The Sleeper Car

2023-01-09 · 54 views · 0 reading now

My friend had the idea to take the train from the west coast all the way to the east coast, because it seemed like it would be fun, and trains are cool. We were in Seattle for winter break, and were heading back to the east coast for spring semester, so why not book it. We left on 4pm Jan 5th from Seattle, and arrived in Boston jan 9th at 8pm, including a 24 hour (optional, but fun) layover in Chicago. It was indeed fun, and trains are indeed cool.

We booked coach, but the app offered us some bids for what we would pay to updgrade to a sleeper car. We bid 200 dollars and won, and it was definitely worth it.

The vibe on the train (in this case a large train on the "empire builder" route) is somewhat similar to a plane. You spend most of the time sitting in an tempurature controlled cabin, with a light rumbling and some background noise. You can get up when you want to and use the bathroom, and there are staff around who are very friendly to you. But everything is better. The chairs are nicer. The background noise is quieter and a pleasent rumbling pitch instead of a the high pressure squeal of the airplane. When you get up there is a lot more room to navigate. The cars have multiple floors and there are lots of bathrooms.

The sleeping part of the sleeper car was very good. I shared a room with my friend, and it was very comfortable. Its defintely tight, so I would have preferred my girlfriend be the one in the other bunk, but its more room than a two person backpacking tent, so me and my friend knew how to handle it. The sleeper car passengers also have access to a shower, and a "lounge" which I never entered but seemed to be useful for dealing with a baby, or other private activities :suggestive smirk:. The rooms themselves also have very convincing internal and external curtains. It is a very romantic situation if you want it to be.

At any moment you can walk from car to car to access the dining room or the "observation room". It feels a lot like being in a hotel than being in a vehicle. I would go further than hotel, and say that has an even family atmosphere. An exhibit involving trains described the atmosphere in the first class cabins on trains during the peak of rail transit as "convivial" which predictibly means "with life", and some of that has definitely been preserved over the years.

If you have a sleeper car, the dining is included. This means three very satisfying meals a day, with lunch and dinner having dessert, and dinner having an appetizer. Part of the convivial dining experience is that you are pointed to a seat when you enter, often with another party occupying it, even if there are free tables availible. If you are feeling shy, you can ask the friendly chef man to seat you alone, but I recommend talking to the other passengers, that was one of the most interesting parts of the experience.

We ended up talking to two ~35 year old skiiers from winnipeg who said that the coldest it got there was "aboot negative 40 centigrade", and that ~30% of their friends consumed weed in some form. We reported that ~90% of college students in our circles smoked weed in some form. We talked to a traveling nurse who had taken the empire builder train 9 times in her life, and jumped at the opportunity to answer any questions we had about how it works. I asked her about the nurse vs traveling nurse rivalry and that was interesting. Apparently traveling nurses usually get the night shifts (which are better because less supervision), and that they get paid more. Also there is a very tangible nurse shortage.

We spent most of our time in the observation car, which is incredibly beautiful, especially when you are going through the mountains. There are lots more people there because its open to not just the sleeping car passengers. I saw someone playing minecraft on a laptop, I saw a lot of people reading.

At one point there was a mother traveling alone with her daughter, and a father traveling alone with her daughter sat accross from eachother. They slowly became friends over the course of the hour, the children making the first move. They first bonded over how old they were (9 and 8) and how many teeth they had lost (3 and 4). I overheard some disagreements about tablet placement as they watched somethign together, so they learned some lessons about sharing. The father ended up fielding some hard questions that the mother seemed glad not to answer. He handled the power scaling questions up to 3 Godzillas vs 2 Transformers very well, but had to tap out when Kaiju were brought up.

At some point the child was doing something annoying, so the father had to put a stop to it by threatening to take away a tablet. At first I felt angry at such cruelness and wanted to stick up for the kid. As someone obsessed with gaming growing up, the idea of having my technology taken away brought to mind long forgiven painful memories of having my laptop witheld from me because it was a school night (on the day it came in the mail!!!!!! I think barricading myself in my room in a fit of tears was very justified!!!!!). Besides being obviously not my place to entangle myself in this, I realized that kids do annoying stuff sometimes, and that I did not know how I was going to deal with it when I have kids.

Taking away the tablet solves the problem fast, and only has to be done a couple times before the threat is just as effective. And despite my love of gaming, it seems obviously more healthy for a 9 year old to wander around and be curious than spend time on a game. But taking away access would just make computer time more scarce, which would only increase its value. But the majesty of the app store essentially means the tablet has infinite value, so perhaps thats not a game changer. Anyway I decided that the dad was right to threaten to take away the tablet.

The observation car had a cafe selling snacks and small meals below it, and the vendor had a very fun time on the mic. He would fill his speech with personality and finish it off every time with "and of course we have ice... cold....... beer.......", lasting at least 15 seconds. I encourage you to try to hold a 5 second cheeky pause in conversation for emphasis, it is very fun to reenact.

Also witnessed in the observation car the first time I had ever seen an amish family. Mainly living in big cities, it seems absurd that there exist people without technology. But predictibly they were just like normal people but in matching homemade clothes, long dresses, long beards, and tall black hats. I overheard a conversation between the father of one of the amish families, and another passenger who was a construction site director. They talked a bit of shop about construction and farming and cows and beans and family life. At one point the construction manager had is iphone going and tapped around google maps while being directed by the Amish father to find the closest town to where they lived. Apparently there is an epic Amish-goods-only store on highway 20 in Washington which I havent noticed despite driving it a couple times.

