posted
The June 18 issue of the Financial Times contains, on page 13, an article entitled "'The most beautiful train trip in North America' Why spend three days on a train to San Francisco instead of three hours flying? Lesley Gillilan took the California Zephyr to find the answer". The article's author, Lesley Gillilan, is apparently British. The article is full of the usual disgusting tendentious misinformation we've all come to expect in mainstream-journalism treatments of Amtrak, starting with the phony "three hours/three days" time comparison: of course, it's about four-and-a-half hours flying if you go nonstop, versus only about two-and-a-quarter days by train. (Ms. Gillilan at one point actually claims that flying from Chicago to San Francisco takes "less than three hours": I suspect that she looked at the westbound flight arrival and departure times without remembering to convert for the time zone change.)
I'm in the process of writing a brief Letter to the Editor in which I'll dispute at least two of Ms. Gillilan's most obnoxious misstatements of fact, namely the above-mentioned phony time comparison, and her claim that as she boarded her train at Chicago Union Station the air was "thick with steam". There's one more point that I'd also like to discuss, namely her allegation that during her trip, which seems to have taken place during autumn 2004, the train "rattled along" on its way from Chicago to Denver, and "rattled through Omaha". On my most recent two round trips between Chicago and Denver, in February and May 2005, I found the tracks to be almost stunningly smooth over the entire 1,038 miles. (This contrasted markedly with some trips I'd made in previous years, when that same route was so rough in places that the train lurched frighteningly over and over again, making you wonder how it could stay on the tracks.) So my question to all of you is, has the smoothness that I experienced this year existed at least since the beginning of autumn 2004 (i.e., September 22, 2004)? And for that matter, does anyone know when the trackwork occurred that brought about the current smoothness? I want to be able to state confidently that the rattling Ms. Gillilan claims to have experienced was, like so many other things in her article, just the product of her overactive imagination.
In closing, there are a few more points I'm wondering if any of you could help me get straight, in case I write Ms. Gillilan a longer letter picking apart every mistake in her article, to let her know what a pathetic excuse for a journalist she is. The points are:
(1) She describes the old waiting room at Chicago Union Station as a "1920s ticket hall". I was under the impression that that room has never contained or been intended to contain ticket windows. Am I right about that?
(2) One of her paragraphs reads, "'Experienced travellers say it's the most beautiful train trip in all of North America,' gushes the Zephyr's route guide, Sky." Can anyone figure out what this "Sky" is that she's talking about? Is she referring (correctly or incorrectly) to a document? To a person?
(3) She claims that the dining car tables were "laid with [. . .] vases of fake flowers". I was under the impression that Amtrak has consistently been using real flowers in its dining cars for the past several years. Does that square with your impressions? Do they occasionally use fake flowers as a substitute when real ones aren't available?
(4) She claims that freight trains on the UP west of Salt Lake City can be "up to five miles long". Does anyone know what the real upper limit might be?
Thanks for whatever help you can give me with this. Again, it's the question about track smoothness that's the really important one.
Posts: 86 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
About the trackwork: if she's British (and being a British paper, you're probably right) then she's probably more used to a better quality of track. We in the UK don't exactly have the best track in the world but it is usually a whole lot better than US track! Bear in mind that UK track carries a lot more passenger traffic than once-daily Amtraks.
Geoff M.
-------------------- Geoff M. Posts: 2426 | From: Apple Valley, CA | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
(1) She describes the old waiting room at Chicago Union Station as a "1920s ticket hall". I was under the impression that that room has never contained or been intended to contain ticket windows. Am I right about that? The Grand Hall was were the First Class Lounge was last summer and is a nicer place to wait than Amtraks crowded waiting areas but tickets aren't sold there.
(2) One of her paragraphs reads, "'Experienced travellers say it's the most beautiful train trip in all of North America,' gushes the Zephyr's route guide, Sky." Can anyone figure out what this "Sky" is that she's talking about? Is she referring (correctly or incorrectly) to a document? To a person? You got me on that one but it is the most scenic route in the entire Amtrak system.
