right when you get there because you will probably be just a little bit late okay allie is asleep and it is getting pretty late so i'm gonna go to bed too we're still a little jet lagged uh from our italy trip so it's time to turn these lights off and get ready to go to sleep and we will see you tomorrow at breakfast good night well good morning we slept quite well looks like we made up a little bit of time last night but we're still running a little bit late but it is breakfast time we are in toledo ohio here stopped for a few moments and we've got our breakfast i'm having the three egg omelet and it's got some veggies and cheese inside comes with sausage and some potatoes and i've had this before and it is quite tasty and then we've got the flexible dining railroad french toast and it comes with bacon and that bacon looks good because it's nice and crispy i love crispy bacon so we're gonna dig into this and enjoy it and then start to enjoy some of these views as we start arriving into chicago here in the next few hours [Music] people always ask me about the coffee on amtrak like what it's like now if you're a super coffee snub then you might not like it it is good coffee i think it's better than airline coffee in all honesty and i've had both a ton so i would definitely go ahead and get it don't skip it because it is pretty good so so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] so [Music] so that's a wrap on the lakeshore limit we had a great time hope you had a good time following along with us give us a like if you liked the video subscribe and we'll see you on the next video

Channel: Grounded Life Travel

Views: 64,165

Keywords: amtrak lake shore limited, lake shore limited, amtrak, amtrak viewliner, amtrak viewliner ii, amtrak roomette, amtrak viewliner roomette, amtrak viewliner ii roomette, amtrak sleeper car, amtrak vacation, amtrak overnight, amtrak sleeper car tour, amtrak from new york, amtrak to chicago, brand new amtrak, amtrak vlog, amtrak couple, amtrak tips, amtrak tour, amtrak roomette tour, amtrak viewliner roomette tour, viewliner i vs viewliner ii, lake shore limited vlog

Id: hHNYYXDJO1M

Length: 41min 7sec (2467 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022