I took a cross-country train trip!

oh what mics is it gonna use i guess i better test that first i'm doing a thing i'm taking the southwest chief which is one of amtrak's longest routes between chicago and la and i'm actually taking it back to chicago i took it out to la and then took the pacific surfliner from la to san diego to visit my brother for a spell the reason why i had to go on this trip ended up not coming to fruition so i was uh the cafe is open cafe is open wear shoes is that all please make sure we're coming to the cafe you are wearing a mask and shoes shoes we have chips cookies candies beer wine cocktails cheeseburgers hot dogs i've heard this many times if you can't tell or if you're interested in anything to eat or drink come on down to the cafe lower level of the observation card towards the center of the train thank you v so as i'm sure you know i am not a travel vlogger so the uh this video is not going to be very polished but this is connextra's so you know that's par for the course so i am as i said taking the southwest chief in this video i actually took it jeez almost a month ago at this point um but i am taking it frankly because i've always wanted to take a long-distance train trip and well i had a reason to do it which ended up evaporating but i'm still very glad i did i've you know it's really changed my thoughts on a number of things which i will be talking about more in talking head form but on this trip i did actually take it in a sleeping car so i stayed in one of amtrak's roomettes which they used to call the economy bedroom it's a very small space but for one person it's certainly fine for two people it might be fine you'll have to think about that i will show you the room itself in more detail with the camera uh i mean like in person wow at the time i recorded video and i was talking and showing the room that's what i mean but what i'm going to do now in voiceover is actually show you the layout of the train because i'm sure that many people both in the us and out are just not that familiar with amtrak trains with sleepers so i am on the top level right now and i'm going between the roomettes so there's a roommate on either side of the train that also should give you an idea of how small they are the passage between cars is on the top level there is no passage between cars on the lower level now uh i am now going past the full-size bedrooms so those are the deluxe bedrooms they still only sleep two people but you have most of the width of the train so obviously it's a much more comfortable accommodation this is passing between cars which is obviously very fun on rough track highly recommend it and so again going through the roomettes and then the stairway is in the middle of the train which goes down to the lower level which i will be taking shortly gonna do a cut here cut here's looking out the window again past the deluxe roomettes i was in the car at the very front of the train on the way to la there's also a coffee station here our car attendant made coffee every morning uh ironically that is a percolator so it was percolated coffee but you know it was pretty good and obviously fresh every day so it wasn't the best coffee but it was decent so this is the very narrow staircase to get to the lower level of the train which is where my roommate was on the way to california on the way back i was on the upper level and i'm very glad i got to experience both because there are very big pros and cons to each and i really couldn't tell you which i would prefer but this was my room it was room 13 and that was the this is the window that i was staring out for the majority of the journey so the thing about the lower level which is obviously a huge drawback is your views are severely limited you are barely off the ground on the lower level um as a matter of fact i will throw up that picture again so you can see where the lower level windows are literally if someone's standing on the platform they're higher up than you are sitting in the chair so anything that gets near to the train at all blocks your view so the views on the lower level are not as good on the upper level they just aren't you can see how anything that's anywhere near the train any sort of brush or an embankment it just completely obliterates your view and all you see is what's close to the train it's much less of a problem on the upper level because you're about you know eight feet higher than the person below you so that's the biggest drawback of the lower level but the benefit is it feels very very very private so this is a different shot that i took at night so you can't see out the window and on the lower level is where most of the restrooms are there are three restrooms on the lower level and one upstairs and you also have the dressing room and shower so this is the a fairly large space to change and the shower is actually pretty reasonable size as well i have now crossed off taken a shower on a train from my list of odd things to do um there's plenty of room in the shower it's just bathing while on a moving vehicle that's negotiating a curve is strange but here is the bathroom hello it's basically your typical airplane bathroom except it's on a train and it's not quite so cramped but then uh so there's the exit door again i actually boarded the train directly onto this car there's some luggage storage there so i just kept my carry-on there most of the time and then you have the stairs up to the second level and again passage