(3) She claims that the dining car tables were "laid with [. . .] vases of fake flowers". I was under the impression that Amtrak has consistently been using real flowers in its dining cars for the past several years. Does that square with your impressions? Do they occasionally use fake flowers as a substitute when real ones aren't available? Depends on the dining car crew. Fake one and real ones are used but that is up to the crew.
(4) She claims that freight trains on the UP west of Salt Lake City can be "up to five miles long". Does anyone know what the real upper limit might be? She might think they are that long as the pass you at 20 MPH in a siding but the longest ones are just over a mile on that part of the railroad under normal operating conditions.
posted
To Geoff M.: I'm aware of the general agreement that trackage used by British passenger trains is on average significantly smoother than trackage used by American passenger trains. (By the way, I don't see any direct relevance in your exhortation to "[b]ear in mind that UK track carries a lot more passenger traffic than once-daily Amtraks", since of course running frequent passenger trains over a stretch of track doesn't cause it to become smooth. Perhaps your exhortation was meant to have some indirect relevance by carrying the implication ". . . and that creates an incentive for maintaining UK passenger tracks to a high standard".) Nevertheless, I maintain that the Chicago-to-Denver track was so smooth, as traversed by a 79-mph passenger train, that only trivial improvements to it could be imagined, whether by an American observer or by an objective British or European observer. I would compare its smoothness with that of the top-speed Northeast Corridor segments in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts as I experienced them in early 2001, shortly after they had first been upgraded for 150-mph operation.
Even if you're inclined to deny that the track could have actually been that smooth, however, or if you're inclined to think that as a habitual rider of American trains I might have an impaired ability to perceive smoothness, that does not prevent us from dealing with Ms. Gillilan's statements on their own terms. As I mentioned in my first post, she says "we rattled along [between Chicago and Denver]", and "we rattled through Omaha"--"we" meaning, of course, "the train", or, more specifically, "the car I was in". When you say that the train car you are in rattled, that has a specific meaning, namely that the smaller components of the car, and/or some of the loose objects in the car, were agitated by the roughness of the track and/or by the reaction of the car's suspension system to produce various audible pulsating vibrations, with the pulsations being in the high subsonic range (say, 3-20 Hz) and the vibrations themselves being in the medium sonic range (say, 100-2000 Hz). This simply was not happening on either of the round trips I took between Chicago and Denver in February and May of 2005. I have been on many trains that rattled from the passenger's perspective, but these were not among them. Therefore, if track conditions in autumn 2004 were like those in winter and spring 2005 (and I look forward to reading RAILforum readers' observations as to whether or not this was the case), Ms. Gillilan's statements about rattling are almost certainly invalid.
I'll take the liberty of pointing out here that your post contains an indication of what the reason for Ms. Gillilan's statements about rattling might be. People, including (regrettably) journalists, have a tendency to perceive what they believe to be true rather what actually is true. Note, for example, Ms. Gillilan's assertion that as she boarded the California Zephyr in Chicago the air was "thick with steam and diesel fumes". Of course the "steam" part of this is nonsense: Amtrak completed the phasing out of steam heating systems in its cars more than twenty years ago, but Ms. Gillilan has seen too many TV and movie scenes depicting steam gushing out of American passenger train cars in a modern setting (many of those scenes unfortunately having been allowed by Amtrak or various American commuter rail authorities, who apparently never think to forbid the use of fake steam when they grant permission to film scenes using their rolling stock); plus she very likely walked into her Amtrak experience with a casual, snotty assumption of the universal superiority of the UK over the United States in rail matters, leaving her entirely open to believing that, among other things, American trains in some way still use antiquated steam technology. The result? She imagines steam where none exists, just as she imagined rattling where none exists, and imagined that the "ascent to Denver" did not begin until Fort Morgan, and imagined less-than-three-hour air service between Chicago and San Francisco and three-full-day train service between Chicago and Emeryville. The woman simply is not a reliable observer. I suspect she approached her trip with the attitude, "I'm British, and I know that American trains are technologically inferior to any trains I've ever experienced in Britain, including their having, without exception, a greatly inferior smoothness of motion" . . . and then proceeded to write that into her article, regardless of what actually occurred during her trip. I know this may seem like a harsh assessment, but I've seen exactly this kind of attitude at work too many times to think that the erroneous Ms. Gillilan is exempt.
