Thinking about taking the Coast Starlight from San Francisco (technically Oakland) to Seattle.
Is it interesting? It’s an awfully long ride - 22 hours.
How interesting would it actually be? We’d get a roomette.
It’s lovely. Really a nice stretch. And it’s one of the restored trains, so you get some of the additional cars that other trains don’t have. I recommend it.
I did it right before Christmas one year, so we had snow coming through some of the mountains. We saw Elk. Just a beautiful ride.
One thing to note - Amtrak isn’t terrible on timetables, but they’re not great. Allow yourself time on the other end. You may arrive later than planned.
I did an overnight once from SF to Salem, Oregon. Unfortunately, most of the scenery happened at night. The No. Calif. and So. Oregon mountains are probably spectacular, but I never saw them.
Definitely get a sleeper of some kind, you will not want to sit on those seats for 22 hours.
That’s really a YMMV opinion. My mom and I rode Amtrak from Phoenix to LA, to Chicago, to Seattle, and back to LA. We didn’t get a sleeper, and it was fine. The seats are really comfortable, and they fold out with a large leg rest. If only airplanes had such seats!
We also had some whack job jump off the train in the middle of the Washington wilderness. We had a delay of over two hours while they looked for her. So yes, any time the train meets schedule is purely coincidental.
I have not ridden that section, but I have ridden from Santa Barbara to San Jose years ago. I remember the ride being VERY slow. It’s about 7.5 hours on the train with only 3 stops in between (it’s about a 4.5 hour drive in good traffic).
Portions that were within sight of US-101 were frustrating - traffic on the road was flowing swiftly while the train tootled along. This was in the flat Salinas Valley - evidently the tracks there needed maintenance/upgrades to accommodate faster trains. I know you should not take the train if you are in a hurry, or if you have limited time. The scenery is nice, and the seats are pretty good. If you are taking the train, bring along patience (as stated, you may not arrive at the expected time).
Amtrak takes a siding any time a freight train is coming the other way, so there are always countless delays on any Amtrak route. Infrastructure has not been maintained because of the “no” folks in WDC, so there are so-called temporary tracks in many areas where the trains are required to slow to 15 mph, and derailings are fairly common for freights. I’m not saying that’s the case for the coastal route, but is certainly true for the northern route.
I concur on this. I took a four-day jaunt across the country in coach, and it was plenty comfortable. I had a row to myself and the leg rests fold flat, so it was almost like having a full bed. I wouldn’t go this way if I was planning a luxury vacation, but if you’re just looking for an adventure I think it works for a lot of people (and the sleepers are so obscenely priced!)
And as a veteran of many absurdly long train rides, it’s surprising how quickly the time can pass on a long hual. It’s superbly relaxing to get on the train and know for a fact that for the next ___ hours, you don’t have to do a single thing. It’s easy to fill up a day reading, chatting and playing cards in the lounge car, taking meals, and just staring out the window. It’s not like being in an airplane for 22 hours, it’s more like being on a very scaled down cruise ship.
I have and it’s spectacular as long as your roomette is on the left hand (west) side of the train. As Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) noted:
- Gentlemen, this is the Coast Starlight, one of the great American trains operating on one of the classic American routes. On this side, you’ll see panoramic ocean vistas inaccessible to any other form of transportation, while on your side, you’ll be treated to 350 miles of CostCos, Jiffy Lubes, and cinderblock homes with above-ground pools.*
No kidding! On the Chief, it is the same. While the views in the countryside are fantastic, you really begin to notice that the people that live in cities along the tracks both have the crappiest houses and the largest collections of junk you’ve ever imagined.
Under the contracts that allow Amtrak to use the host railroad’s right of way, an Amtrak train is supposed to have priority during the time the schedule calls for it to be on a particular stretch of track. But it’s a rule that seems to be loosely enforced — if at all — and Union Pacific (the host for nearly the entire stretch south of Portland) is a particularly egregious offender. Hence the insider term “Coast Starlate”.
(The foregoing does not apply to the Northeast Corridor, the only area where Amtrak owns and controls its own right of way.)
There doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule about which way a Superliner sleeper is pointed when it’s attached, but on every sleeper trip I’ve taken but one the bedrooms were toward the head end, which would put the even numbered roomettes on the left. I would imagine that the northbound CS would be set up that way so that bedroom passengers have an ocean view.