between cars is only on the second level but now these are the bedrooms on the lower level and i was here again in 13 and you have the privacy curtain and you might think the bathrooms you would uh feel and hear people coming in and out all the time you really don't most people on the upper level use that bathroom up there if it's available so man this just felt very very private plus i was at the farthest end so the only person i ever noticed moving about was um the person opposite me and that was empty for much of the journey so the lower level feels very very private all right and now i want to show what the journey was like from my car to the dining car and the lounge car i had to go through another sleeping car i would have started from below but i didn't show walking up the stairs so i have to go through a second sleeping car if the train gets longer you might have to go through more cars to get here but they use the dining car as a buffer between coach and the rest of the train so you have to go through the dining car to get to the lounge car the lounge cars where like coach and the sleepers intermingle and then the dining car which is only four people in the sleepers or at least currently they don't offer reservations for people and coach that serves as like the buffer between the two and so obviously if you've never experienced trains before going between cars can be a little fun and this is the dining car and i'm going to be skipping forward because you can see these people at the end here but obviously the dining car is for dining it is the car where you have food okay and skipping past those people the lounge car is not very exciting during the evening because you can't see anything but it is there for people to use all the time during the quiet hours of the train they want people to have phone conversations here in the lounge car so it's always available to people on the train i did notice there were a couple people sleeping on some of the longer chairs and the conductors didn't seem to mind i don't know if they would if the train were busier because it really wasn't that busy but this is the lounge car this is a wonderful place to be i spent a lot of time in here um and i was able to for instance i can grab that picture and throw it up i had coffee in the lounge car at sunrise the first day going out through kansas it was a lovely lovely experience okay so if that's the last interruption which it may very well not be i the reason why i had to come out here ended up not mattering but i had already moved this ticket back once and hi i wanted to take this train trip and i wanted to take it when the days were still longer already they've gotten much shorter and much to my disappointment i saw virtually none of arizona on the way to los angeles we ended up getting a delay in kansas city we were behind a couple of hours i don't know if that would have mattered though because really we went through arizona in the middle of the night even if we were on time because the train arrives in los angeles at eight in the morning and then on the way back we have been on time we're a little bit behind now but until we were on time up until sunrise and we were almost out of arizona so a bit of a bummer that didn't really get to see anything of arizona but did get to see pretty much all of new mexico which is very very pretty if i remember the route correctly we are about to be climbing mountains and i guess these are still the rockies they would be right i don't know anyway we're about to climb some mountains this route uh only has one tunnel unless i slept through another one that's a bit of a bummer but yeah anyway um i was a little hesitant to make the trip because you know covet is still a thing but i got to thinking i've been vaccinated i'm gonna bring i might have already showed this but i have n95 respirators now that they're easy to get and i'm wearing that the only time i'm not is when i'm in here in the room which even then i kind of feel like should i be but i'll get to my thoughts on that a little bit later but uh and then also during dining service and that was a thing that when i first got on the train i was wondering if i was able to take my meals to go and eat in my room because i didn't really want to eat with a bunch of people in the dining car because i had heard that amtrak had resumed quote unquote normal dining service and they would be filling all tables so i was like i don't want that i mean i'm an introvert as it is so i don't want that period but i especially don't want that now and but it turns out they are spacing the dinner or the dining services apart quite a lot so i always had a table to myself and the dining car was never really that full so i wasn't really worried about that uh but i have been you've spent a lot of time in the lounge car which is just a great place to be and then always have my mask with me because especially then you're mingling with in in the sleepers there are only 22 rooms if i remember correctly 15 no 14 15 16 17 5 yeah 22 rooms most of which only hold two people one holds four so i think it's 44 people or 46 people maximum but most of the rear mets like i'm in now only have one person so i'm sharing this car with maybe 14 people so that that's that's actually part of why i realized you know i think i don't need to worry about taking this trip because unlike an airport you know i didn't go through a massive humanity to get on the train at any point even los angeles