On the Acela from Boston to Washington
[9:50 EDT] I'll be riding Amtrack again! In contrast to my 2023 trip, which in many ways felt like I was in a time bubble preserving the 1970ies, what with mighty diesel engines and cozy sleeper cars, this time it could feel like the age of high-speed trains: I'll be riding the Acela from Boston's South Station all the way to Washington, DC. Electric engines and all.
At the South Station
For now, though, I'm in Boston's South station, which has a rather odd dicotomy: The entrance hall looks like a medium-size, 21st century shopping mall, albeit with an unusual amount of consumer stress-less seating. If, on the other hand, you manage to find the trains (it's not all trivial; try the hatch below the right end of the huge ad at the back wall), you are back in rather less glitzy times:

Don't get me wrong: I like it less glitzy. Still, the contrast is striking, what with the low, dark ceiling, which feels particularly out of place given that most engines in that station burn diesel.
Coming back to the glitzy part of the station, it was the wifi that again sent me back about 15 years. You see, back then most everyone operating a public wifi access point obsessed about which ports to block, starting with port 25, which was a spammers' favourite. Fortunately, that is by and large over. It's been a while since I last encountered a network that would block port 22 (ssh; that's the one I care about the most) outgoing.
Well, that is until today in Boston's South Station. Amtrack's wifi only lets out http and https for all I can see; I couldn't even fetch mail via pop3, let alone phone home via SIP/RTP. Slightly incredulous, I switched to a network provided by the big CVS (a chain of chemist's stores) here in the station. About the same thing. Then there's an open MassIT-public network, the captive portal of which redirects to a page that's a 404.
Eventually, I ended up typing some e-mail address into the captive portal of the network of the Tavern in the Square. That, finally, was reasonably unencumbered. Hmpf. Dear Amtrak, please just do like (almost) everyone else has in the past 15 years and cut out the stilly port blocks.
On the Train
[11:40] Time bubble: the Acela is a bit like the TEE of the 1960ies in that it claims to not have a “normal” seating area, just “business class” and “first class”. This is of course 100% silly marketing. Sure, you have, by European standards, legroom galore, but that's no different from the coach class I travelled in to Chicago; the seats feel very much the same all around.
On the plus side, the Acela windows are much larger than in Amtrak's Amfleed and Superliner cars I rode in in 2023. But – for reasons I cannot begin to fathom – Amtrak quite clearly still is trying to imitate air travel's look and feel. They actually have overhead baggage compartments with doors:

Given the regular occurrence of turbulences, I can totally understand why airlines have the complicated baggage stores they have. But on a train? In many tens of thousands of kilometers of riding in passenger cars with open racks for storing baggage, I cannot remember a single instance of when a piece of baggage came loose. No: I'm sure someone wanted this to look like you are in a plane. Which would suggest that there are actually people feeling good about air travel. Odd.
And talking about creature comforts, air conditioning in this train is a nightmare; they refrigerate the car to something like 18 degrees centigrade. So, don't forget blankets if you ride the Acela in summer.
Talking about air: just now [12:05] it started to smell of brakes and gasoline in the car, and the train came to a stop in the midst of nowhere, perhaps 20 minutes out of Provenance, RI. And then ventilation started up big time. Hm. Some sort of announcement of what's going on would be good service, I have to say. [12:10] Ah, the announcement came, but I did not understand the explanation given (there was something about “power cord“ and “inspecting the train“, but that wasn't enough for me to form a theory). The signal to noise ratio for announcements while the blowers are still running is rather on the low side.
[added a bit later] As a matter of fact, Amtrack also sent emails to the passengers they knew about. Here's what that said:
Mechanical Assessment: As of 12:21 PM ET, �Acela 2253 is currently experiencing a delay west of Providence (PVD) while the crew conducts a mechanical assessment. Our crew is working diligently to resume your travel as quickly as possible; your patience is greatly appreciated. We are dedicated to providing updates to you as soon as it becomes available.�
Is that useful? Hm. It certainly feels more useful than the mails I've got from Deutsche Bahn.
Oh, and allow me to briefly continue my saga on Amtrak's Wifi. On the train, they don't have badly encumbering port blocking. But they have something exceedingly odd that I've never seen anywhere else before: Their captive portal said, when I tried to click away their “agree to terms and conditions” annoyance:
This request appears to be coming from a non-supported user-agent, or from a known non-browser based application. Please retry your request from a web browser.
I'm not too surprised because my normal browser identifies as a Lynx (so I can keep using Google's search in a pinch without Javascript; I'm not making this up). But why would they do this? User agent sniffing… Well, it's a day of odd time bubbles bursting.
Passenger Information in Connecticut
[12:50] We are somehere in Connecticut by now, and outside of the window there are occasional settlements and in between stretches rather wind-swept water:

Is it the Atlantic ocean? I suspect that much, but regrettably the only piece of passenger information is a LED display at each end of the cabin saying, maximally unhelpfully, “SERVICE TO Washington” (incidentally, also while approaching stations):

This is something of a reminder that I am in rolling stock Amtrak has bought in 2000 and has probably never really touched since then. Mind you, I am absolutely no friend of flickering ad space in trains, and just boasting about unsustainable speeds certainly is not useful either (this image from an ICE in 2016):

But I like the maps they now regularly show on the cabin displays of modern ICEs and that they serve on Deutsche Bahn's on-board wifi (there, it happened: I said something positive about Deutsch Bahn!). Fortunately, I can sync with my own renderng of the Open Street Map now and then. And thus I can tell you that the following photo shows the impressive Gold Star Memorial Bridge (carrying the Interstate 95) spanning the (Connecticut) Thames River near (how fitting!) New London – right in front of the train window:

As I'm writing this, we are passing through large salt marshes… Beautiful. My advice: if you ride the Acela and like the ocean, make sure you have daylight.
Towards New York
[14:30] We have just left in Stamford, CT, where I had a few glimpses of the town's glass palaces through electrical wiring that appeared characteristically improvised:

The symptoms are clear: we are approaching New York. I hence wish the Acela were one of the trains in which passengers get to have a look through the front window: I suspect one should start to see New York's skyline just about now.
But then it is about as exciting to see another electric train pulling out of the station displaying “Grand Central” as its destination. That's the funny thing about travelling near the major metro areas of the USA: there's always something that seems to jump right out of a movie.
[14:50] Yup, now it's New York all right. It's just a bit of a shame they didn't clean the train window:

Going a bit further, I got my view of the New York skyline, extra pictureseque with some bridge (and regrettably I got lost on the map and so I can't tell you which it is) in the foreground; in that sense, that's better than having been on the engine:

[15:15] Uh, again, we're standing. The train crew now announces that what happened near Providence was an “issue” with one of the pantographs that they needed to inspect from the outside. And now some team of technicians needs to come out here and inspect the pantographs again before we are allowed to enter the subway tunnels, where some failure might be harder to fix. So: We're standing again. This gives me time for zooming in on what, given its shape, must be the Empire State …