Posts: 86 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Of interest, Amtrak tickets WERE sold "once upon a time' in the so called'Great Hall'(that term was never used during 'railroad days"). Starting about June 1972, Amtrak built a cage roundly where the clock and the arrival/departure board is today and they used this facility intil about Sep 1973, when they opened a cage where the baggage room is now located.
While I must acknowledge. Mr. DS, that there appears to be a bit of fictional license in the work such as "Steam..." what steam, I fail to see how your standing as a respondent to the article will be enhanced with use of terms such as "usual disgusting tendentious misinformation", "phony time comparasion", and "pathetic excuse for a journalist she is". If you wish any standing wth the FT, or for that matter any other leading publication such as the New York Times, I would suggest you confine your use of those phrases to the "anything goes' environment of the internet, and express your disagreement with the reportage in a manner showing a higher degree of maturity and respect.
Posts: 9975 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Hey, DS, chill out a little. I did indeed mean that because UK rails take mostly passenger traffic that they are maintained to passenger comfort levels, as opposed to US trackage being mostly freight.
"with a casual, snotty assumption of the universal superiority of the UK over the United States in rail matters"
I really feel you have the wrong idea about British people feeling "superior" in any way. The vast majority of British people - and especially the media - will tell you that our railways are shoddy, late, dirty, and generally in poor condition. In fact the reality is, it is roughly equivalent to the much-lauded French railway network in terms of punctuality and reliability. Dare I mention inferiority complexes?
With regards to Omaha, perhaps it WAS particularly rough going through the city. After all, unless you have swing nose points/switches, going over all those junctions is never going to be smooth.
If you REALLY want to feel smooth track, try taking one of the French TGVs or even Eurostar. Perhaps she commutes to France regularly (as many do) and had a rude awakening on BNSF/UP rails? Even the NE corridor is rough compared to LGVs. Remember this is objective opinion on my behalf. I am curious to know whether you have experienced rail travel outside of the US?
The reality is, it's a newspaper article. Newspapers aren't renowned for their accuracy - they're more known for exaggeration and bending the truth. I'll bet every page of that newspaper (and any others) will have at least one inaccuracy per page. If you want to waste your time writing to the editor, then fine. They're not going to print an apology, nor rewrite and reprint the story - and the chance of your letter getting in the letters page with every nitpick written in the offensive way you have written is going to be extremely low.
Just in case you're thinking I don't have an objective view - well, having done well over 20,000 miles on Amtrak in the last 7 years (virtually every route), with even more UK and European travel, I think I can be called "objective".
Geoff M.
-------------------- Geoff M. Posts: 2426 | From: Apple Valley, CA | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Methinks you're taking a simple newspaper article a tad too personally, ds555.
During my own coast-to-coast travels on Amtrak, I've encountered numerous fake flowers on dining car tables (not to mention way too many packets of highly dubious Russian dressing).
I've also trudged along station platforms engulfed in a light haze of what infrequent rail travelers might mistakenly describe as "steam" (it's a mixture of diesel exhaust and the water vapor/pollution that typically hangs over urban neighborhoods on humid days).
And I can't say I've ever traveled in any Amtrak car (Amfleet, Viewliner, Superliner, Horizon, Talgo, or Heritage) that didn't rattle, squeak, or groan to some degree, smooth tracks or not.
You insist that "This simply was not happening on either of the round trips I took between Chicago and Denver in February and May of 2005."