30m later I overheard someone with a pink tie-died monster energy shirt say the word "alias" which is a common term to mean screen name in the discord/gameosphere.

I read the first 10 pages of dune, and was smacked in the face with how dense the sentences were. Skimming twitter threads, reddit comments, and github readmes are very different than reading a proper book (with an unfamiliar author). I had to reread each paragraph like twice, and enjoyed it immensely.

The first chapter mentions the near-supernatual Bene Gesserit power of "being sensitive to the minutae of observation". So that is some of what put me in the mood to observe the people around me.

After the sun goes down (at ~4pm because winter), the car becomes very dark and calm. It spent some hours typing on my computer, reading through notes which I had written last semester. It was very calming. A different night I listened to five albums in a row, which to me is a dopamine detox. I felt like I was gliding luxuriously through time, the utter lack of control in the situation a welcome break from my normal life full of (mostly easy) deciscions.

That night I slept in the top bunk. In the top bunk, touching the wall would let you conduct the sound of the rumbling in a higher quality than the walls or floor that I was used to. Occasionally there will be some turbulence on the track that will jot the car in what seems at first to be an unsafe velocity. The first couple times it happened my lizard brain filled my chest with an anxiety like vertigo, that I wanted to hold onto something to avoid being flung. But the train moves on faithfully. To quell my chest I remember that human engineers are very good. We have mastered the rail. We have been doing this for at least 200 years. I also remember the tremendous power and momentum of the machine I am inside: even if the train hit a nasty snag of some sort on the rail, it would be the snag in trouble not me. I remember my high school physics knowledge, and that the low center of gravity would require the car to be almost horizontal before it would naturally fall off the rail instead of back onto it. Mostly I remember that there are all these people around me that I can trust. They got on the car with me and some have done it a thousand times before. The nice lady who asked me if I wanted a new pillowcase would also tell me if the I was in danger. And that hard learned safety regulations would be enforced by hard working people to ensure that people and freight get to their destinations in one piece.

So then after all my thinking the rumbles and jolts and bumps switch from a pressure in my chest to a childlike comfort of being rocked to sleep.

The train really is awesomely powerful. The engine car makes loud noises, and smells like oil. Its really long, it takes like 10 minutes to walk the length of it on stops to stretch your legs. It goes about as fast, or slower than a car most of the time, but feels much more inevitable and unstoppable than driving around in a fickle car. The feeling of epicness reminds me of something I vagluely remember seeing on reddit, where they had an extra train or something, so they ran it off a cliff and billed it as a spectator event. People came from all around to witness the epicness of the weight and impact, and I would too. I think that that would be more thrilling than Avengers Endgame (coming from someone who really liked that movie).

You have opportunities to get off the train, sometimes for like an hour. We stopped in Minot, North Dakota and ran out into the snow and got a beer at a local bar (the attendant was worried that we would miss the train even though the bar was 5m away and we had 90m a very motherly way). The bar tender was very friendly and gave us a crash course in Minot history. There was a flood in 2011 which divided the city (literally, there was a new river locking an entire neighborhood away from any good grocery store) that they were still recovering from in some ways. She seemed proud to be running the bar which was one of the first "real culture" places in Minot.

We stopped in Minneapolis and met our friend from high school which was quite lovely. She gave us THC infused lemonade.

We had a 24 hour stop in Chicago. Went to two museums and got deep dish pizza. Chicago inspires with its massive scale, buildings reaching into the clouds, somewhat dwarfing the traincar. But the museum of science and industry told us that railroads were key to making Chicago what it is, so the train's edge of power remained in my mind.

The shower was fun, when it banks there is a little puddle on one side of the shower until it unbanks and the puddle goes back to the drain.

If you have seen the movie Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho (highly recommend it if you havent, spoilers in this paragraph), it is hard to avoid the analogy leaping off the screen and into your experience. Snowpiercer takes the concept of a stratified, winner-takes-all economy, and puts it very directly onto the train as a metaphor. The cattle car has its residents packed shoulder to shoulder eating barely enough to survive and often less. The most luxurious cars have only one or two people with decadent bars, orgies, leagues of staff, and everything you can think of. The movie compresses the order of magnitudes difference between the highs and lows modern society into a single line of cars. Its very direct, perhaps a bit on the nose with its point, but the directness and truth of the metaphor is what gives it its power.

When you are walking around the train, it is not a metaphor. The dining/sleeper cars are entirely filled with white people, the bathrooms are cleaner (not by design, but by less frequent use), we get served three course meals, and have a nice lady to fix our linens. The further you go back, the more cramped and airplane-like it is. I don't have any solutions, but the least I can do is to not forget the metaphor. On my train there is only one order of magnitude between the back and the front, so it seems more acceptable. But in Bong Joon-ho's train (and in real life), there are ~7 orders of magnitude between the front and the back of the train, and its horrible and people starve every day.

If you're paying attention even a little bit, its hard not be sobered.

Overall, I really enjoyed the train. It was a very interesting experience, on the order of any normal vacation. Especially if with a loved one, the sleeper car experience is a destination in itself. Its too easy to shove the unfairness of life under the carpet and bathe in the luxury that I have worked hard for. But it is unfair. I was born in the sleeper car. I must cling on to the imagery of Snowpiercer, I cant let its message slip out of convenience. I must do the best I can to make the world a better place.