union station is actually los angeles union station is even less of um it's hardly indoors which i didn't realize very surprising the platforms are basically above the station itself and i was surprised by that but anyway so overall this has felt like a pretty safe way to travel and it's just really slow but let me tell you i have enjoyed this so much i brought a lot of stuff to read and do i've well less to do more to watch i've basically just been looking outside the entire time it's gonna tonight once we get out into colorado we're not going through any of the this route we end up in the southeastern part of colorado and that's it and so it's not super exciting it basically looks like kansas so really the rest of once we're over the mountains and back into or over the mountains and into colorado there's not a whole lot to see but certainly the um all of pretty much all of new mexico has been really really pretty um then that's the suburbs i guess you would say of albuquerque right there so definitely more you know more of an urban environment than you see the pretty mesas and whatnot but big scrap heap oh my closet just opened but yes i stop opening i have um this has really changed my perspective on a number of things and i have a lot of thoughts regarding rail travel and i think you know as most of you know in the us we do trains badly and one of the just quintessential ways you know that is if you want to take a sleeper from chicago to la it's very expensive you're looking to at least pay 600 one-way it's not as bad if you do two people to a room at because the fare structure is each person pays a coach fare and then there's an additional fee for the room so if you have two people sharing a room at the second person only costs between 125 to 250 more but certainly if you're traveling by yourself and you want a roommate like i am in that in in a lot of ways you could say this is objectively a terrible idea because you're on the train for at least 42 hours and you spend way more than you would to fly but the experience is just so great and the food has been fantastic like far and away exceeding my expectations i'm glad that they aren't doing the to go stuff that they were doing because everybody was saying it's pretty mediocre but i've tried well i shouldn't say i've tried most of the entrees but more at least half of them in every category but there's only four i don't know how often they change the menu but there's four dinner options four lunch options four breakfast options so if you take this train both directions you will experience the entire menu if you don't repeat something but yeah i just wanted to share that i'm doing this and i think if you have to prep to point my or to say my thoughts about train travel which in the united states which i think i'll probably do a lot of voice over to talk about this is the biggest thing that we don't have in the us because we all are we don't get vacation time you know our are just in general our society is set up to not give people free time we can go on and on about why that is but just in general very few people would want to spend two to four days traveling somewhere because they don't have the time so even if rail could get cheaper i don't think it's gonna get more popular and i wish that we could change that but i don't think we can change that unless we start getting more vacation time guaranteed for people because i absolutely understand five nights in la becomes a nine night trip if you want to take the train there and back so and like that's nearly a 100 percent increase 80 percent yeah increase of uh time and so even though i think these two those four days are incredibly enjoyable barring delays because those are frustrating that's still a lot of time investment and i understand why compared to getting on a plane and making the flight in four hours even with the added pain of an airport it's a tiny fraction of the time but and it's usually cheaper and it doesn't matter that you don't get the niceties like meal service because you're there in five to six hours but anyway if people had more time to spend i feel like this would be more popular one thing that i didn't realize i'm in a super liner they don't run these trains on the east coast because they have tunnel clearance issues so these are double-decker cars amtrak's entire fleet consists of 120 of these sleeper cars they have some like weird edge case cars like they have the deluxe sleepers which all only have full-size rooms on the top i don't remember how many they have but even if you want to count best case scenario there's like 170 sleeper cars and if you consider that this route this train has two sleeper cars on it and there are six of them i imagine running concurrently i don't think the same train turns around and comes back the same day i believe they get serviced but i don't know if any of you do please do tell i know i'm not on the same train that i was on when i came out to la but i do have the same uh service crew interestingly enough our schedules lined up but anyway the point i'm making is that 120 this one route takes up 10 or more of that 120 cars and i know that like there aren't that many long distance routes on amtrak but it's still just like i know that they will sometimes do up to four sleeper cars i think and sometimes they might do more than that but it's just really annoying that in the fort because the car i'm in is probably about 40 years old and in all this time rail travel