Maybe so. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen during the reporter's journey.
Posts: 793 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Regarding the question of how to get access to the Saturday, June 18 Financial Times article, I might point out to RAILforum readers that since the Financial Times does not publish on Sundays, you still have until late tonight or early tomorrow morning to buy a copy at a newsstand or a vending machine.
It was interesting to learn about Amtrak's brief early venture into selling tickets in the Main Waiting Room of Chicago Union Station (what I referred to earlier as the "old waiting room"). This afternoon, a friend of mine sent me the following link to a diagram of the station's original floor plan: http://www.gapw.com/usc5.jpg. (You may have to blow this up to read the lettering in it clearly.) The diagram shows that the original ticketing area was adjacent to, but not in, the Main Waiting Room. Therefore, Ms. Gillilan's description of the room as a "1920s ticket hall" is unquestionably false.
I think that your calling Ms. Gillilan's mention of "steam" a piece of "fictional license" is being too kind. "Fictional license" implies that the author knows what he or she is doing. Ms. Gillilan, on the other hand, appears to be blind to the preconception-fueled workings of her own imagination.
Regarding the tone of my upcoming Letter to the Editor, I certainly intend to make it polite enough to stand a chance of being published. I'm a bit surprised that you seem to be personally miffed by my lack of respect for the Financial Times. How much respect do we really owe a publication that, purely for the purpose of making Amtrak look bad, puts into one of its headlines the outrageous, transparent lie that you can fly from Chicago to San Francisco in three hours?
Posts: 86 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
In order to access the link Mr. DS has provided (I get a 404 error notice), it appears you must go to the archetectural firm's home page www.gapw.com then start browsing through "historical structures" until you come upon those relating to CUS. Apparently, a predecessor firm was the architect for the Station.
It is interesting and worth one's while; happy browsing.
Posts: 9975 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
The problem with the link I provided in my 6:51 p.m. post is that the software of this website mistakenly interpreted the period at the end of the sentence the link was in as part of the link itself. Without the period, the link works fine. Here it is in its proper form:
posted
ds555: Having worked for over 12 years with various Brits and other Europeans, I have to say you are aboslutely correct in feeling that there is a general feeling of superiority toward their ignorant cousins across the Atlantic. I have on occasion said that if I could do a passable German or middle to upper class British accent instead of my natural Southern US one, I also could spout technical nonsensne and have people believe it. The average track condition in the UK and continental Europe is better than the average for the same speed of service, but not because of any technical superiority. They simply spend a lot more money per unit of traffic carried, from between twice US average in the UK up to 4 or more times as much in some of the continental countires. Don't be surprised that the writer forgot about such a thing as time zones. Remember she lives in the land of state sized countires with multiple coutries per time zone, not multiple time zones per country.
However, as Geoff M says, newspapers are notorious for their inaccuracy, apparently in the UK as well as the US. In fact I can not think of ANY newspaper article on ANY railroad related issue that got it right, and usually not even anywhere close to right. It is usually just not worth your time and aggravation to attempt to correct them. Even if you get through, it will probably be acknowledged in small type in some hidden corner of an inside page, and you corrections may itself become garbled beyond all recognition.
It maight also be said that European track is actually quite a bit smoother than American track. This difference is grater than that which can be felt in the difference in ride quality as it is partially negated by the fact that their equipment is all designed and built to operate on smooth track, so the suspension is not near as good or forgiving as that on American equipment.
George
Posts: 2808 | From: Olive Branch MS | Registered: Nov 2002
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posted
Over the years, and having some interactions with the media, I have come to the conclusion that journalism is the dumbest profession on this planet. Logic, common sense, facts, truth, and analytical abilities are not primary requirements for journalism. All they have to do is project some form of emotion. The more emotion the better the "story".
This applies to train news and all other forms of "news". Admitted, there are some exceptions, but they are not the norm.
Posts: 1418 | From: Houston, Republic of Texas | Registered: Jan 2001
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