!"Adventure" on The Cardinal
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KYPATH diary * by Anna
4 May 2023 @ 03:45 UTC
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White man in Berea who works for a private college
as museum curator and professor:
"I took the Cardinal from Cincinnati through
West Virginia with my family back when it ran
daily.
"It was scheduled to depart at 7am. We had to
get on the road before 5am to catch it. It
arrived over an hour late. We waited in the
little closet of a station because most of the
former station was turned into museums. We
learned it's almost always late.
"It seemed the conductor'd never loaded a train
before. It was chaotic and confusing as 2 dozen
of us waiting were broken into groups of two or
three and--it made no sense.
"A cool thing we learned they do on the train is
when it goes through New River Gorge a Park
Service guide gets on to give interpretive and
historical commentary. Unfortunately the PA
system was broken in more than half the cars,
and we couldn't hear him.
"They ran out of toilet paper. They had to close
the bathrooms, stop somewhere in West Virginia,
& send someone to run to the store to buy some.
"If I was going to ride it again I'd probably
get on in Maysville so we could wake up later,
avoid Cincinnati traffic, and skip the claustr-
ophobic station and awful boarding. We wanted
the experience of boarding in the grand old
Union Station, but the station part definitely
isn't grand anymore."
"I'm always up for an adventure, but that trip
soured my wife on Amtrak so much that we prob-
ably won't ride Amtrak again. I wish we had a
system like Europe had before high-speed rail
killed off so many night trains, or Ukraine
before the war. I loved riding night trains."