has continued to just be like the dumb option and so they don't need any more cars than that because they don't need any more cars than that the scale's not going to get better it's always going to stay expensive and i you know it's just me wishing that he had cheaper because it's a really great experience and it kind of stinks that like you have to be both literally you have to be both relatively money wealthy and time wealthy to take this train and it's really a bummer especially because you get to see so much of the country that you just you know i've never seen even though i've been to california several times i've never seen what this part of the country actually looks like because i've been flying now i've actually been able to see it it's really really quite lovely so yes to train travel i don't know if i'm gonna go so far as to call myself a real evangelist i've definitely never been a real fan a proper rail fan i should say because there are things about trains that certainly interest me but um not i would not qualify there's definitely a lot of stuff i don't know and don't follow regarding rail that i know i'm not a rail fan but so even though i think i'm probably maybe edging towards a real evangelist as in we should have more rail travel in the united states um i do understand why it's not popular it's it's just but i think it could be i think it easily could be but it has to get cheaper hang on to those hats everybody because i'm about to get a little political here spicy i can hear those in the back shouting about how amtrak is terrible and it's a waste of taxpayer money because it doesn't make money look in the u.s we desperately need to have a conversation about what the public sector is and does that sentence that it's a waste of taxpayer money because it doesn't make money is nonsense it's a false premise the government is not a profit-seeking organization despite what you may have heard now with amtrak specifically it's complicated it's operated as if it were a for-profit business because it legally has to and in that way and many others it's saddled by strange requirements and so has a lot of inefficiencies i agree that amtrak has many problems but i for one would like to spend the money to fix them the overwhelming majority of my tax dollars are not going to amtrak and it's really perplexing and frankly annoying how much amtrak and to some extent the postal service lives rent-free in the heads of folks as an example of government waste when there are so many much bigger fish to fry and those fish don't even provide a service to you and me but here's the bottom line amtrak is almost entirely owned by the federal government and so for all intents and purposes it's in the public sector and public sector entities definitionally cannot seek a profit they might operate with a surplus but if that happens that extra money just goes back to you and me this obsessiveness over whether amtrak or the usps make money is a question wrongly put because we the citizenry are their shareholders the people who benefit when these organizations succeed are us not some private owner who wants profit out of it and by the way from the perspective of a person paying for a service profit is inefficiency it's waste one could offer a product or service at its actual cost you know think about that for a sec health care we can argue for days over whether or not amtrak is a smart use of public money but it should also be noted that they still get the vast majority of their operating budget from fares that riders of the system pay but i am absolutely okay with my tax dollars working to fill the gap because amtrak provides a meaningful public service and i'd love to see them granted more funds to purchase more and newer equipment to expand their service and lower its cost i would gladly be taxed a little more to that end the entire reason amtrak exists is because the freight railroads couldn't justify operating passenger service but they were and still are profit-seeking organizations sometimes profit isn't what matters and the fact that we equate profitability with justification for existence in this country is tremendously sad i've yet to see the interstate highway system turn a profit but people seem insistent that amtrak has to this is way deeper than i planned to go here but it sure would be nice if we decided to do things collectively and were proud of it for once sure is something that people get all worked up about amtrak and not like the military industrial complex how's that f35 working out for us anyway back to the show i do understand why it's not popular it's it's just but i think it could be i think it easily could be but it has to get cheaper and absolutely spent doing this route and coach i mean you can do it and it's not that expensive if you do get a coach ticket and you can use the lounge car for unless the train is packed as long as you like and uh so you don't have to be glued to your seat for 42 hours we still don't have a place to sleep and even then on this in the room i'm not getting the best sleep i've ever had here i keep waking up quite frequently uh and i would say tonight i'm going to be taking a sleep aid to see if i can get a little better sleep before i arrive back home but let me uh show you what this room is like and i might do some of this in voiceover i'll definitely do some voice over because i've taken a lot of video of what different parts of the journey look like but most of that happened on