Different train lines on Amtrak use, I believe, different kinds of cars, and the seats may not be the same across different routes.
Maybe I was just unlucky. Yes, the seats were wide and there was plenty of legroom. But the seat I had was flat and hard and my ass was tired of sitting in it after a couple of hours. Anyway, just my one experience ('cause I was never interested in trying it again).
Round trip 3/2011 Seattle to Oakland- sleeper as it was hub’s first outing after his watershed stroke 10/2009. Trip down was a beauty. The lower bunk was great for a hemiplegic. There was no problem getting a cab to the hotel in SF. Getting back wasn’t so easy, as our cabbie didn’t know where the train station in Oakland was, but we made it. On the trip back, there was a big windstorm and the engine #2 and the dining car were hit by falling trees in Oregon, and then there was a landslide over the tracks just north of Vancouver, so we were bussed into Seattle. Himself was a trouper, and the challenges showed him he COULD get about! Amtrak did a great job with us and customer service in general for that series of events.
I took an Amtrak once in the mid 70s from Denver to Providence RI. Bumpbumpbumpbump…
and slept in the seats fine, but I was 25.
Just allow plenty of time for delays. They happen. If you are in a big hurry, take a plane. It was nice as well that our view was on the coastal side.
I’ve taken the full ride from LA a couple of times. North of San Luis Obispo, there is no more ‘coast’ for the Coast Starlight; it’s inland all the way to Seattle.
If you get on at Oakland, that will be evening, and you’d be going straight to your roomette, probably straight to bed. Unless you got some special larger room, the roomette has two narrow bunk beds. The person taking top bunk needs to be pretty nimble and the rocking of the top bunk takes a little getting used to. And the top bunk person cannot be claustrophobic. (There’s not enough room for two in the lower bunk, either – there just isn’t.)
The scenery you’ll be missing will be the, well, boring farmlands from Sacramento to Redding - really, no great loss. In the morning, you’ll be in the mountains north of Redding and it’s all green and pretty, or snow covered as the weather has it, with some mountain lakes to admire, as well.
You won’t need to spend any more time in your room than you want – as a ‘first class’ passenger, you can hang out in the lounge car, or go through the dining car to the common observation car. You are not stuck looking out of one side of the train only.
You can eat in either the lounge car (lighter meals, more bistro-like) or the dining car (full meals). The lounge car has a tendered bar - soft drinks as well. Train staff may well also hold a (maybe not free) wine and cheese tasting event in the lounge car.
The food is good regular restaurant quality. Except for alcohol, meals are included in your first-class fare.
Yeah, I love the train experience. Once in a while.
+1
We took the entire route from Seattle to L.A., which is an even longer ride at 36 hours or more. It was definitely a memorable and worthwhile experience, though, and everyone should do it at least once if they can.
The roomette for two is designed so that in daytime configuration the occupants sit facing each other. Neither my wife nor I are especially tall, but was frequently needing to put my feet on her armrest because otherwise there wasn’t really enough room to stretch my legs out in front of me. Just something to keep in mind though I still recommend the trip highly. And the meals, which come with the price of sleeper accommodations, were quite good for “transportation” food–way the hell better than airline food at any rate, or the way it used to be when it was still provided on domestic flights.
This is the notoriously slow/late train in the Amtrak system, so yeah, this could definitely happen.
FWIW I know that the regional rail infrastructure between L.A. and San Diego has been improved significantly in recent years, and I imagine it’s the same in the Bay Area. But most of the route through the far northern reaches of California passes through very small towns most people never hear of until they look at a train schedule, so there’s not a lot of political momentum or tax base to make the improvements we’d like to see.
On a recent trip from L.A. to Oceanside I was pleasantly surprised to see that the train I was riding in paced a freight train at high speed for ten or fifteen miles, instead of having to pull over and wait for it to pass.
Compare elevated urban rail transit, which seems to be similar in that respect.
Usually you need to make your reservations well in advance, so the OP should simply be sure to ask about it then.
Unless things have changed, roomettes are for one or two people and are placed along both sides of the car, on either side of a narrow central aisle. Larger rooms, designed for three or four passengers and almost as wide as the car itself, are on just one side.
It’s worth noting that the roomette’s pre-Amtrak predecessor was only designed for a solo occupant despite being the same size.