It wasn’t easy saying goodbye to the kids, but it’s time to return to sunny Arizona. We will be back here in the spring.  We left Concord New Hampshire, yesterday, returned our rental car, and spent the night at a hotel in Boston so it would be easier for us to catch our early morning train at Boston South Station.

Boston South Station

We were early so I had time go to out and get some pictures of the beautiful old building. It was morning rush hour and loads of people were exiting the train station to get to work.

Boston South Station

Boston, Massachusetts

Our return trip begins on the Amtrak 171 Northeast Regional beginning in Boston and switching trains at New York Penn Station, about four hours. We had reserved coach seats. This is more of a business commuter train, very comfortable seating, like airline seats. It had a cafe car. A big difference with this coach is that most people are dressed better and did the whole trip, about four hours, in a vertical position. This is different from when we took the long-distance train, the Texas Eagle, last week, where almost all of the coach passengers were dressed more comfortably and did most of the trip sprawled out in a more horizontal position. And this train has wi-fi.

It was snowing when we left Boston, and continued to snow all the way to New York Penn. An announcement was made that some of the exit doors were freezing shut and if you couldn’t get out one go find another one. Also, it’s slippery when walking between cars so be very careful.

We never even saw New York City. The train entered the city through a long dark tunnel, parked under ground; and by the time we left the train and acclimated ourselves to Penn Station, which is huge, got a bite to eat, and figured out where to find our next train, we never even left the building.

We are now on Amtrak’s 19 Crescent which will get us to New Orleans tomorrow night. Since this will be an overnight ride we booked a bedroom. It’s almost identical to the one that we had last week. We have our own bathroom (with a shower), which I love.

This is not a two-level superliner, but rather a single level viewliner, which means things are a little more scrunched. We do have a nice dining car as well as a cafe/lounge car. This time the dining car is between the sleeper cars and the coach cars which means we do not have to walk through three or four coach cars to get to the dining car like we did previously. Reservations are made for dinner, priority given to those in the sleeper cars as meals are included with the price of our tickets. Then coach passengers may make reservations and pay for their own meals.

Dining Car Set and Waiting for Service to Begin

It’s been snowing all day which made for some beautiful views.

By the time we finished our dinner the sun had set and it was dark…somewhere around Baltimore, Maryland.  We have been seeing a lot of parking lots with snow-covered cars. Lots of snow.

There was some sort of difficulty along the way so for quite a while we could only go about 35 miles per hour. I couldn’t hear the announcement explaining it because the PA system on this train isn’t working very well at all. This put us 1 hour and 20 minutes behind schedule.

All the stops so far have been very brief, only long enough for passengers to get off and new ones to get on, so no time to get out and take a picture of anything. We did have a longer stop at Washington DC Union Station while the train switched  from an electric engine to a diesel engine. Still, not enough time to walk into the station, so I just stepped out to get a picture of our frozen train.

Union Station, Washington DC

As we left Washington DC we could see the Capitol Dome, the Washington Monument, and Jefferson’s Memorial nicely lit, but, sorry, was not able to get pictures.

Can’t see out the windows any more tonight, and we hope that by the time the sun rises in the morning all the snow will be gone.