the way westbound probably not going to take a lot more video now i did take a couple clips but as i said we're going to the mountains once we're through the mountains and we come back down and we're in the it's not prairie but eastern colorado whatever that is considered it's gonna look like that until it becomes corn and then we're gonna be in chicago so that's that's pretty much what happens but anyway let me stop recording and turn the camera around etcetera so uh i was being followed hello this is my room room seven hopefully you saw that other sign so this is a rumet which is a very small space but for one person and even two i think it works pretty well uh so the way it's configured that is somebody else's room at right across the hall from me so you have kind of the way that i'm saying is i'm equating it to you kind of have the width of two coach seats because this aisle space is about the same but um it's a little bit different you do have um there's a window here but because you know and i understand why people are like this they want the privacy but everybody's keeping their windows shut all the time oh i wonder if i did that so while you do have these windows which would allow you to see across to the other side of the train for the most part everybody has their curtains closed so i don't have a wide angle lens on this camera so unfortunately this is not going to work well to show you everything but right here this is the second bed or birth or bunk or whatever you want to call it so as you can see it is stored there's me in a 45 degree angle my head hits it like this is you know it's not a lot of room between my head and the ceiling can you see that doesn't really work i can kind of see not a lot of room so this uh on that 45 degree angle i can't stand up for more than about 18 inches into this room half a meter or so before i hit this but what's nice is during the day you can use this to store your bags or whatever so i've got my laptop bag up here they also keep the bedding for the lower bunk up here so if you're not using this as a bed you have it as an option for kind of like overhead storage for relatively thick things i mean this is not small by any means but they do get a little bit crushed just want to be wary of that and then down here you have two seats one faces the other this back cushion keeps popping forward on on this seat i will say that the two train cars that i've been on this one is in worse shape everything is a little bit rougher around the edges but it's still functional then you have the tiny little area here where you have you use it kind of like a nightstand side table type well not a nightstand the side table here this is one of my big critiques of amtrak they do not really clean these at all i was seen with different travel videos regarding taking amtrak they recommended bringing wipes because these will be dirty and that's not really the attendance responsibility the people that are with us because you know these trains my understanding is they go because i saw the train that i took here get pulled away to some sort of maintenance area in l.a and just stuff like that they uh they really need to get better at that sort of thing but i understand that if they're trying to turn a train around quickly that's not super possible but i definitely should see some improvement there but there's the other chair and the pillows a lot of things that i had seen suggested that this is cramped for two people during the day i don't know if i would call it that because i saw some people saying that you're gonna hit your knees my knee if i'm sitting upright it's barely extended off the edge of the cushion so we wouldn't be bumping these together unless we were reclining the seats so i really think it's pretty decent space to be with another person uh you have your power outlet there so there's my uh phone charger which is not for a one plus phone anymore because i don't i'm kind of done with them at this point but uh it's a higher amperage charger so i brought it with me to charge my all my other fun goodies um and then you've got reading lights up top are your that's the reading light for the second bunk so they have a light up there and then behind my head here you have your control panel for the ceiling lighting so there you go your ceiling lights for at night and if you hit night a blue led lights up in there before your night light although quite honestly if you can see the curtains do not block 100 of the light you're seeing the ceiling light in the hall that's completely not necessary because you get a night light through the curtains it's not it's not like a bothersome amount of light by any means it's just that adds nothing they got your speaker for announcements they do not make announcements after 10 o'clock so from 10 p.m to six you're kind of in the dark which is actually a critique of mine because that delay we had in kansas city happened in the middle of the night and no one ever explained why we're why we were delayed like not of course they didn't during the evening but they didn't even say anything the next day so it was kind of just like haha we're two hours behind now we'll not talk about that uh so then for the other side this thing uh it kind of works like a nightstand this is why i got confused during the evening for the person on the lower back bunk but what it really is those are steps to get up to the top bunk so that's the primary function of that thing uh and honestly it makes that seat feel narrower even though the width of the actual seat itself is exactly the same because you have that thing there but i'm sitting in that seat because that's the forward motion although i've never been one particularly bothered by sitting backwards but i know people i have two people in my family who absolutely cannot do that hey it's a voice over me once again letting you know about a thing i totally forgot to mention um with the bed folded this is what that looks like so obviously it takes up the entire space of the room and it's long enough for you to sleep on absolutely i think it's six foot six which is very close to exactly two meters and i'm about six feet tall and so it's perfectly fine for me but it's taking up almost all of the floor space in the room so when the bed is down you do not have a lot of space to move around in fact you basically only have enough room to sit on the bed and put on your shoes so that does make getting into the top bunk certainly a challenge without disturbing the person below you so while i do think this can work for two people it's certainly going to be very close quarters let's just put it that way and if you are claustrophobic at all certainly the top bunk man that is an experience it is a very very narrow mattress and you cannot sit up it's hard to get into while you do have your own reading light it's just it's a very very small space and in fact they include a net you can hook into the ceiling to keep you from rolling off the bed and onto the floor below you so it's certainly for the economy-minded and um i think it's it's doable but certainly one person i think in a room at is definitely easier to deal with and then also i just got this shot to show with the bed in the lowered position it goes right to the headrest of the seats so actually you could put the top bed down and still have the space below you if you wanted to do it that way but obviously you can't stand because that's right about it something like chest height when you're coming into the room so it's a very very compact space so certainly those of you that are bothered by that are not going to like it but it is very functional for what it is and i do admire the fact that they're able to get 14 of these in one train car and honestly i'd kind of like to see them build a train car which is nothing but roomettes because then you could have um 20 roommates on the top floor with the other four down below and then you're talking about a sleeper car that only has a very slightly smaller capacity than a coach car which would be pretty cool if you ask me and then the last thing which is surprisingly useful which few people have um touted as such is this closet now a difference an inconsistency between the two trains is that um the first train i was on had a car had a bit of carpet down here and this one doesn't so i just used a towel because there were towels up there but you've not only got you know it's it's wide enough to put a couple of coats that give you a couple hangers but you can also put tons of stuff up there i'm actually using it as a bookcase i haven't read i haven't read uh the sequel to an absolutely remarkable thing yet so i'm trying to re-read the first one to get there but i also have an ipad up there and some snacks behind it so this you know it's very narrow but it's useful for a lot of stuff and i got some snap more snacks down there very important but yeah in the winter like if you were taking this train uh taking the zephyr which goes to denver and you wanted your um you want you would want to bring in coat because you do get fresh air breaks and denver is one of the stops in fact we were just in albuquerque hang on a second just look at that man that's so pretty the clouds the mountains you don't get to see this stuff on an airplane but anyway what i was saying was in albuquerque that is a service stop for the train so we are there uh for quite a while because they refuel re-water i don't think they empty any of the holding tanks but they uh they basically do all the stuff they need to keep the train being a functional train so that stop takes about a half hour but then they also have multiple depending on who's conducting it's either a smoke break or a fresh air break pick your poison and those are very brief just 10 15 minutes at the most but they do give you i mean it's nice to get off the train take pictures of it as i'm sure any rail fan would do many times if i cut this part of the video out uh i'm just reiterating that i do not consider myself to be a rail fan i am nerdy about certain things regarding trains but nowhere near to the point that i believe i could call myself a rail fan there's a lot of stuff that i have actually only learned on this journey because i got curious about it like what trackside defect detectors are fascinating little bit of engineering and technology there and now i know why i keep hearing no defects over the radio i thought it was something about the train detecting problems with the track but actually it's the track detecting problems with the train who'da thunk but anyway so now i might do some voice over and show you some other clips but yes this is very fun and if you have the means and time to do it i'd say you definitely should maybe not this route supposedly the zephyr is a lot prettier especially because you go through the rockies proper and go through denver and whatnot you also have the moffett tunnel which takes 10 minutes to go through so there's some more interesting stuff on the zephyr but the southwest chief is definitely still a great train ride it's just that east of colorado really east of new mexico it gets pretty samey as you go through the plane states but you know that's you're going to get that on the zephyr too the zephyr fault begins the same route as this train for the first few stops it just keeps farther north to stay through denver because it's going to the san francisco bay area and not la but anyway enough of me talking on the phone here's other stuff now alright so to end this video rather than me keep talking and talking over a bunch of the footage that i took i'm just gonna show you a bunch of the footage that i took but before i leave you in voice form i wanted to show that this part of the journey is not the southwest chief this is the pacific surfliner that train goes between los angeles and san diego with lots of stops along the way and i'm taking this shot because i was hoping i could get a great ocean reveal because the train is about to is right now turning south to follow the ocean but unfortunately and i didn't realize this was going to be the case it was rather gray looking but it was still very pretty i was just surprised that it looked this gray because inland it was very very sunny but apparently this is very common on the coast in this part to just be gray and it was like this both uh on the way to san diego and returning back to los angeles but it was still kind of a cool shot because you can see those people on their jet skis skiing their jets off in the water fun stuff but what's really interesting about the pacific surfliner and as i'm recording this i'm going to be skipping around because uh once we pass this beach then there's a bunch of homes between the tracks and the water which kind of ruined the view here but i didn't realize how much well not only how much of the pacific liner is along the coast but also how close it is i mean you can tell just from here it's right next to the ocean but this isn't even as close as it gets there are some stretches where it's basically just some rocks and then the ocean here's all those houses i was talking about and this is farther forward so you can see that there's a little bit of a sandy area tons of people on the beach but then it's just some rocks and the train tracks and i had no idea the train got this close to the ocean it's a really pretty uh pretty journey and the thing about the pacific surfliner is um it and many other amtrak routes in california are kind of this weird mix between long distance and transit so amtrak has specific rolling stock for california and these are the california car they're very much like the super liner that i was on coming from chicago but they have double pairs of automatic sliding doors and bigger vestibules and bigger staircases to get to the second floor because functionally they're an awful lot like transit but at the same time they also go longer distances so you'll see people come on and off only going about i don't know 20 miles rather than the whole distance but then there's also people that are taking it the whole way so the pacific surf liner and a number of trains in california are like i said this weird in-between place where it's not quite transit but it's not quite long distance rail it's both and then this last shot here just shows this is where it was particularly close to the water there was um some sort of beach on the other side you can see these little these tiny little railroad crossings that we zoom by that um are just for pedestrians you'll see one coming up shortly i think yeah right there and it's just it's really cool site here it was a little sunny so it was a it was a nicer view but the pacific surf liner if you live in la um it's worth taking this trip to san diego and back just for these sites it's it's a very very pretty train trip and it's pretty cheap too you can take it oh i don't i don't know what the cheapest fares are i think it was 26 dollars one way when i booked it so quite reasonable and it takes about three hours or so to get from la to san diego on the train and so now i will shut up and let you enjoy the rest of this footage as it exists i don't really remember where all this was i wasn't taking great notes um so sorry but this is along the route obviously and you'll get to see a large bit of variety of what you can see on this train ride lots of very pretty terrain once you get into new mexico and it's not like it's not like colorado and kansas have nothing to see and in fact it's a it's a very uniquely different terrain from what i'm used to in the midwest it's just you know it's still just a bunch of flat land with no real mountains or anything it's just it's just different rather than fields of corn a lot of kansas looked kind of like what you're seeing now if memory serves correctly but it was still very still very pretty just not the star of the show i would say but anyway thank you for watching this long-winded video with my amtrak hot take and i will see you at some other point you know whenever that may be now so ready so come back so oh oh i am going to tell i have i have to tell that to lose yeah uh you

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 109,287

Rating: 4.9481831 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: VDV1R1j1n5I

Length: 56min 55sec (3415 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Man_v_machine]

42 hours. So Sacramento to Portland? :/